are there literally things that you are obliged to not ask them to do ? if not, and you can ask them anything, if they refuse, can you not exclude them? (you could exclude them before you asked, why not after?)
I’m not talking about exclusion itself, I’m talking about authority claims (such as, “you’re in my house, therefore you must give me all of your possessions, take your clothes off, and have sex with me; I have this authority because this is my property”). Exclusion, in this context, would just be a threatening tactic to get them to obey your command. What I deny is any obligation to obey such a command (or any “right” of the owner to issue such a command). If your theory of property logically justifies each owner being a deontological sovereign over others, there’s a problem with your property theory. It’s as simple as that.
The City of London doesn’t have and doesn’t claim that authority.
well, then… you agree with everyone, like murray and hoppe etc.
excellent.
I think you’re portraying city-states as not being states, simply due to a politico-semantic equation about how property is aquired being the dividing line. I think that this dividing line is arbitrary in terms of the power excersized in the real world.
No, I don’t - I’m argueing that the logical implication of their notions of land property rights justifies authoritarianism. Rothbard’s system supports “ultimate decision-making power” on the part of land owners, and that’s exactly what I’m calling into question. From Rothbard’s standpoint, the fundamental problem with the state is that it didn’t aquire land in conjunction with the proper property norms, while aquisition in conjunction with those norms creates legitimacy for political power. From my standpoint, this is insufficient because the same type of political power is simply re-legitimized under a new property regime - how it is aquired is irrelevant as long as it still constitutes an all-encompassing territorial authority claim over the people in the area.
Hoppe is one step worse than (pre-hyper-paleo-mode) Rothbard, for reasons I’ve already gone in circles about with various forum members.
could you back up the claim that Rothbard goes beyond the landowners right to make requests of a ‘guest’ the compliance of which belays the landowner exercising his right to exclude?
Not to highjack an argument but, from the polycentricorder thread http://polycentricorder.blogspot.com/2009/08/ultimate-decision-making-power.html we briefly exchanged on this matter. I posted the following but never received a response. Maybe we can revisit it as this is central theme to a paper I tried to push through Libertarian Papers.
“Yet, this is assuming there would not arise a market to correct for this. I believe you can have it both ways. No one would rationally enter someone else’s land under the conditions of absolute rights (or thus under the condition of yielding all rights), thus, either our complex system of social interaction would cease to exist or individuals would need to find way to contract with one another. We must be able to accept that if there is demand for interaction a market can arise to fulfill this void.
Simply we have absolute rights over our property. If we wish to exchange with others we must contract with them to grant them certain rights (thus, in the end, yielding our absolute authority). I believe this conundrum that you are worried about is a naturally correcting within the market. Only, instead of appealing to some higher morality in which to take away another’s absolute rights over his property, he himself will yield his absolute rights in order to have interaction.”
What I really want an opinion on is why anyone would assume that there are implicit contracts/assumptions that outlaw certain behavior once you are within the realm of my property. If it is MY property, then my action should only be yielded when I contract such action away. Why do you hold that humans, a form of property of the will, is above my land, another property of my will?
States have nothing to do with the acquisition of property, they have to do with the dispensation of justice.
Brainpolice, I too must thoroughly agree with the conception of the state as illegitimate land holder AND illegitimate land acquirer. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, as soon as the state forfeits its right of Eminent Domain, and is forced to purchase holdings like anyone else, even if we all know how ill-gotten all its possessions are now, it will go bankrupt and be forced to sell land. The market doesn’t support such large land-holders. Without eminent domain (and if everyone agreed that the State van “make law” only on public land) there would be no State at all.
As for city-states, think of gated communities. If such a community in the survives the financial meltdown that will engulf within the decade and grows to be a city (purchasing land form rightful owners), would you hold anything against such a city-state? I myself could only cheer at this.