If you had to choose one, which would it be? Basically I’m asking if you’d decide between the idea of currency even if it’s based on relationships/etc. or a world without the state even though the free market cannot exist.
I know this is a lose-lose situation, but I wanted to see what people’s different opinions are.
Stateless communism. At least then it’s voluntary considering noone is making it be that way so it’s possible a primitive form of capitalism can emerge.
Do you think it’s easier then to form a capitalistic society from a communist society rather than from a corporatist one? I’d agree with that statement just because people tend to get capitalism and corporatism confused.
Profit maximizing monopolies are not always bad… and monopoly pricing is itself competitive. Even if two providers of heterogenous inelasitcally demanded services try to jack up prices, they compete with eachother for consumer dollars.
+1 Stateless Communism. Works good for tribal life.
If there is stateless communism, what is to prevent anarcho-capitalists from breaking away and starting an an-cap society?
+2, for a similar observation as well.
“Crony Capitalism” (I dislike the word, so I’ll use state-capitalism instead) obfuscates too much of the economy to allow any sort of reasonable dialouge that isn’t instrisitnly tied into arguing for certain political teams and/or grand master plans of either the minimal or maximum amount of regulation.
Of course, I would prefer neither, & I highly doubt many who would advocate stateless communism would allow free association & voluntary entry into said society, & those who disagree, peacefully letting them be as long as they do not initiate aggression, so uh yea, there’s that.
Depends on whether you want utility over ethics. Either way, if the communism is voluntary, only corporatism truly will enslave.
I couldn’t decide if I wanted to this discussion to entail voluntarily or involuntary stateless communism. If it’s voluntary, then anarcho-capitalists could break away from the society - much easier than they could from corporatism, in my opinion - and I guess that would be the clear answer.
But, for this discussion, pretend it’s involutary stateless communism and that people will use force against people who try to break away from that. In the end it comes down to: from which society would it be easier to break apart and live in a free market?
I don’t see how anarcho communism can be voluntary, since you can’t own property… i.e. food, clothes etc. If communists were really serious about their argument against property rights, they would deny self ownership too because you reqiure violence and authority to enforce it.
Assuming that everyone was a communist at first, it would work. But if someone decided to branch out, how would they be able to claim a certain amount of land if it’s currently “un-owned”. If everyone agreed that Earth wasn’t owned by anyone, couldn’t someone simply claim ownership of Earth? I’m just curious because I don’t really understand how private property rights started. One of the harder points to argue for me are property (land) rights because I’m not familiar when it comes to arguing with communists. Most people I know are either socialists or corporatists (even though they think they’re capitalists), so I argue a lot about economics in terms of taxation, regulation, etc.
In other words, what would I say to someone who says to me: why does a person have a right to claim ownership Earth’s land that was granted to him or her by nature? Something like that.
I’m actually a little dissatisfied with how libertarians defend this issue. The concept of property versus use rights should be distinguished. It just so happens that with simple things like farming, they are both pretty much the same.
So traditional homesteading theory says that once you start farming, you have mixed your labor with the land and it becomes yours. I don’t buy that because it sounds like some mystical ritual that somehow grants you the right to exclude everyone from your land, including use of force against people who just happen to be in your geographic monopoly.
I prefer use-rights, because its more homestead-y. If you’re doing something peaceful, like farming, you have a right to continue doing so without interference. This allows you to prohibit any activity that would screw with your farming such as people stealing your crops or dumping garbage in your water tanks. However, you cannot prevent activities which do not in any way interfere with your farming, such as radio broadcasts going over the land or someone drilling under your land for oil (horizontal wells). All other things equal, you can’t even prevent people from walking across your land if it doesn’t conflict with your farming, but in reality such openness would be a large breach of security, you could probably disallow that.
In short, I believe one homesteads use, not exclusive regional control. It resolves nozick’s tomatoe soup dilemma. He has a right to continue pouring soup into the ocean, so long as it does not screw with what anyone else is already doing. He does not come to own the ocean.
[edit] at any rate, this makes the moral case more clear. Don’t mess with people who aren’t hurting anyone!
Okay. That makes sense to me. I never know how to articulate my feelings/logic in a good way, so I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.
Two questions on this point.
First, how often does someone have to ‘take care’ of property for it to be known as their own? I understand the farming example, but what if someone claims that they’re farming a 10-acre-squared piece of land even if they only tend to a specific 1-acre-squared piece of land daily while they tend to the other nine monthly? For example, this big business (I can’t remember its name for the moment) owns a piece of land a few minutes from my school. All they have is an abandoned building that was previously used for electricity or something like that, but it broke down a few years ago. Since then, they still own the land and have “no trespassing” signs out front even though they’re never there, which is why I asked about the monthly versus daily tending. Should I be able to start farming on their lot considering it’s just an ‘abandoned’ - albeit owned - building with dried-up dirt around it?
Second, I know that you own your land length-and-width-wise, but what about height- and depth-wise? Would someone be able to claim that they own the oil under their land, saying that they planned on drilling it, just not yet (or simply hadn’t gotten around to it)? If they own it, I’m assuming that the drillers and land-owner simply have to agree on a price for the transaction. If not, what’s to say that a person couldn’t steal a flag flying on my roof if they use a contraption to grab it without actually setting foot on my land, similar to horizontal wells? I know that’s a weird example, but I just want to get my arguments clearer. Thank you again, by the way.
Depends what they’re using it for. If they aren’t using the building, you can use it. If they are planning to convert it to an office in a couple of years, you can use it till then but you gotta clear out because they were there first. If someone is farming land 1 month of the year, you can’t interfere with them doing so.
What you’re getting at is whether people can sort of forestall homesteading by doing some bare minimum amount to keep the use-rights. I would argue that this is really a form of saving, or speculation, and is beneficial. People would never have staked out these locations if it weren’t for their expectation of reaping benefits. It incentivizes the discovery and conservation of of potentially valuable resources. And hey, if they aren’t putting their use-rights to good economic ends, you can always buy it up from them.
Oh no I’m not arguing this. You don’t own soil particles, you own use rights. There’s no geographic box you can really draw and say everyone is excluded from this patch forever. Like I said, radio waves don’t interfere with use-rights but interfere with strict property rights… I support the former.
Do you think that an oil driller should be able to take someone’s oil from under the latter’s feet for free then? That sentence wasn’t supposed to sound as cynical as it did, haha. If I’m farming my land and I decide that I’m going to try to drill for oil in a few months, what’s to stop someone from getting to the oil first with better technology, if you don’t believe that I necessarily own the use to drill that oil?
Furthermore, would it be possible to sell land for money if I decide that I’m done using it? I feel like, if I’m correctly comprehending what you explained, that my land would no longer be available for me to sell once I’m done using it because I’m not taking advantage of use-rights. Wouldn’t this make people pretend to be using land so that they can sell it for money?
If you have any book/paper/media recommendations for me about property rights or use rights, I’d really like them. I seem to have stumbled on a lot of questions in my brain this morning.
What would be the communist take on these rights, too? I’m assuming that they don’t agree with ‘use-rights’ like you explained, so would they argue that someone can simply take over another’s land if the former thinks that it has something more importat to do on the land? A driller might insist that his drilling is more important than a land-user’s current farming and proceed to take it over with force.
Yup. You aren’t using it. You’d be guilty of forestalling homesteading.
The issue of two people drilling into the same reservoir is actually better resolved under use-rights, since the person who taps it first homesteads the right to continue doing so, and anyone else tapping it messes with the reservoir’s pressure profile etc…
Nothing. You can’t say “Oh i’m going to do it later so everyone hands off now!”.
I think transfer of use rights makes a lot more sense than transfer of “property” rights. Because you can think of it as them paying you not to farm anymore.
Kinsella is pretty good on this. To be honest, I just kind of fire from the hip on this issue. I’m not aware of any authors who use my exact argument, but I could be wrong.
The hard left conception of property rights has always been vague. They think their arguments against the property rights of mercantilist elites apply with equal force against egalitarian homesteading. Ultimately they just hate the idea of exlusivity, and if you really press them they don’t support any individual rights or voluntarism because they are always willing to attack individual rights.
That sentence alone actually helped make everything really concrete in my head. I was understanding everything you were saying, but that really made it clear. Thank you.
Your argument implies that you would be against people renting out houses/land, or is that incorrect? From my understanding of your definition of use-rights, people shouldn’t be able to rent out land because they do not own it. But, then again, they could be having people buy them to ‘temporarily not live there’. If I can’t afford any of the apartments around my general area, should I be able to sleep out on someone’s front law if it doesn’t stop them from doing anything, or would it be enough that they might be annoyed about me sleeping there that I’d have to leave?
Think about it like you’re letting someone else pay you to suspend your use of the resources.
Maybe. In reality it would probably constitute a breach of their security. Its perfectly okay for you to point a gun in my face, except it causes all these psychological problems 
Hahah, makes sense. This should be my last question, which might lead to something else I’ve been wondering about, but I’ll probably end up posting a new thread about it sometime. Private roads. With use-rights, it’s perfectly okay for me to walking across a few people’s private property in order to get from Point A to Point B, assuming I don’t walk straight through their house and stuff like that. But, if that is okay, why would anyone take the time to build roads if they wouldn’t make any money from it and would have to give up that space to other people for use after they are done using it? The only thing I could think of is that people who want to use their land long-term might not want people to walk across their grass, and so they’d build a road across which people could travel instead. What’s your opinion on how roads would have been built (or how they were built) without public funds, as I’m not really knowledgable on that section of history. Again, any links or recommendations would be helpful, but that’s the subject on which I’ll most likely start a new thread in the future.
There are a lot of ways to build roads or provide public goods. Some of it depends on the psychology of society. No economist would deny that charity can provide public goods, but there may or may not be enough of it. In greedland, you might have toll roads or dominant assurance contracts… My preferred way is to bundle roads (public good) with real estate (private good). So when you buy a house, you are not only paying for its construction and land use, you are also paying for the roads all around it. Its similar to how lighthouses were provided – they were bundled with port fees.