Let’s say we have a private security agency that enforces rules in the territory in which it owns. Anyone who doesn’t agree with the rules is free to leave (emigrate) at any time. How is this “private security agency” (or whatever term you prefer) substantially different from how most governments in the world currently operate?
You can say that current governments don’t legitimately own the land they hold according to your chosen criteria (inheritance through first use/first improvement principle, etc). But if that’s so, why don’t you hold all current property deeds illegimate, since virtually no one who owns property now actually acquired it through these channels?
Take Dodge City. It’s supposedly anarchocapitalist according to Mises.org. But it had a local government that collected taxes and had a legal monopoly within its own territory. It wasn’t part of the US federal government, but it met all the normal, political science, non-Randroid definitions of a state. How can you make that distinction?
Governments do not own all of the territory that they enforce rules upon.
they dont own the land for a variety of reasons, firstly because they dont even claim to own the land. Furthermore, you ignore the fact that ownership is transferable.
Reference?
Oh ok. You arent even aware of the different normal, political science definitions of state. So I guess I could type some out for you to not read, and if you were making an attempt at honest discussion, that would move the conversation forward. So you can explain to yourself why I havent done that.
if you anticipate a thread lock, maybe you should explain why. Are you planning on violating the forum rules?
Semantics. If the government never repudiated ownership (which would probably involve giving up eminent domain), it would still be practically indistinguishable from one of those private security agencies.
It’s just a particular private security agency that you want to dismantle because it has some rules that you don’t like.
The federal government isn’t doing that. It’s requiring individuals within its territory to follow certain rules. If they don’t want to follow those rules, they can leave the territory.
Your security agency in this example has legitimate control over their own property and can exclude others at will and make ultimate decisions over their property. However, governments claim jurisdiction even over things they do not own, and thus use coercion illegitimately. This is the salient difference between them.
Libertarians would deal with existing title conflicts thus:
If the title was stolen and the owner or their descendants can be found, the property should be returned to the owner.
If the title was stolen and the owner cannot be found, then one of two things happens:
2a. If the current owner was the thief and the owner cannot be found, then he cannot be allowed to profit from his theft and title would be given to the first person to make new use of the land (in practice this would probably be the person/agency who was able to prove it in court or make the complaint).
2b. If the current owner was not the thief and the owner cannot be found, but is rather the descendant of the thief or someone the thief sold to, then that person is not guilty of the theft and can be considered to have homesteaded it as the first user of unowned property and now legitimately owns it.
If the thief sold the property to someone, and the owner can be found, then the property is returned to the owner and the last owner has a claim against the thief for selling “stolen goods” that he could not legitimately sell.
In the current world, the vast majority of property, even real estate, falls into the 2b category and thus not much would change were libertarian principles effected into law. However you would see restoration to the indians of a good deal of property, but certainly not the entire US as some imagine.
Not necessarily. For example, if you agree to live within a government’s territory - semantics aside, for all practical purposes governments have always claimed at least partial ownership of nearly everything in their territory by possessing an underlying right to eminent domain - you agree to turn over your tax money. If you disagree with this rule, you have to leave the territory. If you leave the country and take your property with you, the government will leave you alone (apart from some rare instances when it goes overseas for things like World War II; no institution is perfect).
This is no different from a private homeowner’s association requiring you to pay fees as long as you own a house in the neighborhood.
Sure, you could do that. Basically you’re asking if the situation changes if a person subjects themselves to the state voluntarily. The answer is yes, it changes and becomes moral. However, states would have to abandon the presumption of citizenship for the young for instance, upon reaching adulthood, and make such voluntary acceptance explicit, and allow you to opt out, which they currently really do not. And, and this is important, the state’s territory and influence could only extend to property they’d purchased and own 100%, not to anyone new’s property who simply agrees to their jurisdiction. And if that new person seceded, the “state” could not keep claiming jurisdiction.
If states were willing to be more honest in that way it would be a move forward, but states are not willing to be honest. Also, states would have to abandon their monopoly on controlling the court that decides suits against them. Even in that scenario any suit should be brought to a 3rd party court, and this too states are not willing to do.
If someone agreed to that up-front before joining, then fine. However state’s don’t do that.
No, it wouldn’t be leaving the country, because the state could only do this on land they actually had title to. They could similarly eject people living as renters on their land. But people who do own land and simply join their system could secede at will and stay in place without the state, and no state currently is willing to allow that.
Homeowner’s associations are actually illegitimate as currently implemented because the title to property is transferred burdened by the HA which cannot be gotten rid of. In practice if a HA wants to do that, it must retain title to all the property and lease them out conditionally. They could not be legitimately considered sold if they’re sold conditionally.
So, it’s not quite the same thing.
Similar illegitimate laws currently burden property all around the US, and in the past were used to racist intent, forcing owners not to sell to minorities for instance.
But the dead cannot retain control of a property and thus force the choices of future generations. The right to control property is a heritable right, and once the owner has died his right passes on to the next owner, regardless of what he wrote into the deed, and the new owner should be able to change that at will, having now inherited full title.
formalized the citizenship process (although I think immigrants already go through this, guess the government can make rules that apply to them)
took formal ownership of all land, as is done in Hong Kong, or some similar measure to legitimize tax revenue
and
there were independent courts somewhere which would still allow it to collect taxes, but would prevent it from invading Iraq and such
Alright, I get this. I’m just saying that it would still allow countries to go full communist as long as they gave criminals a choice to run off to the brigand colonies in Australia.
so a person owns land, then a state claims to own the land. the legitmate landowner is not the state, the legitimate landowner never consented to be part of the state. the state is making war on the legitimate landowner.
It seemed like you initially came here and you disliked the ideas presented on here, but as of late you have been posting what appears to be pro-market posts. Have you had a change of mind or is this a really subtle joke?
Let me say up front the overall principle, that I would be okay only with a state that eschews all institutional forms of aggression. Since the state is generally defined by at least three particular forms of aggression:
Forced monopoly of police protection.
Forced monopoly of judicial services, including using its own judges in disputes involving itself.
Compulsory taxation.
and also sometimes 4. Assumption of territorial ownership/jurisdiction despite lacking legitimate title.
The only “state” I’d be okay with could hardly be called a state at all, but rather a free association with not taxation but voluntary subscriptions. The road you’re walking down will likely lead to the same conclusion if we follow it far enough and if you do so consistently to the idea’s logical conclusion.
Not merely formalized but allow free association. That is, states could only claim jurisdiction over land they personally had title to. Those entering their land would then agree to certain malum prohibitum on the basis of choice, with the penalty of being kicked off state land should they break prohibitum. Any conflicts would have to be solved by third party disinterested jurists.
Not merely take formal ownership, they’d have to actually purchase it. No entity could possibly buy entire countries at this point so that precludes the idea for now. And if they did buy a plot of land, they could contract with individuals to stay on that land for a set fee, sure, but that would not in fact deserve the label ‘taxation’ since it would be an agreed upon sum and involve no element of coercion. It would become mere rent.
Independent courts outside itself, yes.
No, such courts would probably not allow it to collect taxes or conduct war, since both are immoral aggressions. No more can any business collect taxes or conduct war.
That is, such a society would be based on the non-aggression principle and forced cooperation in the form of taxation or conscription would be impossible.
Aha, now here you have an interesting statement. Because the funny thing is you’re right, that it would allow the creation of independent, self-regulating communes where the people lived there by free association. That’s one of the virtues of such a rule of law.
But it would also prevent those communes from spreading their jurisdiction illegitimately.
I’m working on writing out a legal code to effect just such a libertarian ideal society in practice, under the label of ‘autarchy’, and it involves self-regulated communities that join together on the basis of similar individually-accepted legal principles. Thus, all the communists could very easily join together and create a commune, yes, perfectly possible without violating the NAP.
What the communists could not do is to effect policies of forced redistribution of income. No, it would have to be voluntary. Nor could they prevent the property of an owner therein from seceding. So, in contrast to now where cities have their boundaries set in stone for all time effectively, in a libertarian society the size of any individual self-governed region (let’s call them tuath / tuatha), each tuath would grow or shrink according to the property of each individual joining it or leaving it.