I’ve been thinking similar thoughts for a while, so it’s good to see that other people agree.
Basically, for those who don’t feel like reading, libertarians often defend their preferred societal order on the grounds that it is non-coercive. When people object the system of property rights, libertarians defend it by saying that if you don’t like it, you still can’t justify forcibly changing it because that would necessitate coercion. However, that argument presumes the moral significance of the very property rights that are under attack. While a defense of property rights may not be considered coercion, their establishment must be, and therefore libertarians cannot defend their society on grounds of non-coercion but on utilitarian grounds.
Everything is coersive. Morals are nonsense or polite conversation. This is old hat.
What matters is that most other sociological theories (assuming we discount primitivism and a war of all against all approach) theories have more nonsense, in the very literal sense of the word, than more market oriented philosophies and outlooks.
Besides all that the word “property”, among every other word I suppose, implies force. Either by stating you can or can not have something is saying something with authority.
This is one of the many reasons why I am not so sure anarchy is a good word at all to use (what the hell is “anti-authoritarian”?):
If I read this right, I may disagree with Callahan here:
“We do not seek to impose centralized controls on ‘society’ but rather to remove them! We do not seek to impose our preferences on ‘society’ by force but rather to prevent certain members of society from imposing theirs on us by force!”
Of course, by “removing” controls, they mean “placing everything under the strict control of strong property rights.” By “not imposing their preferences on others by force,” they mean “imposing the property rights regime we like on others by force.”
In the fact that one could say if the market is allowed to be put in place, or the more it is put in place, the more good customs will arise and the more it will filter out the bad. Of course this sentence is an over generalization, simplification, and technically wrong and I don’t feel like debating this here, but hopefully you get the picture. I would probably fall somewhere in this camp.
And I may nitpick with Kuehn here:
or we can talk ourselves into a logically coherent but practically meaningless infinite loop by telling ourselves that there’s a way to avoid coercion.
As I don’t know if it counts as logically coherent if our starting position is the equivlent of ^&^%&, and hence nonsense. It ought be assumed that all sociological theories have a logic that assumes a connection and integration with real world phenomenon.
But yeah, other than me actually looking for things to disagree with - almost for the sake of seeing if I could do it, good column.
property rights are not coersive. to say that one has the free access to use/consume, in part or in whole the fruits of anothers labor is theft. how can one be coersed to take what he has not earned? why would one produce when all his efforts could be taken from him at any moment, at the whim of anyone? can one reliably care for a family when a safe place to sleep, eat and raise children cannot be counted on? what levels of violence would he be reduced to to insure his families survival. if someone came into your families home at night, how would you react? would you help him load up your tv? do you consider your body to be your own? do others have the right to do to you what they will? when you take from another you are the aggressor. you are the coersive one. you have essentially become a slave master, forcing another to labor for what you have taken. is what you have taken then yours? if not why take it, you have no right to use or consume it. coersion is the initiation of force. defense of property, self included, is not initiation.
I want to write a book entitled “the poverty of utilitarianism”. Until then, property is not coercive. Demanding that someone let you use their property is coercion. Don’t believe me? Can I borrow your toothbrush? What about your house for a couple of weeks? How about the food on your plate or the money in your bank account? How about a few years of your life?
It just occured to me; interesting enough I think Callahan is a self proclaimed moralists…and an objective moralist at that. Odd, if any of that is indeed the case.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read the blog post yet.
That said, whether property rights are coercive depends on how one defines the word “coercive”. Many people, including many libertarians, seem to conflate the word “coercive” with the word “aggressive”. I’m not one of them. For example, I consider defending one’s property from a (would-be) thief to be coercive, but not aggressive. So to me the word “coercive” simply means “involving the use or threat of force (i.e. coercion)”. Notice that this leaves open the issue of whether said coercion is legitimate, and this is where the Non-Aggression Principle comes into play. The bottom line is that yes, property rights are coercive IMHO. But so what?
In order to say, “This is mine,” I first have to say, “This is not yours,” and back it up with force. I’m aware that libertarians have various theories about how property rights are legitimately established, but unless everyone agreed to them beforehand, it smacks of a social contract.
Autolykos, my response to Coase would be a little shorter. It would, in fact, be:
So?
We can’t both have this loaf of bread. What are you defining coercion as? The inability to possess any given entity X, where X stands for anythign that can be declared property? That strikes me as odd to define coercion in that manner.
“In order to say, “This is mine,” I first have to say, “This is not yours,” and back it up with force. I’m aware that libertarians have various theories about how property rights are legitimately established, but unless everyone agreed to them beforehand, it smacks of a social contract.”
Sorry, but no. That’s some wacky Derrida logic you have there. In fact, the only time you have to say “this is not yours” is when someone attempts to take something you have worked for or made from you.
Coercion to me is force initiated against another. Not in self-defense, but the point is that what can be defended must ultimately first be gained through aggression. Since two ownership-units (awkward term that allows me to include things like corporations) cannot own the same thing, one must first say to the other, “You cannot have this.” Only then is it property. To defend such an action on the grounds that it is just to use violence in defense of ones property is circular. Libertarian moral arguments, therefore, assume what they need to prove.
Of course, this need not matter if people accept the moral legitimacy of property rights, but such legitimacy must be assumed, not proven, and property rights therefore can only be justified through utilitarian concerns.
MrSchnapps, I agree with you, but I was asking for Coase to further explain his position. It remains to be seen how establishing something as one’s own is necessarily aggressive.
I briefly scanned the article. I find this Kuehn fellow to be tedious most of the time. I have no idea who Gene Callahan is.
Basically, this is yet another example of the difficulty of escaping “us” “we” “they” “them” when talking about social order. Groups matter but groups cannot be comprehended until we first think about individuals. Conflicts do not arise between groups, they arise between individuals and organizations (which are, invariably, run by individuals). Redheads do not stage revolutions and no one has yet proposed cleansing all left-handed people from the earth. Groupings by race, geography, religion, culture and so on are as arbitrary as grouping by redheadedness or left-handedness. While the former list of characteristics has played an important role in the history of demagoguery, they have no more importance in social science rightly understood than the latter list.
When conflicts arise between individuals who are not under the umbrella of an omnipotent Leviathan, there are no such things as “rules of society”, there are just the terms on which both sides will or will not agree to stop fighting. Arbitration by elders or other recognized expert dispute-resolvers played an important role in facilitating the settlement of disputes without further fighting. Customary law (aka common law) emerges from the experience of arbitrators in what settles disputes. If you kill someone’s servant, you generally have to pay 10 goats if you want to make them go away and stop being mad at you about it. As a shorthand, we speak of 10 goats for a servant as a law but in reality there is no such thing as “a law” in customary law. There is law but there are no laws.
The State is nearly definable as the monopoly of arbitration services (law) - it is only when the State comes into being and there is an omnipotent “rule-maker” that we can speak of the “rules of society” so the authors of these blog posts are really assuming their position from the outset. Once you assume there are always “rules of society” then it necessarily follows there must always be coercion.
To be clear, I do differ with the pure libertarian theory of law in that I believe that the use and threat of force in retaliation for wrongs which another party refuses to settle peacefully (i.e. through arbitrated or even un-arbitrated discussion) is justified. Without this basic right to retaliate against someone who refuses to come to the negotiating table, there is no incentive for aggressors to come to the negotiating table to begin with. But there must be no limitation of liability even in the use of force which is not part of a settled agreement, else people will retaliate excessively.
Phaedros, if you want to own something, I cannot. So you must tell me that the thing you desire, I cannot have.
Isaac, that is silly.
Autolykos, mutual agreement is fine. However, the current system of property rights has not been agreed to by everyone on the planet, so this is a problem. It is aggression because I must attack or threaten to attack anyone who is willing to compete with me for ownership of the resource.
The various methods for legitimately establishing property rights are similar to the social contract theory that justifies the state in that they assume agreement that they cannot prove and is in fact obviously false.