It shows that any social order must rely on aggression, and therefore libertarians cannot claim moral superiority through the NAP (except against those who claim to already support the current property regime).
“It shows that any social order must rely on aggression, and therefore libertarians cannot claim moral superiority through the NAP”
It shows no such thing. People cooperate to labor on the same area of land to increase their productivity at least as much as they might fight over each square foot of land.
Let me try to explain how I view your argument at this time. It’s like you’re saying, “Everything is green and simply because something gives off a different frequency of light doesn’t mean it’s not green. You have to violently impose your definition of green on me in order to say that the color green is a specific frequency of light.”
When all 7 billion people agree with one another on a property system, you will be right.
Your definition of green is circular.
Coase, can you explain how can there be sentience without any sense of property rights?
What.
Also I think the real question is “who cares”?
If I can go one step further and speculate, I think in the end all people are just trying to describe what makes the most sense for wealth maximization, and using the most on hand language they know how to use.
The reality is nobody cares about coercion (whatever that means). .if it was that big of a deal the action would have been bred out.
William-
I care. Rothbard seemed to care. Classical liberals cared.
Can we claim moral superiority by showing that our system best suppresses conflict (and thus violence) and/or uses the least amount of coercive ‘threats’ to do so (in that there are fewer laws/rights than in other systems)?
Not really.
Property rights is intrinsical to sentience. One cannot exist without another. How could a sentient being be sentient if it thinks it doesn’t own anything, not even himself?
Property rights is intrinsical to sentience. One cannot exist without another. How could a sentient being be sentient if it thinks it doesn’t own anything, not even himself?
I don’t particularly disagree with this. At least the property part. Rights… who knows?
Stil my point is it all requires force in one form or another. “Coercion”, if it is to have much meaning has to be a an extant legal term. Which in and of itself would require some force to uphold.
Well, if there’s a property it’s because someone has a right to it. There can’t be properties without owners.
And I’m disputing the point raised by the thread starter because NAP doesn’t mean not using force, it means not initiating force. It’s perfectly acceptable and in line with NAP to use force when appropriated. So when you use force to defend your property you are not coercing anyone, because by the very sentient nature of human beings all of them (by the simple fact of being sentient) acknowledge property rights.
Just to be as clear as possible, it is like sentience itself was a ‘social contract’.
And then the agreement has to be hammered out between the person claiming and the person denying the right. You are equivocating between imposed decisions and mutual agreements arrived at through arbitration. In the first case, you have something like, “The State hereby grants Joe the right to sit in the sun unshaded on his land and hereby simultaneously denies Bob the right to erect a structure that will shade Joe’s land” but in the second case you have something like, “I, Bob, agree to pay $X to Joe or tear down the offending structure… because I have violated Joe’s customary right to unobstructed sunlight on his property in the form of an easement which must be recognized by virtue of his long use of his land in this manner.” Bob could indeed be obstinate and refuse to acknowledge Joe’s customary right or refuse to acknowledge that Joe has an established easement and so on and so forth but if Bob is just being unreasonable then his obstinacy may eventually render him an outlaw where Joe will then be within his rights to simply tear down the offending structure no matter what Bob thinks about it.
Under the statist order of imposed laws, rights are indeed a zero-sum game. In a customary law system, both parties benefit by bargaining the least mutually disagreeable settlement to which they can both agree that is still preferable to feuding and outlawry.
Clayton -
What is silly?
Has no one here ever read Hoppe? Really?
Private property rights must be presupposed for any argument at all. One cannot argue that he doesn’t own himself since, by virtue of him arguing, he must presuppose the use of his vocal cords and tongue, etc.
As regards coercion, property is established through the principle of self ownership and homesteading. It’s not circular. The argument “You may not own what I own - and I will use force to defend my claim” is not a violation of the non-aggression principle when property becomes owned legitimately.
You cannot argue that you do not own yourself. Your body is your legitimate property and you are allowed to defend it with force against others who want to use your body.
First, what makes you think that people do not read or understand Hoppeian viewpoint in this thread? Second, everything you have said is basically what is already said here…
I’ve read Hoppe and I think he’s way off the mark. Any axiom is presupposed, meaning, that it is simply assumed to be true. There is - by definition - no such thing as a “necessary axiom”. An axiom is a matter of choice… “supposing you take X to be true, then Y must also be true.”
In logic, it is well established that all statements are either axioms or theorems (or definitions, but that’s pedantry). If it is an axiom, then it is not true as a consequence of some deductions within the formal system. If it is a theorem, then it is true as a consequence of deduction from the axioms. There is no third category of “necessarily true statements which are neither proven nor assumed.”
“You must accept X to be true because you can only reject X by first assuming it.” This could be argued, for example, of the Law of Non-Contradiction. However, it’s not correct. I can reject the Law of Non-Contradiction without first assuming it. Let me illustrate:
“The Law of Non-Contradiction is null and void.” I say.
“Ah,” you say, “but since it’s null and void, it is also not null and void! Ha! You can’t escape it! You must accept the Law of Non-Contradiction either way!”
To which I respond, “It is true, as you say, that I must accept the Law of Non-Contradiction even if I reject it… but it is also true that I must not accept the Law of Non-Contradiction if I reject it, as well.”
In other words, it’s impossible to convince the irrationalist that he must accept the laws of logic, starting only on his own assumptions. The laws of logic are only necessarily true if you first assume them.
Hoppe’s axiom of self-ownership fares no better. Self-ownership is only necessarily the case if you first assume it. David Friedman delivers the coup de grace here.
I have an awesome respect for HHH but on this one point he’s just way off!
Clayton -
To say that property rights needs coercion is a plain contradiction in terms. That is because the only way to define coercion is the threat of aggression, that is to use force against your property. To defend your property from aggression is not aggression, indeed to restore your property from a previous aggression is not either.
That the problem of social order needs norms, and hence that ethics is normative is a truth statment. However, this has nothing to do with coercion. The only legitimate source of enforcement is your own will, you are allowed to enforce your own will through contracts. But this is not coercion, its just your will.
If you don’t accept the law of non contradiction, I really dont understand why are you talking at all. Furthermore, I dont know how you will convince me that your nonsense must be listened. After all the opposite of what you say could be said by you as well and nothing could be pointed out about it. This is just ridiculous.
I basically agree with what Coase has been saying here. Unless anyone comes up with either a viable basis for natural rights (no one has, IMO) or unless all 7 billion of us agree on a property rights system, rights regimes are going to be socially constructed and ultimately coercive. You cannot have an anarchist/minarchist society based on an existing or a new property rights regime that also claims non-coercion.
There are lots of other examples of why statelessness is more coercive - depradations of criminals and invaders, externalities perhaps for some people, and of course the maintenance of property rights themselves. These points have long been put forward by non-anarchist libertarians for a long time so they shouldn’t be new.
We can’t pretend that we’re all getting a start from an equal footing either. Some people call that luck, but I call that being constrained by an existing property rights regime and by the decisions of your ancestors. Jefferson and Paine both wrote a lot about this, and about what today we might call the path dependence of past coercions. Now - is a state remedy for something like this - something like poverty or inequality - itself coercive? Of course it is, and I would never deny it. The case is that it is less coercive than the alternative.
Rather than simply claiming the mantle of non-coerciveness and avoiding the question of the coercion of property rights regimes, libertarians simply ought to recognize that they have no special priority or claim - and actually make a case. That case is hard to make, of course. We can’t measure “coercion” after all. But we can’t just assume it away for our favored philosophy either. This is the advantage of pluralism and self-government (which would not be possible if self-government were constitutionally restricted in a minarchist or anarchist society). If we have a tough time figuring out the least coercive solution we ought to argue and deliberate over it.