The fact my (and your) values are subjective does not really detract from my original point. Indeed, it is impossible to refer to how markets or society should be organised without referring to philosophical ‘oughts’. Murder, rape and torture are only subjectively wrong.
Anyway, I wasn’t intending to get into a heap of anal austrian methodology so to phrase my initial point entirely wrong just to please the subjectivists, I know that it is definitely morally and objectively wrong (my opinion being a universal underlying ethical principle that is always right by necessity ) to spy on your neighbour or play loud booming music at night and hence I ought to be able to use physical force to prevent that happening.
Then you have to go read more on how Property Rights arise. I would recommend that Hoppe book I linked to a few posts up.
It all depends on who owns the lawn. You cannot go to your neighbor’s property and throw bums out, but you can throw trespassers out on your own property. Just like you can’t go to your neighbor’s property and demand he wears a silly hat. The silly hat example came from critiques of Social Contract Theory, which I think would tie well into this discussion, and might bring in some relevant arguments.
Property rights are not about making everyone better off. If I have got a Ferrari and you don’t, but you very much would like to have one, you are unhappy not because of the concept of property rights. You are unhappy because you do not have the productivity for such car, or don’t have wealthy parents or so. Prosperity is a direct consequence from property rights, but not their goal. If the concept is not applied no such car as Ferrari would have come into existance in the first place. Property rights do not tell or guarantee who will be affected by the prosperty (the concept does not include in itself some sort of an equal distribution system,i.e., the marginal increase of the total wealth that is brought about as a result of exercised and not violated property rights is not allocated in an equal manner among the individuals). But one thing is for sure - the total material well-being will increase relatively if property rights are not violated.
By the way how do you apply property rights theory with excessive sound? How can you say that excessive sound harms your property and non excessive sound doesn’t? Isn’t it obvious that its not about harm to property but about psychological damage? How is excessive sound different from spying or from non excessive sound?
An instance of this objection was discussed by Coase (1960),
Friedman’s colleague at the University of Chicago, and fellow Nobel Prize
winner in economics. It was the case of Sturgis v. Bridgeman, which revolved
around the issue of whether the manufacturer may run his machinery, which
interferes with the quiet needed by the doctor in order to operate his MILTON FRIEDMAN ON INTOLERANCE: A CRITIQUE 11
stethoscope and other medical needs. Coase, of course, answered this
question in terms of which decision would maximize GDP, but the
libertarian analysis is clear on this matter: it depends upon who was there first,
to homestead either the given level or noise, or the required level of quiet. So,
to answer Friedman’s challenge, it all depends upon who was the initial
homesteader of the noise or quiet rights.
This is not even theoretically possible as far as I know without trespassing. You would need to send a signal of some sort onto the person’s property first, be it a transmitter, cameras, x-rays, etc. If you are putting things on someone else’s property then you are trespassing and violating their property rights. At such a time as people find a way to spy purely by looking at what comes naturally out of the property then this answer would change but I don’t even think that is theoretically possible at the moment.
Since all land is owned if someone is stalking you then you should speak to the owner of whatever land he is stalking from. Following a person is not illegal in itself, but the acts required to follow a person might be (tresspassing again).
If you masturbate in front of your window with the blinds open then the person recording the video is not in the wrong. In my opinion there is a certain amount of burden of security on the individual wishing to keep his life private. Closing your blinds would require the person commit some other act (tressspassing) in order to commit this “offense” which they can be held accountable for. If you are worried about such events get really expensive tresspassing insurance that has a massive payout.
If I setup a infra-red scanner and point it at my neighbor’s bedroom, it is a mockery of common sense to claim, “Well, technically the infra-red rays from their body heat were coming to me…”.
The same is true with sound dishes that are able to pick up noises that far exceed the normal capacity of the human ear.
Free individuals should not be forced to “infra-red proof their homes”, or install “sound dampeners” to prevent eavesdropping - people have a reasonable expectation of privacy against these invasive and insidious technologies.
I don’t really mind how anti-spying laws should be justified, should we somehow justify them using existing libertarian principles or should we think about new principles, intuitively it just doesn’t make sense to legalize this kind of behavior.
When that technology exist then privacy problems would be dealt with, but hypothetical situations will never have a satisfying answer. But even today that they have the technology to look in to your home and see a heat signature. This is used by the police frequently from helicopters, looking for cannabis grows and similar illegal activity. This is legal with a state and nothing happens. Would a private organisation get away with heat signatur’ing a suburban area? Well google has satellite mapped several countries and we can only imagine what sort of mapping the NSA and GCHQ have. So it would foolish to speak about hypothetical situations as you described when the government and its agencies already do similar things and they are completely legal.
Restraining orders could exist within a stateless society or like you said they would be dealt with in similar ways as they do today, violence and other deterrents.
When people think of privacy they think of an Orwellian type state or corporation that is infringing on their personal life. But if you look at today’s society people voluntarily hand over all the information. Sure some types of information are forced through the threat of fines, like the census and driving license etc. People have to take the necessary precautions or they will suffer the consequences. Complete privacy is possible but that requires a lot of money and high security etc. What most people would not even think of doing.
Murray Rothbard on right to privacy from ethics of liberty
