@GL: Awesome post.
I’ll give my illustration, slightly modified from yours:
- The government paves a very large parking lot with numbered parking spaces. The government sells these spaces at a fixed price of $20 per spaces. Speculators buy up “vanity spaces” with cool numbers like 666 or other distinguishing marks and then resell them to the highest bidder. However, there is a rule that if someone’s birthday is the same as the space’s ID - such as 9231976 for someone born on 9/23/1976 - then that person has a right to the space at the government price of $20.
The entire scheme is illegitimate from the outset. The parking spaces are not genuine property, they are artificial scarcity created by the government and then “sub-let” to private mini-tyrants, looking to make a profit on the speculation. Certainly, it’s not completely un-property - it would still be robbery for a person to beat somebody up and take their title to their parking space. Nevertheless, to naively apply the rules of originary appropriation and voluntary exchange to the matter as if this is how the land had been originally acquired and sub-divided is simply incorrect. Ron Paul is simply saying, “The rules - the very same rules by which you acquired this parking space and by which you deign to charge some large price for it - say that the space that corresponds to my birthdate can be purchased by me for $20. So I don’t have to pay your asking price.”
The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s close. The whole enterprise is illegitimate, to begin with. So it’s incorrect to pretend that buying a government-allotted parking space is “the same as” or even “analogous to” homesteading unused resources… or that the government in originally acquiring and sub-dividing the lot had used original appropriate (the government is incapable of homesteading). Furthermore, for the owner of the lot to protest, “you’re using the government’s aggressive rules against me to take the lot from me at $20!” is contradictory because the current owner is using the government’s aggressive rules against the hypothetical birthdate-individual to claim the elevated price in the first place!
We’re playing in an environment of wholly-artificial scarcity here. There’s no need for there to be this scarcity in the first place[1]. ICANN is a government-created entity whose job is not unlike the government sales counter for the parking lots above. They sell domain-names at a fixed price of around $10-$20. Her sister organization, IANA, manages the absurd task of allocating blocks of IP addresses to highest bidders. The rules permit resale of these government-created “lots” to the highest bidder… thus, there is a large market in domain-name speculation. While there is nothing illegitimate in reselling these domain-names, there is neither anything inherently “property”-like about them beyond whatever scarcity has been imbued into them by this government-created system. Hence, if the rules had been that “you may resell this domain-name to anyone who is not left-handed”, why, that would be the rules everyone would abide by. Ron Paul is simply saying: The rules state that if your domain-name is a trademark, the name of a well-known entity, then I have the right under ICANN rules to supplant your DNS entries in the routing tables and redirect the domain name to my servers." Rules iz rules. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword… if you play by statute, then you get played by statute.
Now, this situation of artificial scarcity and faux-“homesteading” actually describes a great deal of property in society. Even many land titles can be criticized on precisely these grounds. In the US, public lands - to which the government itself never had any originary title - were sold to the “highest bidder” in closed and unfair auctions that violated the rights not only on the indigenous inhabitants, whose land and other resources rights were trampled in the process, but also of the public generally who was denied a fair chance to homestead the property by making use of it, rather than simply having the government claim it in their name and then “sell” it to them at some ridiculously low price.
But the lobotomized horde doesn’t want to think about complicated problems like this. They want a clean, Platonic world where they can dream up some new “rule” and have it rigorously applied upon everyone alike at the point of a bayonet in order to “make society free” or fair, or efficient, or whatever their pet collectivist obsession is.
Clayton -
[1] Some of the reasons why there is no need for this domain-name garbage: Distributed hash table, OpenDNS, VPN, Tor, MagnetURI, secure timestamping, etc.