How the hell is a maxim a “delusion”?
This is actually something that Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics holds up to (before it gets to the part where people say it breaks down). You have control over your thoughts, and it is impossible to relinquish that control to someone else. Your thoughts are what controls your body. You can claim to be someone’s servant, but ultimately you are still choosing to do what they say, and could change your mind at any moment. As Rothbard pointed out, this is where the concept of “inalieanable rights” comes from.
…there are certain vital things which, in natural fact and in the nature of man, are inalienable, i.e., they cannot in fact be alienated, even voluntarily.
Specifically, a person cannot alienate his will, more particularly his control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own will and person, and he is, if you wish, “stuck” with that inherent and inalienable ownership. Since his will and control over his own person are inalienable, then so also are his rights to control that person and will. That is the ground for the famous position of the Declaration of Independence that man’s natural rights are inalienable; that is, they cannot be surrendered, even if the person wishes to do so.
And even if that weren’t the case…even if you want to argue that you somehow could alienate your own will, and “sell your body”, you’re still selling your body. The whole reason it’s called “yours” is because (a) you cannot be alienated from it, but also (b) you have a better claim to it than anyone else.
You can try to argue that that is only a “de facto” ownership, but it’s ownership by any understood means, nonetheless. Not only that, but this whole time everyone has been using all the “your’s” that directly imply a claim over something. They imply an individual consciousness outside of everything else, and they recognize it as such. To claim that “you**r idea of ‘ownership’ is a delusion” is a self-contradiction…along the same lines as what Hoppe’s argumentation concept points out. (Of course, he draws conclusions from that that haven’t been sufficiently explained to me, but in the specific case of making the point that your act of arguing proves you are an independent conscious mind in yourself, is basically undeniable as far as I can see.)
See here for a list of resources on the concept of self-ownership.