In another thread, discussing immigration, we have gone off on a tangent.
The question is, who rightfully owns the assets currently held by the state? Who has a claim to it’s services? What is the moral status of public property?
Basically my idea is this.
The state is a criminal organization. The property it holds is expropriated from its victims. The victims have a right to get their property back. The class of individuals that are victims are taxpayers. It is the taxpayers that have a claim to the state’s assets and services, since reclaiming property in any form is just. Any non-taxpayer has no right to use the state’s services, since they don’t belong to them.Taxpayers may only repossess an amount up to their level of expropriation, the amount of taxes they’ve paid. If they were to take more, they would be taking another taxpayer’s property
What about the case where two taxpayers have conflicting claims to a particular asset, or state funds? This is likely the case since the state continually wastes and consumes funds, and there is not enough public property to restore all of the state’s victims. This scenario is analogous to the case in the state of nature where two individuals have conflicting claims over nature given goods. The solution is also the same. No one can be the owner, until one of them takes control of the good. But then the issue is settled, since the original appropriator has a stronger claim to the good than the latecomer. Similarly, there is the first reposessor and the latecomer. The former is the legitimate owner and the latecomer is out of luck.
My response to stranger is this: We do not live in an AC society. All judges are employed by the state. Why would we let a judge decide how the state’s assets are divided up? And how would you know whether or not a judgment is just unless you have a theory of justice?
This is completely wrong. In a case of original appropriation, the first claimant is the first to see the value in a good, and so is the first to exploit it for social use. No conflict arises from this. A conflict arises only if someone attempts to take something that has already been appropriated for social use. These conflicts need to be prevented, and this is what original appropriation laws do.
In the case of stolen property, simply being the first to recover the property by force does not invalidate the claims of all the other victims. It makes you the most powerful and violent of them, not the most productive of them. Rewarding the first taker is only going to reward violent takeovers of state property that is going to leave much of it in complete ruins.
First of all, it’s obvious that as long as the state holds a monopoly on justice there is no way in hell that any state assets are going to be returned to the taxpayers. Only if the state fails will that take place. Now when it does, the first task of rebuilding society will be to create a new class of judges with the authority to settle conflicting claims, and one of these will be liquidating the state’s assets to compensate all of its creditors in equal parts, many of whom it must be said are old and weak pensioners who would not stand a chance in a race to grab state assets by force.
A steals $500 each from B and C. He spends $500 on some services and where he spent it is untraceable. It is impossible to tell whether the $500 he has left belongs to B or to C. When they catch up with him, who should the $500 go to and why? (For the purposes of this experiment, it is impossible to force him to work to pay off the debt or to expropriate any of his assets)
But why is B entitled to less than his original $500, just because A stole from C? And why can’t C recover the whole amount. Why are they each entitled to an equal share? If B catches up first and takes $500, he’s just recovering his property. How does he owe anything to C?
Well, how can you object to my solution? Surely it is at least just as good if the ‘equal share’ solution is arbitrary. And who hires the arbitrator? Whose arbitrator should judge?
I won’t object to my solution as long as it’s not my money that you are holding. If it is, then you and I will have a problem, and then we will have to find an agreeable arbitrator to sort it out.
If it’s arbitrary, why should the judge’s arbitrary decision be respected? What if it goes to appeal and another judge decides differently? Which judgement should be ignored? Whose judge should decide? The one who B hires or the one who C hires?
What is it exactly that makes someone a judge anyway? I thought it was their ability to be fair and just. If the decisions they make are arbitrary, why can’t everyone just be their own judge? Could B just declare himself a judge and rule in his own favour? Is there any non-arbitrary reason why any judges decision should be respected?
I think the problems of your position are insoluble.
But, to quote you, “there is no expectation that stolen property will ever be recovered whole”—in fact, there’s no expectation that it will recovered at all. If all of B’s money is recovered and none of C’s, that doesn’t violate your “expectations” either. (E.g., what if A stole B’s $500, but B chased him down and recovered it immediately—would you still say he has to split it 50:50 with C, whose stolen money has been spent? What’s the cutoff time after which he has to split it?)
This argument seems intuitively plausible. However, I think the reason for this, is that we have business arbitration as an intuitive analog. In business when a partnership breaks up, all the assets and liabilities are divided in proportion to the capital which all owners have invested. I don’t see how the proportional position is justified when it comes to reclaiming property.
Also, I’m not arguing that the secondcomer couldn’t receive his ‘share,’ just that it’s up to the first re-appropriator. After all, until one of the justice seekers reclaims the stolen property, no one has demonstrated that they value the stolen goods enough to bear the cost of reclaiming their property. When one does remove it from the control of the criminal, they demonstrate that they value their stolen property and establish an objective link by bringing it back under their control.
I would like to step the thought experiment up another notch, just to show how contorted the proportional solution must become to remain consistent.
What if C finds the criminal, and takes his property back (in proportion to the amount which was taken from him) and then releases the criminal, before B shows up? Surely this is within his rights. He is under no obligation to provide justice services to C. How can B argue that C owes anything to him? He doesn’t even know how much property remains in the criminals hands. Even if he were to catch up to him, the criminal may consume more and there’s no way for him to determine his correct share of the property which C removed from the criminal.
And how does C owe anything to B if all he did was take property away from a person who took it from him in the first place? B was not a party to the first transaction nor the second. All C did was remove the opportunity to retake his property. If opportunity to appropriate were the basis for natural law, there could never be any just original appropriators.
So, I have tried to explain why I think that the Natural/Austrian/Libertarian legal tradition implies that competing victim claims to criminals and their assets should be settled on a first come first serve basis. Now can anyone who believes that the proportional solution is implied by the principle of self-ownership and homesteading principle, or give some kind of legal or moral justification?