Continued from here,
So how do you come to this determination?
My issue is that I do not believe private property destruction is ever justified. Sure, Macy’s comes by it’s property dishonestly, but mob violence is not the way to rectify the situation. How many of us living under the state come by our property in a legitimately libertarian manner? Should the same rules of property vandalism and destruction extend to everyone?
This is not the anarchy I signed up for.
I’m trying to make the point that it’s not private.
I didn’t say it was, but that’s different than being justified. Macy’s isn’t a person, it’s a thing, a legal fiction, with no legitimate rights to anything.
You and I are people, who would be private were we not enslaved. Macy’s would not, could not even exist but as an extension of government power.
I love you like a brother JC, but I’m not buying. LLCs can and likely will exist under a free market.
By your rationale, vandarchists could burn down churches.
Aww, ain’t you sweet! Be that as it may, that is true, so long as a legal corporation, an extension of government power, rather than a priest or congregation, owns it. Once legitimate owners are in place, property right (insofar as they go) apply.
You can call your business arrangement whatever you want, and set the terms of your dealings with others. This is getting tangled into other threads, though. I’m aware that most of y’all are more libertarian Corporatists than actual anarchists.
How is a church (a government sponsored non-profit) a legitimate owner?
If the state murders indigenous people, and grants me their land to settle, am I legitimate owner?
Are you saying that the state property is subject to destruction and vandalism?
And I think you are grasping at straws to justify violence and property destruction. You’re a smart cat, come up with a principle that can be applied to every business, individual, corporation and state. Your definition is very loose, and clearly not totally thought out.
Btw, if you think that what happened at the RNC was anarchy, you’re very wrong.
Property destruction, state owned or otherwise, is vandalism, not anarchism.
So you advocate theft from all the legimite owners of “Macy’s” on the grounds that it isn’t an actual living, breathing person but is a large collection of living, breathing people who pooled their capital together to provide a service to as many people as possible.
As LC points out this argument could be used to justify a drive-by shooting against a bowling team because the ‘Bronx Bombers’ isn’t a thing in its own right therefore doesn’t have any protections from theft and violence.
The only ‘libertarian’ method to deal with a situation like this, assuming what you say is true, would be to remove the government protections from it and let the true owners decide if they wish to reorganize or liquidate the assets under their legal ownership.
There is no way you could possibly justify jacking a company car or burning down one of their stores to force this structural change and/or redistribute their wealth to the ‘rightful’ owners who I assume would be either the paid employees or the general public.
So while it may be true that ‘corporations’ are the result of state interference in the market your argument for using violence against them is weak, to put it extremely kindly.
I don’t really feel like jousting with strawmen today so save your corporatist ad hominems for someone else, please.
But I’m not stealing from the owners of Macy’s. They still own the entirety of what they bought: a part of a fictional entity. As others have pointed out here, it’s not the value of Macy’s they own, but Macy’s itself. The corporatist system is set up specifically to benefit the shareholders, to protect them from liability. If you are a sole proprietor, and a jagged tool, precariously placed on a shelf, falls on me, and I sue the store, you are liable. It’s your store. If that happens in Macy’s, you aren’t liable, only the store itself is liable. Which is nonsensical. You gained illegitimate advantage by incorporation. Now reap what you sowed.
No, people are actual beings. If, somehow, I could do a drive-by against the property of the team as some sort of seperate fictional entity without hurting the actual people and their personal property, then the situation would be analogous.
Nonsense. Because it is acknowledged by most as owned by the fictional entity, which cannot, in fact, own anything, no legitimate owner has claimed it. Because that is the case, it is available for claiming and homesteading. The “vandarchist”, as it were, does this by destroying it… not the most constructive use, most likely, but hey, it’s their’s now, right? They can do what they want with it.
Uh, huh…
So the ownership doesn’t revert to the owners of the fictional entity but becomes unowned? How’s that work, ethically speaking?
The shareholders already disavowed ownership by acknowledging the corporate entity and implicitly acknowledging its property rights. They were wrong to thing that “it” has any ability to own property, however they knowingly entered into an arrangement where they owned not the corporate assets, but only the “slave”, the corporation itself.
And the ethical basis for this assertion would be?
Forgive my being obtuse, but could you clarify the question?
All I get is that you believe that someone who believed in a structure of ownership that you don’t believe in loses their rights to any property that is encompassed under this ‘corporate structure’.
What you have left out is where your belief is justified in removing all claims to property titles under such a system instead of something like my belief that ownership would revert to the owners of the ficticious entity that controls the property you claim is open to homesteading.
My belief is consistent with property as a negative right, IMHO, while yours seems to assume that anyone who doesn’t hold the same views as yourself automatically loses any rights to ownership of the contested property and is open to justified theft on a grand scale.
I was just kind of wondering under what ethical basis you rationalize violence and theft against the rightful owners of ‘corporate property’.
Unless I’m gravely mistaken, you take the state to be an illegitimate holder of property, do you not? Ought former governors inherit all the property from the dead state? The state and the corporation are the same sort of abomination, lies meant to legitimize powers and immunities no truly private entity could claim, and the latter, as it stands today, cannot exist without the former. But those who “own” the corporation have no more rights than those that “own” the state which spawned it. You are just as guilty as I of evaluating what is or is not rightful property, regardless of claims, based on your beliefs. I just draw the line in a different place than you, and in my mind a more consistent one.
Even if a corporation is an ‘illegitimate holder of property’, of which I actually conceded that point for the sake of argument, the way in which they acquire property is much different than the State.
The State uses force and coercion, much like your proposed ‘solution’ to this problem, while a corporation buys and sells property on the market just like you and me.
If a corporation (and by default the owners of the corporation) acquire property in a non-fraudulent way how are you, a disinterested outsider with no valid claim in any conceivable way, not committing theft by deciding that they are not the rightful owner and that you in fact are?
This is starting to sound like the typical justification to tax the rich because they have ‘more than their fair share’. Or egalitarian BS.
Well, with the subtle difference that my ‘belief’ isn’t based on some arbritrary value judgement but on a valid theory of property rights.
Indeed. Rather than gaining their property as the State, they gain it from the State, like any other State agency. Corporations are economic arms of the State, socialisms hiding behind the masks of markets. The owners have made a devil’s bargain: protection and monopoly profit for what in the end is further slavery. Has it not been amply demonstrated of late that the government is only too happy, when necessary, to absorb its appendages back into itself, to cast aside the facade of separation? It has grown to the point that its masters no longer feel as keenly the need for deception.
The worker at a national park gift shop uses neither force nor coercion, and buys and sells property on the market just like you. This makes him no less an extension of the coercive state. Corporations are the same.
No, ownership does not default to the owners of the corporation. Corporate law, into which the corporate owners voluntarily entered, states explicitly that it is the “corporate person”, not the owners of that person, that owns corporate assets. A shareholder cannot demand the liquidation and payout from a proportional amount of its assets, because the corporation remains a unit, a legal entity, despite having been split into a multitude of shares, and it alone owns that property. If you hold to the ridiculous notion that a fiction can own property, that is.
Aren’t we all “outsiders” in regards to unclaimed property? Unclaimed by anything real, that is.
And you’ve long sounded like a typical vulgar libertarian. And I’d never say to tax anyone, though no doubt most of the rich have more than their fair share. I am no egalitarian, I just hate those who use collusion with the state to cement and increase their wealth and power beyond what their true worth could merit. The system rewards most richly those who are most willing to cast away all dignity, honor, and compassion. I pray that I live to see a day of reckoning.
Vandalism is vulgar. I’m tired of the term “vulgar libertarian” being bandied about by people who should know better. It’s seems to be the left-anarchist slander of choice for anyone who opposes their soft socialism or violent anti-property agenda.
“More than their fair share”? Perhaps more than their share, but then the notion of a share, or that there is such thing as a fair share is inherently un-libertarian.
Protest like crazy. I’m actually for it. I think it is ironic that Brad Spangler would claim to be apolitical, then organize political protests, but hey, whatever. Property destruction and hooliganism totally undermine the message of standing up to state power. On the contrary, to outsiders, it reinforced the notion that political power exists to keep the mob in check and defend private property.
The only message sent by breaking Macy’s windows, is one of feedback, or preaching to the choir. At best, libertarians will get it. At worst, they will start to believe it is a successful tactic.
I use it in only a libertarian sense, which is to say, a fair share is that gained without coercion. Any advantage gained through force is unfair. Is that somehow controvertial? Certain terms may evoke visceral negative reactions in people, but we should work to get rid of the aversions trained into us as part of a largely false left-right dichotomy.
I believe I’ve said several times by now that it was not necessarily a smart move or a good thing to do, but only that there was no ethical violation, at least beyond possibly giving anarchism an even worse image amongst a corporate-brainwashed populace.
Fictional entities? Like rights, like ownership?
I don’t know that anyone thinks that principles such as rights or ownership are people. However, corporations are treated as people. Rights can’t own anything. If I say, “No, I don’t own this, but my right to free speech does,” than I have denied personal ownership. Same thing. Try again.
I understand the point that JC is making is that in a revolution, corporations can be legitimate targets of violence. JC justifies this by saying that since the corporation exists and is protected by the state, that attacks on corporations are justified. Now as JC rightfully says this is not to say that this tactic should be employed in all cases but that they are justifiable. I would qualify JC’s opinion by saying that people who have formed corporations many times are just as much a victim of the state as everyone else and only form these entities as a means to make a living or to comply with some other regulation. I would contrast these with corporations that are actively involved in promoting the states coercion and routinely receive special priveleges. I consider there to be a big difference between the local liquor store and the companies that have just been bailed out by the governement. The first is a guy trying to make a living and the second are actively promoting and sustaining a corrupt state economic system.