http://polycentricorder.blogspot.com/2010/02/explaining-anti-authoritarianisms.html
Thoughts?
There are some things I like about Brainpolice’s comments but how can someone be committing aggression against someone who comes onto their property? How can one have the ability of what comes on and what comes off their property but not have ‘ultimate decision making’? Isn’t the ability to dictate the environment a sense of ultimate decision making? The ability to leave a group is the most powerful example of control.
brainpolice thinks that guests should have the run of the house…
so much for private property…
Well that’s what confuses me. We can dictate who comes on and who comes off our property but saying what needs to happen while on our property is aggression? Wouldn’t a loophole be openly stating what needs to happen to the visitor before they come onto your property and if you don’t get a form of approval then you disallow them from entering? Perhaps BP is trying to use something like positive benevolence in a non-violent manner. Like saying it is reprehensible to dictate harsh conditions of what happens on your property but it is not unjust.
Most people are confused about what property rights means. Under the homesteading theory, you have the right to the fruits of your labor. So if I farm land I have the right to the crops. This gives me NO rights against people who don’t interfere with my homesteading. So, people could walk across the land so long as they didn’t interfere with your homesteading activities. You don’t own the land. You own the rights to your labor, which is mixed with an aspect of the land.
Contrast this with the state conception of property rights which says that you can own all aspects of a geographic region. Probably stems from the fact that the state feels the same way about the territory it claims…
Anyway, so with respect to living quarters, you’ve homesteaded a peaceful domain for living, and you have a right to maintain that. So its reasonable that you can eject guests if they interfere with your peace of mind. It is unreasonable to object to say, radio waves, passing through your house, unless they interfered with your homesteading.
good luck trying to get brainpolice to address counter-arguments… https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/city-of-london-government-or-firm/10896/47
You said something similar here and Conza responded:
Although you did not respond in that thread, you are offering a solution to his second analogy:
How does a person “homestead[…] peace of mind”? What if I were to both plant crops in a field but also lie in the field constantly? Would I then gain the “right” to eject people from it?
thanks for the article, I think I agree with him here. [Y]
It has been claimed (incorrectly, I think) that the JNF, using freely given donations, bought all the land that is currently Israel, and ceded it to the Israeli government. If BP’s comments were taken to be false, and we held to an absolutist private property position, and if this claim were true, then it would follow that any action, no matter how tyrannical, taken by the Israeli government, was unobjectionable on libertarian grounds.
It could be objected that this wouldn’t apply to emigration - that one thing the government could not do would be to prevent people from leaving. Even if taken without argument, this isn’t much. People can only leave by getting to the border, and if you build a fence around their house, they can’t get to the border. You can lock them in camps and shoot them if they leave, saying “this whole area is mine, and one of my rules, admittedly, quite arbitrary, is that you are not allowed to leave that perimter, and if you do, I can shoot you. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have come in. What, I should have warned you ahead of time? I did. You knew when you came in that there was a group of a couple hundred people who can vote for such things, and have done so before.”
By the way, what if I own a plane? Is it true that if you come on my plane, I can do as I like with you, so long as I don’t prevent you from leaving - but surely I’m not required to actively help you leave, say, by giving you a parachute?
According to the Principle of Proportionality, the use of defensive coercion must not be disproportionate to the seriousness of the aggression. For example, if you accidentally step on my property and I shoot you for trespassing, my actions would be disproportionate and hence I would actually be aggressing against you.
Our rights don’t disappear the moment we step on someone else’s property.
Everyone of his posts should have an obligatory tl;dr summary at the beginning, but I would advise this for any long blog post, though, as it helps ensure your readers don’t just skim half-way, say screw it, & start arguing in the comments instead.
Doing so would make his text less thick (ba dum bum) to read, more to the point, & inform the reader the main point ahead of time. I admit that these are preferences, however, so to each their own I guess.
Also this (w/ bonus spell-check):
Gave me a headache.
What happened to using a new break line after every sentence in blog posts for more detailed expositions, & avoiding the constant use of paranthesis, when you could easily just make a new, clearer sentence? It may not be English 101 Strict Rules Compliant, but it really helps the eyes & reading flow.
As for the actual content itself, as usual I disagree with his preferential bias upon “expanding libertarianism”, & the invention of yet more prefixes (extra-rothbardian).
Still not clear on what he constituents private property; I’m at least honest when I admit I am undecided on Lockean, Mutualist, etc., although he probably has clarified his position previously (it’s understandably tiring to repeat once’s stances).
I find it odd he continues to bring in “exploitation” as a valid term, based on the assumption that anything that the individual engages in that isn’t under ideal (but by no means harsh conditions, like say, having a boss who is actually good at their job) circumstances to the individual is automatically a rights violation, furthering a stereotyped perception that libertarianism is all about atomized individuality, imo.
Then again, I often find that I need to re-read his entries more than once to get past the barrier of over-complicated writing, so maybe I’m just not getting something as usual.
That is probably true in the philosophical sense, but it doesn’t have an application in practice.
All I need to do is plant land mines in my corn field and presto: I have homesteaded the field for my peace of mind as well as for my corn planting.
Proportionality has to do with punishment not with defence. A very mild form of occupation is scarcely different from a form of trespassing - jet few would claim that it is wrong or immoral of an occupied people to resists an occupation in a guerilla style war and shoot at the occupiers.
Shooting at a trespasser is perfectly OK, but only when this is the only way to stop his aggression. So the example of the accidental trespasser fails. His aggression can be stopped by simply making it known to him that he is trespassing.
After reading Nitro’s post I’m not going to read BP’s blog. It sounds like a similar BP position that I’ve argued with him, though I think BP at least recognizes ethics, in other words, there is actually an act between individuals called conflict of scarcity which he doesn’t ignore so I applaud him for that. Yet as of the last time I’ve argued with BP I still don’t think he understands that the natural law tradition completely acknowledges the declarative proposition that property includes the person, not exclusively tangible goods external to the person. What Marko says here is what any sensible individual would do. To simply cap somebody because they crossed into somebody’s yard wouldn’t make sense especially in light when the yard owner could yell out to the person that this indeed is their yard and they would appreciate it if the person left. Of course if the property owner had the time to do this. If they don’t leave, then of course I wouldn’t think the person is simply passing through. I would feel threatened and feel that the intruder has a hidden motive. I can’t know what that motive is that is in their mind, but they are not acknowledging the piece of yard that I’ve become comfortable knowing to be mine. They are not recognizing it as mine. They are not leaving. What else do they not recognize as mine? Maybe they don’t recognize that I deserve to live? I wouldn’t sit around and wonder my whole life away until it is too late to find out.
just build a fence and there will be no trespassing [Y]
then how would you answer to this with your PoP?
Quoting from brainpolice’s blog:
There is nothing about the proportionality principle that constrains a land owner from setting up an absurd rule such as “if you enter my land, you must give me all of your possessions, including your clothing, and you must have sexual intercourse with me”. Is this, in and of itself, physically aggressive? No, it isn’t. Is it authoritarian? Yes, it is.
in my mind person and property are one domain. stumbling into someones yard is comparable to stumbling into someone vagina. the difference is the degree. of course a graceful person would presume innocence and ask the person to leave.
“Is this, in and of itself, physically aggressive? No, it isn’t. Is it authoritarian? Yes, it is.”
im sick of LL’s sophistry. its his fucking property. you can’t define some arbitrary standards of niceness one has to follow. if you think that im such a meany for requiring you to do irrational things, don’t associate with me. period.
I always wonder who is BP arguing against when he comes up with stuff like that.
do people realize that one could make anti-libertarian arguments by using this logic. you cannot hire a janitor, because its an “oppressive, mean relationship”. on these grounds i could send people into re-education camps for being nasty to their fellow men.
That’s another tidbit that I didn’t quite understand. What makes anyone in their right mind think this is a realistic example?
It would be recognizable that this absurd rule is what it is: an absurd rule that could not possibly be enforced without coercion, let alone without looking outright silly.
In a given community (yes, yes, I’m sorry but it’s quite realistic that we might still desire to live in communities & not all by our lonesome) even in a stateless society, it is very unlikely that people would put these types of “unsaid” or “fine print” rules, because they would serve nothing but to drive the community apart into atomized segments constantly distrusting one another, possibly resulting into disputes or war with one another.
Not everyone is a responsible person, just as how not everyone is irresponsible, intelligent, caring, evil, sadistic, authoritarian & other adjectives & so forth.