Thoughts?
Property is created through homesteading. The state does not homestead, therefore it has no legitimate authority on the territory it claims.
Good question.
What do you make of this? Homesteading? Something else?
Thanks.
I don’t quite believe in territorial property, but… still, I am sure there is some difference even between that and a State. As someone mentioned, the state doesn’t have legitimate authority on the territory it claims. But then again, I don’t believe it is possible at all to legitimately claim thousands of square miles of land..
Relevant to my interests..
Property in land does not entail a dual-law/morality, a territorial monopolist of law and security does. I am working on an ethical theory of property that defines property in exactly these terms. The boundary between public and private property is the boundary of unitary law. In order for society to be subject to unitary law/morality, public property must be governed by a unitary law, that is, there is no one agent with special privileges with respect to the use of public property. Public property is that which is available for anyone’s use and so no one can claim special ethical privileges with respect to its use, that is, public property is restricted to ethically symmetrical uses. This restriction is not enforced by an agent of overwhelming power but, rather, by the force of the private property order itself. Blocking a public thoroughfare is a tortious offense in itself and anyone affected by your actions may sue.
Private property, on the other hand, entails a moral distinction between the owner (privileged) and all others (unprivileged). Within the boundaries of private property, there is an ethical duality that applies. You may rightfully unlock your door. No one else may rightfully unlock your door, even if they have key but not your permission. That’s because it’s your door. Doors are not like public thoroughfares. You may block someone from passing through your door and, in fact, someone attempting to force their way past you into your house is committing a tortious offense because they are violating your privileged status with respect to your property.
Communism can be understood as a mistaken, naive extension of unitary law past the boundary between public and private property. I have no right to prevent you from entering my house because it’s as much your house as mine. I have as much right to block a public thoroughfare as anybody else has so that if I choose to park my tractor-trailer across it, that constitutes no offense to anyone. Of course, such a social order is so incoherent as to be unimaginable.
But communism has always been a vehicle for statism, in practice. Statism can be understood as an augmentation of the above situation. The king (state) not only imposes ethical duality on his property, but also on all public property (the king (state) may direct the use of public property and no one else may) and also on all the formerly private property of everyone else. In other words, everything is the king’s (state’s) and we have it by gift from him. In the movie Das Lieben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), it is mentioned that, in East Germany, even the furniture in your house was stamped with a serial #, as a reminder that it belongs to the State’s inventory.
This is the difference. Private property minimizes ethical duality to only the extents necessary to avoid conflict on the basis of the facts of human nature. The private property order arises by custom not imposition. Communism claims a sort of moral high ground by abolishing all ethical duality but at the cost of being utterly unable to avoid conflict (you can walk into my house any time you feel like it). Statism is the imposition of a single ethical duality - the king’s - onto everyone. The statist property order arises only through imposition, not custom or willing acceptance. Hence my sigline.
Clayton -
I’m not sure you can block a public thoroughfares as is. But it does raise a few interesting questions:
What does it mean to say “ours.”
Assuming it means as much yours as mine, can you litigate against your own partnerships?
But to argue this is to imply that the physical matter in question is not, in fact, the King’s rightful property. Why/how do you derive this conclusion?
In a sense, perhaps there is no difference between the state’s property inour current world and private property in an “ideal” world, but there is a definite one in our current one. Currently, only states are truly “sovereign” and could be said to have undisputed claims to property, aside of internal struggles with rebels and external ones with foreign enemies. This undisputed nature of title is denied to private property holders, who are always under the consistent threat of "rightful expropriation at the hands of the sovereign.
From this we can discern another difference. The state, additionally and implicitly “owns” its subjects, much like slaves, from which it extracts tribute under threat of violence and imprisonment.
Hence in an anarchocapitalistic world, the pattern of ownership for private individuals would be equivalent and complete, much the same way as it is for current sovereigns, without “private property” in the current sense which can be taken at the arbitrary whims of the ruler, and is at best granted to the individual. Furthermore, self ownership would be supreme, and every man would be “king” on his own “turf.”
Whether and how such a world can be realised, is of course another matter.
If I steal your money, and then buy a nice sweater with that money, is the sweater mine?
So, you consider anarcho-capitalism a decentralization of statism to its logical conclusion (the individual as the state)?
Define “steal”.
Define “mine”.
In a certain sense, though I think I have to be careful how I state this lest I be misinterpreted.
To me, the characteristic of the state is the eminence of its claim to property that should be held by private individuals ot itself. Hence, in an anarchocapitalist world one would not have a 2 ranked system of supreme sovereign and private whimsical claims to property, but rather that the private claims to property would be sovereign in themselves, as well as that of self ownership.
Secondly, and key to recognise is the voluntary nature of such a system, with valid contracts for whatever purposes only being. Hence only those who explicitly entered into contracts with landholders would be liable to their terms, so no vague bullshit implied “social contract” on non-participatory parties. Similiarly defense, and legal services would be provisioned privately along the lines already envisioned by Hoppe, Molinari and Rothbard.
Another empirical factor, we would see much more of I feel, in the absence of the current statist paradigm would be far more exchange and a genuine market for these sovereign properties. At the moment, one does not see much of this outside of royal marriages and annexations.
Why “should” the rightful title to the territory in question be held by individuals rather than the state?
You do not believe in rental or lease?
When should an individuals be approached by the landholder to confirm such a contract?
define “private”.
Why do you predict this?
There is a danger of a semantic confusion. As long as a state is not coercively breaching the property rights of others it is no longer a “state.” In that case, it would be legitimate.
I do, but only for individuals who explicitly and voluntarily entered into the contract.
I do not know… This seems to raise more issues than I anticipated.
Private property is already exchanged on the market, I see no reason why this would not continue when these property titles are no longer threatened by a coercive monopoly. On the other hand, I do not know why there is not more of a slave market among states, perhaps that’s the point of elections.
I’ll have to think about this more carefully, your thread has been something of a wakeup call…
What if we just call the “public property” the private property of the people making up the state?
Well, “rightful” and “property” have both pre-legal and legal meanings. I will simply say that in neither sense is my body or the things I produce with my body or voluntarily exchange with others the property of the king. The only sense in which they are the king’s property is by the king’s superior force and his own evaluation administered through his courts who impose what the king calls “law” onto me and others.
Clayton -
Well, I think that’s how most people today think of public property. It’s in this kind of pseudo-government-owned status … it’s “all of ours” yet it’s really the government’s. I’m talking about giving a positive account of how the ideas of public and private property originally arose. Essentially, each self-interested individual has an unbounded capacity for special-pleading, that is, imposition of his own way of looking at things. In my view, the whole world and everything in it is mine. But that goes for everybody else, too. Each of us are Yertle the Turtle King.
It turns out, however, that we all have fists and can wield weapons to keep others from actualizing their Yertle-like egos onto us. Over time, a concept of possession emerged which is a sort of “truce”… I don’t take what’s in your hand and you don’t take what’s in my hand, and nobody gets hurt. The scope of my Yertle-ego has been scaled back to smaller and smaller domains until it is only the things I carry on my person and the territory over which I roam that I regard as “mine.” But the process doesn’t stop here, the concept of public property pushes it back even further so that the territories that are hunted by many or the paths that are walked by many or the streams that are used by many cannot be owned, either. No one can establish sufficient control over these resources to afford to exclude all others from their use (private property), so they remain public property. And this pushes the scope of my Yertle-ego even smaller so that it is only the ground on which I directly dwell that is “mine” - this is the emergence of property in land.
So, public property originated in convention in the private property order, not from government exclusion. Only very recently has the idea of blurring “public” with “State” arisen. In fact, this is the essence of democracy.
Clayton -
I think that the difference between territorial property and state property is this.
A territorial property owner gets all of his power from being able to force you to leave, whereas a state property owner gets all of his power from being able to force you to stay. A territorial property owner can say, do A, or I will force you to you leave, and then you aren’t my problem anymore; but a state property owner can say, do A, or I will make you stay in a certain part of my property, namely one of my prisons. A territorial property owner gets all of his power from the fact that his property is attractive to other people, and he can choose to help them or not; but a state property owner gets all of his power from the fact that certain parts of his property are very unattractive to other people, and he can choose to screw them over or not.
We can see this idea in the anarcho-capitalism of Bob Murphy. He thinks that prisons in an anarcho-capitalist society would simply be the last territorial property in the society which would still let a violent criminal hang out on. If all of the private property surrounding the “prison” was owned by people not wanting anything to do with you, it would be “legitimate” for the “prison” to not only act as a hotel for you, but also act as a protector of the private property owners surrounding you, by not letting you get onto the property of the people who don’t want anything to do with you. But that would of course make it so you couldn’t leave the “hotel”, unless the people in society forgave you for whatever you did. This means that violent criminals could also just choose to leave society if they want. And it means that the prisons could be as nice to live in or shitty to live in as the people supporting them would tolerate.