That is an other, utilitarian, question. What I’m saying is that, applying the NAP consistently, the state could become justified now (assume away the issue of past violence) by just stopping to enforce exit taxes/bans and eminent domain and rebranding itself as a mutual company. Whether such a system, i.e. anarchy, would work or not and how it would evolve, that is something else. But the state can become justified only under such conditions, I think.
As for the more general question of how would property be defined, I feel that any definition that is consistently applied to every actor (state included) should, at least initially, do. Of course, in time I’m certain that the libertarian position of NAP+homesteading would become the norm.
+1. That’s what I was thinking. If I walked into someone’s house and started making a PB+J, I don’t think it would take me very long to be forcibly ejected.
Why do you consider the state the aggressor? How is the state functioning any differently than a landlord? We live on the state’s claimed property (rightly or wrongly, depending on what ideological lens you are viewing through), and as a result of being allowed to do so, we must pay rent, or be banished from society (exile, jail, etc.).
States are aggressive monopolists on arbitration. Territory has good historical corellation with states, but we can imagine states that have no well defined territory, or share territories.
For a loose example, consider a government owned boat. The boat is always moving. You can argue that the boat is territory… but this at least breaks up the land-argument.
Also consider that it is in principle possible for there to be a government that has no defined territory. An example might be what if the catholic church decided all its members were now its citizens, and they had to pay yearly tithes or else the Catholic church would come out and get them. The Church would be an aggressive monopoly, but non-territorial.
Lastly, Governments frequently overlap in jurisdiction, such as the case with Lebanon and Syrian governments. So even if you think states are territorial, it surely doesn’t mean much if more than one state can occupy any given region.
This thread was created because we fight so often against statism. We should really be focused on ALL arguments against aggression. The only reason we argue against states so much, as opposed to non-institutional aggression, is because all the aggression-apologists hide behind statism.
Don’t buy their premise. This is not state vs no state. It’s aggression vs peace. Territory doesn’t make a lick of difference.
Nowhere, explicitly. Although there is an argument to be made that by living within the realm of the landowner, you are implicitly agreeing to the arangement.
That’s sort of the conclusion I’ve been led towards as this thread progressed, but it still seems an incomplete thought. This is why I’ve been “stuck” on feudalism; it appears to be the system of rule which slips back and forth between anarchic land ownership, and the birth of statism. I still cannot axiomatically discern the two.
I believe your summation concentrates on a false dichotomy, i.e. the state claims on property is equivalent and rival to your claim. We all live on someone else’s property: the state’s. We merely are renters on the King’s (landlord’s) or the Parliment’s (corporate) claimed property. My question is what factor distinguishes the two.
It can’t be force, since proprieters are justified (by an-cap ideology) in utilizing force in defense, and in the enforcement of norms (private courts). It can’t be simple claims of territorial monopoly (justified via property rights). It could be both a monopoly on territory and law (in said territory) as Stranger suggested, but this seems to ignore the effect of majoritarianism might have on private courts.
So you consider the distinction to be “aggression/non-aggression”? Interesting, although I find it tricky to understand “aggression” vs. “non-aggression”. Is some force still justified to you, or are you a pacifist?
I already said that I didn’t mean that they would mean that it would always be more advantageous to be a non-state property owner, than to be a state property owner, because you could have a high enough time preference, a really anti-social ultimate desire, and so on, which would make it more advantageous to you to be a state property owner. But nothing less than whether society can exist depends on people like that always being the minority.
And I wouldn’t call the arguments showing that it would be, for most people, more advantageous to be a non-state property owner, than a state property owner; but those arguments are ones which I don’t understand very well, such as the knowledge problem, the calculation problem, and so on. I wasn’t saying that I could make the arguments in full detail right now, but just that those arguments, saying that it would, for most people, be more advantageous to be a non-state property owner, than be a state property owner, are at the heart of anarcho-capitalism, and could even be called the whole basis for anarcho-capitalism.
FYI, no axiom can be proven correct. Axioms can only be accepted as givens or rejected.
So someone like me can easily discern between anarchic land ownership and statism, namely based on the presence of aggression. If one holds another captive on his land without the other’s consent, for example, that’s aggression – as I understand the term.
Another difference between anarchic land ownership and statism deals with inheritance of servitude. Under the former, a person could become an indentured servant (albeit not permanently), but his children wouldn’t automatically inherit his debt.
I guess things like these are why I think there’s an all-too-strong connection between the state and kinship structures.
They probably don’t want them, either. I suppose the US could start doing that, but we probably wouldn’t stay friends with Canada or Mexico for very long…