Nozick's theory of property

Perhaps you've heard Robert Nozick's famous "tomato-juice" argument.  It's an argument against the Lockean labor-mixing idea.  Basically, Nozick asks - if you can own something by mixing something you own with it, can I own the ocean if I dump a can of tomato juice in it?  After posing this problem, Nozick puts forth his own theory of property - it is the creation of value that creates property.

Now, here's a thought.  The Austrian economists (as well as general common sense) say that value is subjective.  What does that make property, then?

Brainpolice2 advocates voluntary property (unless I'm mistaken)

Here.

Now, for some reason, he calls it "thick libertarianism," though Roderick Long, who coined the term, has seemed to indicate a few times that he does not agree with the concept of voluntary property.  Plus, I think voluntary property is a thousand times "thinner" than thin libertarianism.  It's certainly more "big-tent" and less "ideological."

Insane Propertarian Quotes, Part 2

I linked to this article by Walter Block in my last post as an offhand mention to "certain ideologically-hypnotized sociopaths."  Now, this is loaded with rabid propertarian insanity that makes Rothbard's remarks about lighthouses seem like harmless eccentricity.

The insanity begins with this remark:

"They misunderstand the nature of libertarianism. These arguments implicitly assume that libertarianism is a moral philosophy, a guide to proper behavior, as it were. Should the flagpole hanger let go? Should the hiker go off and die? But libertarianism is a theory concerned with the justified use of aggression, or violence, based on property rights, not morality. Therefore, the only proper questions which can be addressed in this philosophy are of the sort, if the flagpole hanger attempts to come in to the apartment, and the occupant shoots him for trespassing, Would the forces of law and order punish the home owner? Or, if the owner of the cabin in the woods sets up a booby trap, such that when someone forces his way into his property he gets a face full of buckshot, Would he be guilty of a law violation? When put in this way, the answer is clear. The owner in each case is in the right, and the trespasser in the wrong. If force is used to protect property rights, even deadly force, the owner is not guilty of the violation of any licit law."

The first part of this paragraph is clearly an attempt to weasel out of the dilemma.  Libertarianism is about property, not morality - but isn't property, and the methods of enforcing it, a moral question?  If not, what the hell is it?  Oh, but the distinction is simple.  Libertarianism doesn't say you should fall from the flag-pole, no - it merely says that someone can shoot you if you try to get down!  If that's not the same thing, it's even worse.

Of course, it gets worse.

"These examples purposefully try to place us in the mind of the criminal perpetrator of the crime of trespass. We are invited, that is, to empathize with the flag pole hanger, and the hiker, not the respective property owners. But let us reverse this perspective. Suppose the owner of the apartment on the 15th floor has recently been victimized by a rape, perpetrated upon her by a member of the same ethnic or racial group as the person now hand walking his way down her flag pole, soon to uninvitedly enter her apartment. May she not shoot him in self-defense before he enters her premises?"

Nice job, Walter.  To get us to empathize with the apartment owner, you tell us that she's a violent racist who hates a whole racial group on account of what one of its members did.  I'm so sympathizing with her now!

Believe it or not, it gets even worse.  After that, Block argues that anyone who disagrees with him should give every penny he owns to help end poverty in the Third World.  What's next?  Will some statist argue that libertarians, if they took their anti-tax arguments seriously, would have to donate all their money to people in high-tax countries?  

I pray (and I'm an atheist) that Block is actually writing Swiftian satire, but I know it isn't true.  I'm afraid he actually believes this sociopathic nonsense.  There are propertarians out there who are much more reasonable than this.  They use concepts such as "easements" to offer ways for landowners who are surrounded by other landowners to get off their land.  Why doesn't the flagpole-hanger have an "easement" to get down from the flagpole?  Now, I happen to regard "easements" as a kind of Ptolemaic epicycle tacked on to save the rights-based way of thinking about property.  Even so, adding an epicycle is more reasonable than shooting astronomers who don't observe the planets moving in perfect circles around the Earth.  

What can the principle of voluntary property accomplish?

Optimistic list:

> Unite the anarchists, or at least get the individualists and communists to agree not to kill each other, and allow both sides to agree on a basic concept of who the aggressors are.

> Remove the need to convert people to a rigid, complicated economic ideology in order to de-mystify statism.  How?  By opening anarchism up to the beliefs of "economic agnostics," "mixed-economy" types (at least a decentralized version,) and folks who generally have an "experimental" approach towards economics rather than an ideological one.  In short, reasonable people.

> Relieve fears that anarcho-communism would lead to localized (or globalized) collective tyranny, or anarcho-capitalism would lead to feudal warlords and plutocrats and whatnot.  (As long as either group advocates shooting people for not going along with their economic system, then these fears are entirely justified.)

> Give anarchism all the strengths of "democracy."  I believe that the democratic idea has been successful largely because it is a meta-ideology.  Ideologies A, B, C, D, E and F can all be vastly different, yet all be "democratic" as long as they support voting their favored parties in.  Democracy was able to topple monarchy because it is a "big tent."  Panarchy with voluntary property can become the next "big tent,"  open to all those who are (rightly) cynical about the oligarchical politicians who now rule statist democracy, yet aren't dogmatic enough to advocate the One True Economic System for the whole world.  In short, reasonable people.

Pessimistic List:

> Become a dogmatic ideology itself.  For example, someone might use the principle to argue that no one should use force to stop people from destroying life-support machines, or blowing up occupied buildings.  The version of the principle that runs the risk of becoming dogmatic is "never use force to defend property."  A version that is much less likely to become a dogma is "defending property is not sufficient justification for using violence."  If someone attacked a life-support machine, for example, that is not mere vandalism - that is murder.  But murder is also shooting children for the heinous crime of walking across your lawn, despite what certain ideologically-hypnotized sociopaths may think.

> Create a stereotype that anarchists are a bunch of thieves and vandals.  Since this stereotype already exists, we don't have much to lose in that department.

> Simply be ignored, by anarchist and statist alike.  

The instability of the Left-Rothbardian position

Perhaps you have encountered the Left-Rothbardian idea before.  If you haven't, then Brad Spangler's "Market Anarchism as Stigmergic Socialism"  is a good introduction.  The article contains a quote from Rothbard that sums up the essence of the argument:

"The only genuine refutation of the Marxian case for revolution, then, is that capitalists' property is just rather than unjust, and that therefore its seizure by workers or by anyone else would in itself be unjust and criminal. But this means that we must enter into the question of the justice of property claims, and it means further that we cannot get away with the easy luxury of trying to refute revolutionary claims by arbitrarily placing the mantle of "justice" upon any and all existing property titles. Such an act will scarcely convince people who believe that they or others are being grievously oppressed and permanently aggressed against. But this also means that we must be prepared to discover cases in the world where violent expropriation of existing property titles will be morally justified, because these titles are themselves unjust and criminal."

Now, I ask, what if we don't know whether a particular property title is just or unjust?  Rothbard himself offers an answer;

"If we know that these conditions hold, then there is no problem, for the identification of both aggressor and victim is remarkably clear-cut. But if we don’t know whether these conditions obtain, then (applying our rule), lacking a clear identifiability of the criminal, we conclude that the land title and the charge of rent are just and legitimate and not feudal." The Ethics of Liberty, chapter 10

Now, what is wrong with this position?  Quite simply, it allows the ruling class to take advantage of confusion and ignorance about historical facts.

Consider Rothbard's hypothetical example which he uses to refute the "utilitarian" position of siding with all currently-existing titles by default.  His scenario is that a King is faced by a rising libertarian movement, so the King proclaims the "state" to be dissolved but claims the kingdom's territory as his private property, renames taxation rent, etc.  Now, the "utilitarian" libertarians would not be able to criticize the king.  But all this king has to do to swindle the Rothbardians is to destroy historical records of his violent conquest of the land.  Sure, they can probably guess that the land was stolen, but they wouldn't know for sure, so they'd need to side with the king by default.

In short, Rothbard replaces the utilitarian cry of "You can't revolt against private property, peasant scum!" with "You can't revolt against private property until you've done loads of historical research, peasant scum!"  A similar premise can be found lurking in his "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle" - the workers can take over the factory, but only after they've researched how much money it gets from the government, and only if it's above Rothbard's arbitrary threshhold.

I can understand why Rothbard would come up with rules like these.  He has accepted the principle of violently-enforced property - in order to prevent roaring, violent conflicts, there must be a rule for every case, and in cases of uncertainty, there must be a default owner.  To side with the current owner is merely an extension of "innocent until proven guilty," right? The absolutists need to classify all property titles in the binary categories "legitimate" or "criminal."  Clearly it would be bad if we classed all property as "criminal" until proven otherwise, yes?  

But there's a third category - "indeterminate" - which cannot be ignored in this imperfect world.  The violent propertarian must throw the "indeterminate" cases in with the "legitimate" cases - otherwise, his principle would create massive violent conflicts.  A Macchiavellian conservative, interested in winning the violent propertarians over to the defense of the status quo, can easily do so by expanding the "indeterminate" category, by spreading confusion and uncertainty.    That is their real "cunning stratagem."

That is precisely what the "right-libertarians" have done in the recent debate between left- and right-libertarians triggered by Roderick Long's articles at Cato.  The right-libertarians are running the smoke machine.  That's why they've shifted the debate onto the field of limited liability, where the mighty Legal Jargon SmokeMaster 5000 is ready for use.  And since many left-libertarians are still mired in the absolutist, binary distinction between "legitimate" and "criminal" property, they stand around swinging their swords at the smoke.  

Insane Propertarian Quotes, Part 1

I know three posts in a day might be a little excessive, but I saw this on LewRockwell.com and I don't know whether to laugh or be frightened.  From none other than Murray Rothbard:

"In fact, lighthouses could easily charge ships for their services, if they were permitted to own those surfaces of the sea which they transform by their illumination. A man who takes unowned land and transforms it for productive use is readily granted ownership of that land, which can henceforth be used economically; why should not the same rule apply to that other natural resource, the sea? If the lighthouse owner were granted ownership of the sea surface that he illuminates, he could then charge each ship as it passes through. The deficiency here is a failure not of the free market but of the government and the society in not granting a property right to the rightful owner of a resource."

Yeah...

The labor-mixing argument has no clothes!

John Locke's argument that "labor-mixing" creates property is well-known.  As I've heard it described, the argument runs as follows:

> The individual owns himself

> The individual therefore owns his labor

> Therefore, the individual owns what he mixes his labor with

Now, to make sure that I haven't encountered a distortion or a watered-down version of the argument or whatnot, I've looked up the actual quote in his Second Treatise on Government.  It is:

"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others."

Now, what's wrong with this argument?  Isn't the problem obvious?  Am I the only one who has noticed it?  Am I crazy?  Have I misread it?  It's the fallacy of reification!  Labor is not a thing to be mixed with anything in the first place.  If the argument is metaphorical, then it should have a corresponding literal equivalent.  Otherwise the metaphor is an excuse to get away with spouting nonsense.

One can make a pragmatic case for labor as a standard for appropriation - it's a way to encourage productive labor.  But there are equally good pragmatic arguments against treating it as an absolute.  Locke himself had his "proviso."  And of course, there's the problem of balancing the claims of labor across time, which can't be solved with a simple a-priori formula (more on that in another post.)  What I object to is all this silliness about putting ownership of things on the same moral plane as self-ownership.  If the best argument you can muster for that connection is a bunch of linguistic gymnastics, then your argument has no clothes.