Voluntary Property Blog

Nozick's theory of property

2009-01-30T10:28:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-01-20T15:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-11T22:53:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-01-11T02:33:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-07T22:08:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-03T11:24:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-01-03T06:35:00.000-08:00

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.

In which I post a link to another place where I've encountered the idea of voluntary property before

2009-01-03T05:51:00.001-08:00

Here - from Robert Anton Wilson, via BlackCrayon.com.

I have not read the Illuminatus Trilogy, but I have read Robert Anton Wilson's book Natural Law, or Don't Put A Rubber On Your Willy. I highly recommend the latter as an antidote to all those libertarians who are still mystified by natural law, metaphysics, moral absolutism, and whatnot. It's a short book, and you can read it online at the link.

"Panarchy" Requires Voluntary Property

2009-01-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

Kevin Carson, in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, writes:

"Any decentralized, post-state society, following the collapse of central power, is likely to be a panarchy characterized by a wide variety of local property systems. For them to coexist peacefully, all three property systems must reflect the understanding of their most enlightened proponents. Those favoring each of the property systems must be willing to admit that it is not self-evidently true, or at least be willing to acquiesce to the system favored by majority consensus in each particular area."

I like this idea, but for a long time I've held an objection. If some feudalist asshole forces a bunch of people to work for him as his serfs, can he claim that his property system is the "local consensus?" Can he claim to be contributing to the wide diversity of property systems in the free society? If anarchists from outside the fiefdom try to liberate the serfs, are they being intolerant towards the diversity of property systems? Of course not. There must be some sort of middle ground between "tolerating feudalism" and "discovering the One True Anarchist Natural Law Property System to rule them all."

Of course, in all the biased glory of a blog with the title "Voluntary Property Blog," I believe that the solution is voluntary property. In the feudalist scenario, outsiders can and should come to the defense of the serfs if the feudalist "consensus" is being enforced by attacking (or threatening to attack) people. If, on the other hand, the serfs are so stupid as to adhere to the feudalist property system voluntarily, then their property system should be tolerated. We can go into the community and try to convince them to shake it off (and under voluntary property, shaking off the feudalist consensus would be very easy,) but if they continue to adhere to it voluntarily, then we should not bring in guns and force them to change. They're idiots. Let them be idiots.

But there's another reason that voluntary property is preferable to violent property in a "panarchic" scenario. The different property systems, unless they draw arbitrary (statist!) borders between each other, will inevitably come into conflict. Do we want these conflicts to consist of fighting and killing, or running back and forth stealing things at worst? If we want the panarchy to be civilized, then voluntary property is simply pragmatic. Given the diversity of property systems we see in the world, let alone the diversity of property systems advocated by libertarians (yes, even right-libertarians,) then panarchy itself is pragmatic. The alternative is to become fanatics and say that killing each other over property issues is just and holy, or "pragmaticly" adopt Chinese Legalism and say that it doesn't matter what the rules are as long as there are rules. Or, you can be a naive, egotistical idiot and think that everyone would be converted to your property system and conflicts over resources simply would not happen.

If you have a practical, sane, civilized mind, then do not sympathize with aggressors even if they're enforcing an economic system you agree with. Advocate your favored economic system within the civilized framework of panarchy and voluntary property. If your economic ideas are superior, then they can demonstrate their superiority through wealth. If they're not, then they can only demonstrate their superiority through force.

Discussion about voluntary property at Anarchism.net

2008-12-31T12:51:00.000-08:00

Alas, I have got off my lazy ass and found one of the discussions about voluntary property I've encountered before. This is a discussion that started several months ago at Anarchism.net - Forced Property vs. Voluntary Property. Now, I am not the user AntiProphit who started the topic - I posted under the name "Not A Number," and actually offered an argument against the voluntary-property position. Apparently the discussion has ballooned massively since I left it. I tried reading through the posts and got about halfway through them. Thus I won't be offering commentary on the whole massive discussion in this post. For now, I'll simply talk about what's wrong with the argument I ("Not A Number") made.

My argument can be found in this post. The post is not very long, but I'll give an even briefer summary here - the notion of enforcing property by "stealing from thieves" doesn't work against thieves who have nothing but the clothes on their backs and steal nothing but food. Looking back at the argument four months later, I can see what's wrong with it.

First, it's important to note that there are two ways someone can become this kind of "food-stealing vagabond." They can choose it voluntarily, or they can have it thrust upon them by a community which takes all of their property or refuses to acknowledge their claims to property. The former, in my view, is not a serious problem, because very few people would choose this sort of lifestyle voluntarily. In the latter case, however, it is clear that the option of becoming a "food-stealing vagabond" is a useful protection against a bad property consensus.

Consider, for example, a Christian fundamentalist community which accepts the idea of voluntary property. They agree upon a system of individual property. However, whenever they discover a homosexual in their community, they respond by storming his house, taking all of his property, and distributing it among the members of the community. This property system, and others like it, would deliberately create food-stealing vagabonds. A sizeable minority of them could become a crippling nuisance to the community. In this manner, the food-stealing vagabond possibility would serve as an incentive for communities to not enforce property norms that are excessively stifling to minorities within their community. A community with a bad property consensus would know that it's got a bad property consensus because it generates so many food-stealing vagabonds.

It is an error, in my view, to consider a social system's "problems" in isolation. In this case, at least, two seeming "problems" of the voluntary property idea serve as counterweights to each other.

First post - What is the principle of voluntary property?

2008-12-25T18:34:00.000-08:00

I have encountered the idea of voluntary property a few times over the past five or so years in libertarian and anarchist forums. Each time I encountered it, of course, I reacted with the same knee-jerk objection that I describe below. Now, after some long thought about the complexity of property, I've come to reconsider the idea, and I have found that my main objection to it before now has been terribly weak. I do not claim to be the original "inventor" of the idea, but I'm too damn lazy to dig up ye olde posts and links where I have seen the idea expressed in other forums years ago. For now, I'll just produce my own defense of the idea.

"Voluntary property," as I refer to it, is simply the principle that the use of force against another's person in defense of property claims is immoral. This is an extension of the idea that all violence is immoral except in cases of self-defense and defense of others from aggressors. Defending things is not the same as defending oneself - in this, I stand opposed to the propertarian moralists who insist that property derives from "self-ownership" as an absolute "natural law."

If you want to enforce your claim to property, do it by stealing from thieves. Either steal back the thing that he stole from you, or steal something else. Naturally, this leads to the objection that this principle would lead to society degenerating into a constant free-for-all, with people running back and forth stealing from each other only to have their loot stolen again. This situation would clearly be undesirable for all parties involved. How, then, could a stable consensus about ownership emerge from this situation?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, this worst-case scenario. Now, I maintain that a consensus about voluntarily-respected property claims would emerge out of this situation precisely because this situation is undesirable for all involved. If you know game theory, then this is, at least in part, an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. "Cooperate," in this case, is the decision to respect other people's property claims - "Defect" is to steal from them. This hypothetical situation, then, is "Defect-Defect" on a massive scale. "Cooperate-Defect" would mean sitting back and letting thieves steal your stuff without retaliation, while "Cooperate-Cooperate" would mean talking and arriving at a consensus about who owns what, whatever the consensus may be.

Game theorists know that the iterated prisoner's dilemma is easily solved by strategies such as "tit for tat." Therefore there's no mystery about how or why this hypothetical worst-case scenario would not last long. As for the formation of the consensus itself, the people can bring it about through arbitration, assembling into consensus groups, or both.

The question remains - what kind of consensus would arise? I do not know for sure, but I do know that the consensus would have to be better than the theft-fest scenario. Otherwise, it would not be a prisoner's dilemma, and people would always choose the theft-fest. This tells us at the very least what sort of consensus would not be chosen - a terrible consensus, such as feudalist propery claims. The theft-fest is the baseline. Any property consensus must be better than the theft-fest.

The real question is - how could the introduction of violence improve the situation? Not at all, I say. Clearly it tips the scale in favor of the strong. But more importantly, it lowers the baseline. The situation of universal violent conflict ("anarchy" in the state propagandist's sense) is much, much worse than mere universal theft. Therefore any property consensus forged under the threat of violence would only need to be better than universal war in order to be stable. Hence we see that terrible property systems are only stable under violent enforcement. Of course, it's possible for the "right" property system to exist under violent enforcement. But it isn't likely.

But why do we need this principle, this consensus process, in the first place? Why can't we just have some philosophers derive the One True Property System from mighty Natural Law, and enforce that system with violence? Frankly, I find such arguments to be a load of metaphorical nonsense. For now, I won't go into detail as to what I find wrong with the arguments themselves. I'll simply say that these philosophers don't derive property from a-priori principles, and can't. If pressed, they'll admit that many of the key parameters of property are nothing short of subjective and arbitrary.

Consider, for example, the concept of "abandonment" or "salvage." Most legal systems recognize that if I leave a plot of land unused for several years, I no longer own it, and someone can freely come along and homestead it. But how can the time limit be anything but arbitrary? Some time limits are clearly better than others - few people advocate a 1-hour time limit, or a 100-year time limit. Do the philosophers have an a-priori principle that allows them to derive the One True Abandonment Time Limit? Of course not. The concept of property is riddled with such subjective, price-like parameters. I propose that these price-like parameters be set by the "haggling" of the voluntary consensus process.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the consensus would even resemble property as we know it today. But I don't necessarily want that. I'd prefer a more individualistic, market-oriented property system, but that's just my bias. The consensus would never be set in stone, and might even be different in different areas. What matters is that the freedom of the people to define their property system must be seen as an essential principle of the free economy. And if any property system relies upon violent enforcement, that alone is evidence of its inferiority.