Force in defense of property is self-defense. Force in pursuit of other people's property is aggression. Aggression is the problem, not force in general.
But most aggression comes from disgreement over who property belongs to! Whose property is Israel/Palestine again? Who "owns" the air and can expliit the resource of increasing its CO2 contents?
Is it obvious that humans can own large areas of land simply because their grandfather did? If so, then in the case of US, why do you start tracking property after the natives who originally used it were forced off the land? And so on.
Property is not a simple concept and something to easily be for or against.
Property is almost always disputed and almost always linked to use of force somehow.
Yes, but we recognize that as a disagreement over who has legitimate claim to the property. With taxes, we take property that practically everyone, except the most snobbish socialist intellectual, and certainly the courts, would recognize as belonging to the individual.
It's on a totally different scale in terms of how certain we can be that it's a violation of property rights.
I disagree that it is obvious. Most of the taxes are a cut of income that would not have been generated if taxes had not been invested 20 years ago in education and defense and infrastructure.
And who granted anyone else the ownership right to destroy the air I breathe and destroy the climate I depend on? Some taxes are a way to compensate for that.
It is more like a forced VC capital investment in your life... you get a big chunk of education and defense and security paid for you, but if you hit it big you have to pay a lot back for it.
If I mow your lawn without your asking, and you set up a lemonade stand on your lawn, and as a result, benefit financially from the lawn mowing service I provided, because it led to more people visiting your lemonade stand, that does not give me the right to threaten to imprison you to force you to pay me $20 for the service.
At least make the example straight: The majority of the neighborhood decided that all lawns should be mowed, because they don't want unmowed lawns that are bad for the economy.
And that neighborhood are the only ones who protect you from the squatters outside with nuclear weapons ready to take the lawn, so they think they have a say. (Unfortunately you are surrounded by neighbors on all sides, so they cannot stop rendering protection services due to laws of geometry). And they are the descendants of the neighbors who helped your great-great-grandfather take the lawn from the Indians in the first place.
I don't agree that there are cleae cut simple examples when it comes to property.
I'm not talking about unmowed laws that are bad for the economy though. That's a negative externality for which there are many more justifications for government intervention (though not for an income tax).
It you want to nitpick on my thought experiment, you could also bring up the fact that a lawn is on top of land, and that there are strong moral arguments against an individual having a natural right to absolute private ownership over land, which in turns provides various justifications for government dictating land-use rules and collecting taxes on land/real-estate.
But I was not trying to make a comment on negative externalities or the right to private land ownership.
I was making the point that the government spending money on something, and this action ending up benefiting you, does not grant the government the moral right to threaten you with imprisonment to force you to pay for that something.
Sure, you can define it like that, but in doing so you've just rolled an extremely complicated economic system (property) into the otherwise very simple concept of non-aggression.
I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously correct.
Laws against stealing are one of the basic laws of society.
Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.
What evidence are you using to claim that laws against 'stealing' are one of the basic laws of society? I assume you mean after codified laws and surely after agriculture. And, probably post-enlightenment, right?
But, at that point, laws are no longer 'basic laws of society' but laws of the sovereign - to maintain their power and control. And, interestingly, the soverign is the only one allowed to steal. I'm suggesting that maybe those 'laws' are no longer useful or at least may need to be modified. And, I think it's a cop-out to not try to think beyond that.
But, let's go back before the king. Did people really own land then? Doubtful. Did they even have individual property rights? Probably not in the sense that we do today. Most 'property' was collective. And, people didn't own land, which was thought as sacred.
In fact, behavior within families and kin groups is not much different then it was 12,0000 years ago. And, of all families and kin groups that I know, I see young children taught to share within the group. Where that breaks down is when they encounter strangers or 'invading' groups. And, only then do they rely on the laws of the state to make transactions.
So, that's what I mean when I point out my neighbors' behavior. Their natural inclination is to share (at least with those of their kin group).
Again, I don't think capitalism or communism are the answer. I don't know what is. I just think we can imagine something better.
>8. If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold therefor; if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death.
>9. If any one lose an article, and find it in the possession of another: if the person in whose possession the thing is found say "A merchant sold it to me, I paid for it before witnesses," and if the owner of the thing say, "I will bring witnesses who know my property," then shall the purchaser bring the merchant who sold it to him, and the witnesses before whom he bought it, and the owner shall bring witnesses who can identify his property. The judge shall examine their testimony--both of the witnesses before whom the price was paid, and of the witnesses who identify the lost article on oath. The merchant is then proved to be a thief and shall be put to death. The owner of the lost article receives his property, and he who bought it receives the money he paid from the estate of the merchant.
>Plutarch, another ancient source for Draco, in his Life of Solon , claims that the penalty for the theft of an apple or a cabbage was death, and you could have someone made your personal slave if they owed you money. The writer also records that when Draco was asked the reason for making execution the punishment for most offences, the reply was that ‘Small ones deserve that (i.e. death), and I have no higher for the greater crimes.’
>The process of the law was one of political negotiation that involved everyone in the community. When there was a dispute, the elders met to discuss the punishments: their word was LAW. Offences regarded as unlawful included the unauthorised killing of a person, sacrilege, incest, adultery, theft, unauthorised assault, insult and neglect of kinship obligations. Punishments could range from making compensation over an agreed period of time to having to face a squad of spearmen, with only a shield and that person's ability to protect himself.
The reason laws against theft are universally found is that theft creates harmful incentives. It doesn't matter what stage of civilization we reach: the fundamental dynamics of multiple parties co-existing make theft harmful to creating economic value.
This is something I would argue is self-evident. Not sure why you're so desperate to question the moral principle that theft is wrong.
>I just think we can imagine something better.
Moral principles are timeless. There is nothing "better" than not stealing, because it is a basic requirement for a functioning society. The only type of configuration better than 'not stealing' is 'not stealing' + doing something good. But not stealing, murdering, assaulting etc are the foundational principles that a functioning society has to build on top of.
Ultimately every conception of rights is subjective, but property is generally recognized as that which we acquire through First Possession (a principle observed throughout the Animal Kingdom), and Homesteading (taking unclaimed natural resources and reconfiguring them into a more valuable resource).
First Possession at least has been shown in Game Theory simulations to lead to stable equilibriums, so it's not surprising that property rights are so widely observed. I think observance of the Homesteading principle naturally emerges from observance of the First Possession principle.
Where it gets fuzzy, in my opinion, is property rights over natural resources like land, which derive almost all of their value from their natural form, rather than the value done to them by their original appropriator.
How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? What about if you're using a hose in your garden and you accidentally damage my laptop next door? What about if I sell you the laptop and it breaks a few days later?
There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
>How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent?
How do we determine that you assaulted me? It's your word against mine. We're not talking about the complexity of determining the true account of events, which is obviously great. We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all.
>What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case?
Then common law, which springs from the first principles of personal and property rights, would preside.
We'd have a similarly difficult time determining if a hockey fight classifies as assault. Or if in a traffic altercation, you stepping out of your car and aggressively approaching me justified my preemptive (or aggressive?) first punch.
>There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
The system of laws being complicated does not mean that it is not generally straightforward to determine what a person has property rights to. The complexity comes from the edge cases, but most cases are not edge cases.
>We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all.
Okay so what are they? What makes your claim to own the things you own correct and someone else's invalid?
Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?
Again, there are answers to these questions, but they are complicated and even within libertarian thought, people disagree about them.
>What makes your claim to own the things you own correct and someone else's invalid?
The fact that I made it, or acquired it from someone else through trade.
>Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?
The homestead principle is based on the notion that if something is unclaimed, and someone adds value to it, they should be able to enjoy the full benefit of that value-added thing.
The only 'artificial' private property is scarce natural resources, most importantly land, and that is because much if not most of its value comes from its natural form, rather than anything added to it by its original homesteader, and it is this class of property which society has a moral right to create rules/taxes on.
With respect to this latter class of property, once the rules on its use have been established (say a rule asserting that a property title owner must pay a rent equal to 1% of the value of their land to the government each year) anything the title owner earns in accordance with the rules (e.g. anything they earn on top of the 1% tax) is theirs by right.
And sure, these are reasonable answers, but they're starting to show complexity, and people aren't necessarily going to agree that they're obviously fair.
Society is complex, and trying to explain a principle and its application in all possible permutations will require an indepth explanation, but the overall concept is coherent and straightforward. I wouldn't call it ambiguous.
Regarding people disagreeing: people also didn't agree that ending ritual sacrifice and slavery were fair, but I don't believe many reasonable people would disagree on the general outlines of what private property is if the discussion is permitted to progress far enough.
I believe counter-notions are mostly a result of demagoguery and would dissipate in the face of reasoned inquiry.
Well for what it's worth, I think property is an effective economic system which should be utilised to the extent that it leads to good outcomes. I think arguing about a philosophical notion of property rights is ultimately pointless if a system that enforces them doesn't lead to better outcomes than one that flagrantly violates them.
I guess we can agree to disagree on that. I think if we step out of the philosophical, it's clear what private property rights are at the level of principle. True, there is a lot of disagreement in relation to specific cases, but I think that's due to superficial understandings people have about these cases, and that once the complexities of the given situation are elucidated, there would mostly be agreement on what a person has private property rights to.
As for outcomes, knowing what we know about incentives and how they affect the behavior of economic agents, and extrapolating the effect of the evolutionary processes of the market, it's inconceivable to me that violating private property rights would result in better outcomes in relation to increasing economic output over the long-run, than protecting them.
My impression is that completely unhindered property rights lead to ever amplifying inequality, as those who own capital are more able to earn money than those who do not.
I think a Capitalist system needs to be paired with a wealth redistribution mechanism to damp that amplification, such that inequality can only ever be maintained by constant effort.
EDIT: And while you may be right, I think being unable to conceive of ways in which you may be wrong speaks poorly of your imagination.
I don't believe that inequality justifies violence to force people to give up the currency they receive in private trade (to pay an income tax).
I also don't believe that inequality is a natural outcome of a market economy. The market will favor efficiency above all things, because it is an iterative process that rewards good utilizers/investors of capital with greater allocations of capital, and it is not efficient for 5 people to own and direct as much capital as 150 million people. More individual owners of capital means much more attention being given in the management of each unit of capital, resulting in higher returns on it.
The sources of income inequality need to be found in the government either not fulfilling its responsibility to manage the commons in the interest of the public, or in authoritarian prohibitions that disproportionately harm the less wealthy and the poor.
Free-market inhibiting factors that could be contributing to income disparity:
* high fixed-costs for participating in business. Fixed costs, unlike variable costs, punish small businesses. Regulations are known in the economics field as a source of fixed costs. A very basic example: you can't offer stock in your company on a stock exchange without having millions of dollars to pay lawyers. This excludes millions of small businesses from one of the best sources of capital: the public stock market. More on regulations causing an upward distribution of income: Working Paper: The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?: http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...
* high market transaction costs as a result of regulations and taxes. Why do high market transaction costs contribute to income disparity? Because non-market transactions internal to an organization are not subject to the costs imposed by regulations and taxes. This will result in large corporations having a competitive advantage over small ones that rely on market transactions for a greater portion of their activity. For example, a large corporation doesn't need to pay a sales tax to have its accounting department do an accounting job for it. A small corporation that pays an external company to do it does.
Fair question, the answer is that you cannot. However, note that I did not say libertarians reject all uses of force, only that "they would rather appeal to people's self interest to achieve social outcomes than resort to force".
I think we would both agree that the generosity of your neighbors represents the ideal. But if they weren't so generous, how you get them to share their coffee plow your drive way? Would you lobby for regulations to be passed to force them to stop hoarding their coffee? Have the police requisition their plow for the greater good?
Or would you offer to compensate them for their goods and services? And if they refused, would you peacefully resign yourself to some other means of getting your needs met?
The socialist often invokes the spirit of generosity with his rhetoric, but when others are (in his view) insufficiently generous, he is too quick to trade the pen for the club.
