The post on guns triggered a query as to my position on the 1964 civil rights act. My thoughts are not particularly original, or cogent, but here goes:
1) Though I endorse the principle that private property owners should be able to use their possessions as they wish, slavery was America's Original Sin, and segregation was an outgrowth of a bitterly unjust and state-enforced order. Just on those grounds, I'm probably prepared to make an exception to general principle.
2) I'm not particularly friendly to public accomodation laws in general, though I'm not a lawyer, and fully recognize that I may simply be missing important facets of the debate.
But even if I endorsed the principle that racist shop owners ought to be free to exercise their beliefs, one's right to discriminate against people on the basis of race or creed is literally the last right I am interested in defending. When we have rolled back eminent domain abuse, ended state nannying about our health choices, curbed prosecutorial abuses, obliterated corporate welfare, stamped out farm subsidies, ended the moronic drug war, established well-funded school voucher programs, pruned our overgrown tax code, torn down our trade barriers, shoved the government all the way out of our bedrooms, rationalized regulation, and gotten the Supreme Court out of the business of approving nativity scenes in remote town squares . . . well, then I might be prepared to sit down and ponder, philosophically speaking, whether one's fundamental human right to be a repulsive racist should be recognized by the legal system in this context.
Last time I looked, we still had a ways to go on those other things yet.
My thoughts are not particularly original, or cogent
Are they ever?
This isn't news to us....
Try focusing on one topic a week. It would be much appreciated. Speaking of guns, If your blogging style was compared to an FPS your style would be called "spray and pray".
Wow LL, you should call your ISP and demand they stop sending all your web traffic here against your will.
One can't help but (responsibly!) speculate what Jane Galt would have written about the Civil Rights Act had she been around in 1964. Or for that matter, what she would have written five years after it passed. One suspects it might have read a smidge differently.
Was it Mindles H. Dreck, L. Ron Hubbard or Jane Galt who penned this review of Atlas Shrugged?
And isn't L. Ron Hubbard is a pseudonym of Ayn Rand? Enquiring minds want to know now that The Atlantic has become the Lipstick Libertarian's online companion to The Enquirer.
I love it when good old American pragmatism wins.
You missed one: "ensuring that the government has little to say or do about regulating firearms possession"
You waited until I was out of the race to endorse my platform? Women!
Got it now. You're one of the big state libertarians, who wants to coerce people into things like paying for the education of other people's kids. Are you like David Stockman? A big state libertarian who believes in huge defense budgets? The corporate welfare remark would imply not.
Oh dear, we're guilty of "original sin." Not Christian but 'Paulist' or is it 'Augustinian' are we?
Megan is oh so right.
I like this bitter-sweet souvenir. It somehow somewhat reminds me of something in present times... I just can't quite figure out of what. Maybe it is the whole animal welfare vs animal rights debate.. or how government regulations only serve to...?
No.. wait - this one.. this one is different.. it is in color and now I know what it reminds me of..
Toots!
You are not long for this job. Any thoughts on what you'll do when you get the axe? Hollywood? Modeling? Underground sex tapes? Celebrity endorsements?
But even if I endorsed the principle that racist shop owners ought to be free to exercise their beliefs, one's right to discriminate against people on the basis of race or creed is literally the last right I am interested in defending.
While this might be a legitimate defense of Title II of the act, which covered discrimination in "public accommodations," the real problem is Title VII, which covers problems with discrimination in employment. And the problem is not that that it prohibits racial discrimination by employers--it's that it gives the judiciary the discretionary power to second-guess any private employment decision, a power which is abused by lawyers, activists, and disgruntled employees on a fairly regular basis.
Less snidely, you're not a libertarian. You're an economist and a civil liberties buff. All that stuff comes right out of Ec-10.
A proper libertarian is an isolationist, don't tread on me type. Does that fit? Because if that part of it does, your views are almost exactly congruent (and ironically) with Glenn Greenwald's (and mine, ftm).
Except on the voucher thing. I got fooled once on this market-based approach to something that should be publicly funded by Alain Enthoven and Victor Fuchs and their prepaid group practice stuff.
Never again. There are some functions that belong in the public sector.
The question, in my view, is not, "Should racists be able to keep black people from entering their stores?" Rather, it's, "Does the government have the right to label some peaceful actions as racist and ban them accordingly?"
That's the principle involved, and the reason to reject it is *not* to protect the irrational racist, but to protect the rational people who would be harmed by that principle: say, the person who publishes a book critical of Afrocentrism, or a shop owner who doesn't wish to serve anti-American racists like Obama's preacher.
The question, in my view, is not, "Should racists be able to keep black people from entering their stores?" Rather, it's, "Does the government have the right to label some peaceful actions as racist and ban them accordingly?"
That's the principle involved, and the reason to reject it is *not* to protect the irrational racist, but to protect the rational people who would be harmed by that principle: say, the person who publishes a book critical of Afrocentrism, or a shop owner who doesn't wish to serve anti-American racists like Obama's preacher.
Would that have the effect of allowing racists to be racist? Sure, which is why it is so crucial for private citizens to denounce and boycott them. But to allow the government to label some ideas as evil, and use force againt individuals for "endorsing" such ideas is disastrous.
A proper libertarian is an isolationist, don't tread on me type.
Not me, baby. Walk all over me! I love it, just like Dagny Taggart. But I must warn you, I top from the bottom.
I beg your pardon!?
I can certainly understand your preference for solving these rights-related questions in an order that puts the rights of racists last, but I have to tell you that it will never work that way.
The state grew in a certain way based on necessity. It is very likely that the only way to counter the state's growth in any substantial or lasting way is to attack its powers in the same order in which those powers were expanded. This means that you would pretty much have to go after the interstate commerce clause first, the New Deal second, aggressive zoning laws third, the Civil Rights Act fourth, OSHA and the EPA fifth, etc. [That is a very vague order and I'm sure if we went over the political history of the US in detail we would come up with a more precise order.] Each encroachment utilized precedents established during the previous encroachment, and relied on the gradual acclimitization of the public to certain types of controls.
The Civil Rights Act helped to establish that private economic decisions weren't private. The increasing micromanagement of the use of property that we have experienced since would not have proceeded in the same way without that precedent. The continued existence of the precedent undermines libertarian arguments elsewhere. [If you complain about the justice of any particular limitation on property or private economic discretion, you always will get the response: "Well, we already regulate property in way 'X', and that means you shouldn't care. It's not like it's a principle or anything."
The Civil Rights Act is the sole thing that would make me hesitate if I had the power to give the commerce clause a logically consistent interpretation (i.e. a much more limiting one)
Private property rights blah blah... at the end of the day millions of people were getting oppressed because of racism. The Civil Rights Act, while maybe of dubious jurisdictional provenance, was critical in altering the cultural norms around race towards a direction any fair minded person would endorse. The good accomplished so vastly outweighs the damage done by denying businesspeople the right to exclude whoever they wanted it isn't even a contest.
Of course, while we are dreaming we could just amend the constitution to give the civil rights act its own jurisdictional power over private entities and move on...
I like libertarianism, but it still runs into the problem all utopian visions have... which is that there are enough people who will not behave according to the utopian rules of human behavior and muck the whole thing up.
The Civil Rights Act, while maybe of dubious jurisdictional provenance, was critical in altering the cultural norms around race towards a direction any fair minded person would endorse.
We could similarly move cultural norms around race in a fair-minded direction if we started imprisoning people who advocated white supremacy. The electorate probably wouldn't bat an eye. Libertarians and civil liberties organizations recognize that protecting the principle of free expression requires us to defend the most obnoxious exercises of that expression.
Some libertarians are not willing to defend the most obnoxious exercises of property rights and associational rights. I think that on some level that this is indicative of a tendency to view rights of expression as fundamentally more important than property rights, and thus more worthy of defense. For many reasons, I think this is a miscalculation, both in philosophical and practical terms. Statism advances today mainly by framing issues in terms of control of the uses of property or the terms of employment.
I love how magically you guys dance around the problem of the fact that there is not a clear line between public and private property. This is the single largest flaw of libertarianism (though, don't worry, there are many others large and small).
See, in the real world there's all this icky gray stuff stuck between the stark black and white. Kind of makes a political ideology that can be summed up in a single sentence seem stupid.
Libertarianism is ridiculous extremism pushed by whiny brats who don't like being told to do and have found rhetorical hoops to jump through that make this seem unselfish.
Single sentences damning libertarianism is ridiculous superficiality pushed by whining thugs who just cannot stand the thought of people behaving in a manner that the thugs do not approve.
From Nut:
On the contrary, this is precisely the point of the debate, but it is perfectly understandable that you are mystified by this- you and most others simply want to assert that there is no clear distinction between my property, your property, and public property. Libertarians don't accept this assumption. It is notable that this claim to indistinct boundaries to property is always made by those looking for new ways to infringe on the individual's property rights, and they always do it with the claim that they are being unselfish in doing so.
Single sentences damning libertarianism is ridiculous superficiality pushed by whining thugs who just cannot stand the thought of people behaving in a manner that the thugs do not approve.
I'm having a really difficult time not going ape-shit at the suggestion that jailing people for hate speech is equivalent to requiring businesses to accept funds and provide services to people in a color blind manner. Its not like the Civil Rights Act banned racism; it just said that if you plan on opening your business to the public, its all the public or none at all.
Infringement? Yeah I guess. But hell, my constitutional right to travel is infringed by traffic lights too if you want to put it that way.
I'm having a really difficult time not going ape-shit at the suggestion that jailing people for hate speech is equivalent to requiring businesses to accept funds and provide services to people in a color blind manner.
Um, yeah. That's what I just SAID - that to many people, including some who purport to be libertarians, restrictions on expression seem more onerous than restrictions on the use and enjoyment of property, and that this leads those purported libertarians to aggressively defend obnoxious speech, but not obnoxious uses of property.
Here's the reason I made the comparison:
There are two types of harm created by racist discrimination in so-called public accomodations and employment:
1. The economic harm of being denied access to the property or being denied the employment
2. The psychic harm of seeing signs that say "Whites Only" or words to that effect.
What you have to understand is that I completely discount #1, because I would only recognize that economic harm if the party in question had some pre-existing automatic claim to the property in question, or some automatic claim to employment that comes before actually negotiating for that employment. And I don't.
That leaves us with the psychic harm, and frankly if psychic harm is created by seeing signs that say "Whites Only", the same psychic harm is created by seeing someone marching down the street wearing a Klan outfit, or by seeing a copy of The Turner Diaries for sale. Stripped of its economic component, the property rights questions in discrimination law are questions of free expression, so if we're going to punish one sort of expression that outrages our sensibilities on racial equality I fail to see any rationale for not punishing the others.
All these problems you want to solve from the 1964 Civil Rights Act which, in order to be upheld, required that the Supreme Court abolish states rights.
The only effective vote that ordinary people have against tyranny or bad government is the one they cast with their feet. The 1964 Civil Rights Act took away that vote.
Before 1964 if you did not like your state laws or government, you could move to another state. Now that the state legislatures are creatures of the federal govt, if you don't like a federal law you have nowhere to run.
Grin and bare it. Its your turn in the barrel.
Lipstick wrote: Not me, baby. Walk all over me! I love it, just like Dagny Taggart. But I must warn you, I top from the bottom.
Whoops, looks like the moronic drug war must have ended after all if this level of access has been achieved. One down, eleven to go until the hostess is ready to ponder the philosophical implications of legal recognition for privately-enforced racism in venues open to the public.
Different business:
NutellaonToast wrote: I love how magically you guys dance around the problem of the fact that there is not a clear line between public and private property.
Is this a sloppy way of stating that the distinction is not clear when said private property is normally open for public access, as is the case in e.g. a department store? If so, we may have more to discuss. If you meant this as a general statement, then Yancey Ward's cynical takedown works too well.
What you have to understand is that I completely discount #1, because I would only recognize that economic harm if the party in question had some pre-existing automatic claim to the property in question, or some automatic claim to employment that comes before actually negotiating for that employment. And I don't.
That sounds good in hot air form, but give it actual legs to walk, it would promptly produce a society that operates like groups of snotty high school cliques: minor superficial differences and preferential associations are regularly elevated to the status of sharply-enforced divisions. Let that run its course, and soon you will have the basic principles of inner-city gang warfare spread across an entire society. Take a look at the former Yugoslavian region to see what that ends up looking like in practice.
you and most others simply want to assert that there is no clear distinction between my property, your property, and public property. Libertarians don't accept this assumption.
But they require it for the state to exist. Real property is a creation of the state, owned and controlled by the state. Property rights to land cannot arise unless a state exists that seizes them from someone else, and hands them out to a preferred set of people, called citizens.
The way it works is a state, one that has armed forces, sends its agents to a place, kills or drives out the occupants, and creates rules for handing out conditional property rights to its citizens. Always conditional. And rightly so.
The state not only uses its coercive force, funded by taxes on its populace, to engage in these conquests, but it also runs the entire process of establish boundaries and adjudicating ownership conflicts. It can reclaim its ownership at any time, and does in fact do so, as we are seeing in Texas right now.
This massive, collectivist and oppressive state apparatus is essential to libertarians who claim to believe in a limited state. Because they also want capitalism (and, it turns out, patents. Oh, and stoplights. Oh, and publicly funded education.....)
It's nonsense.
The mouse raises a good question.
Should the state take an interest not merely in administering justice between its citizens, but also in making the social interaction between those citizens as smooth as possible?
I tend to think that it should try to succeed at the first one, first, and then once that is done we can look at the possibility of going beyond that.
But while we're giving claims "legs to walk" [I like that, I'm stealing that], let's look at the claim that giving people associational discretion will lead to Balkanization for a minute:
It seems to me that there actually still is a whole lot of associational discretion in our country - that possessed by customers and employees. A person choosing which business to patronize can do so on the basis of race. A person who does not want to work for a black person can decline to seek or accept employment from them. And there are more customers and employees in the land than there are business owners and employers. Why hasn't their ability to make racist economic decisions divided our country into warring racist states?
That's the not-so-hidden subtext of discrimination laws: since there are more consumers and employees than business owners and employers, the former group retains its own discretion while legislating limits on the discretion of the latter designed for its own convenience. A restaurant owner can't sue all the restaurant patrons in a town for the "disparate impact" they're having on his business. Those citizens could openly declare that they refuse to go to a black-owned [or Korean-owned, or white-owned, or whatever] restaurant, and the restaurant owner would have no recourse. Because boycotts are sanctified when undertaken by the many but criminal turpitude when undertaken by the few.
Given the somewhat flexible nature of employment in the modern era, this leads to absurdities whereby [for example] if I engage the services of an independent accountant, I can at any time tell him I'm dropping his firm because I don't like his race - but if I hire him as an employee and do the same thing, I am liable in civil court. It's the same economic action, but one is legal and one is not, based purely on an administrative distinction. Administrative distinctions between economic actors are being treated as differences in kind.
Well, jay, I could put on my Hobbes hat, and point out that in a state of anarchy, every system participant can seize whatever he wants to the limit of his strengh at any moment in time. Any anyone can have everything he has seized away from him at any moment if someone stronger wanders along.
This means that if the first step is taken to create a state, it constitutes a moral improvement on the previous state of affairs, even if it freezes in place property arrangements which arose out of the maelstrom of injustice of the anarchic situation - because it breaks the cycle of rapine, and allows even the weak with little property the relief of a break from the continual threat of imminent annihilation.
I would also point out that the problem you are railing against - the fact that states behave in immoral ways towards the weak, to the benefit of the privileged group described as citizens - can only be solved and the cycle broken only by taking away from the state the ability to make redistributions for its own ends.
Your objection also has a problem with the Proudhonistic fallacy - the thing you're accusing the state of doing is only a bad thing if there are "just" property claims that its thievery is harming. If it's all BS anyway, then it's really morally neutral or irrelevant if states organize to seize land and hand it out to reward its citizenry. It's not like it's anybody else's rightful property anyway.
Well, jay, I could put on my Hobbes hat, and point out that in a state of anarchy, every system participant can seize whatever he wants to the limit of his strengh at any moment in time.
This is, of course, irrelevant. We are not talking about states of anarchy. This kind of argument is informed by the historically false claim that there is some kind of anarchic state of nature that precedes the development of a working society.
There was no state of nature that did not involve operating, functional societies that adjudicated property rates. There was no pre-existing anarchy. This is a myth.
This means that if the first step is taken to create a state, it constitutes a moral improvement on the previous state of affairs, even if it freezes in place property arrangements which arose out of the maelstrom of injustice of the anarchic situation
There was no anarchy in North America when Europeans came over, and proceeded to use state apparatuses funded by coercive taxation to kill people in order to . There were functional societies, enforcing marriage obligations, property (but not real property) ownership, making works of art, raising their children, adjudicating disputes and bathing frequently (unlike their conquerors).
Just as when I was living in the central Sudan, there was a very clear well-developed system of authority over land use, based on clan membership and a lengthy fallow period. There is a system of dispute adjudication, clearly defined property rights, and a functioning, hierarchical government.
There was no "rapine." Murder was very rare. There were boundary conflicts with other communities that involved occasional violence, but there is nothing anarchic about that--certainly nothing like the government there has unleashed upon that populace, or the US has unleashed upon the Iraqi populace.
I would also point out that the problem you are railing against - the fact that states behave in immoral ways towards the weak, to the benefit of the privileged group described as citizens - can only be solved and the cycle broken only by taking away from the state the ability to make redistributions for its own ends.
Not at all. I am asserting that there exist more minimal, less collectivist and less coercive models for a state that happen not to involve the concept of real property. Libertarians claim to hold these elements as central virtues. Yet they have no interest in such a state, because they also want capitalism. Capitalism requires an enormously intrusive, profoundly interventionist state, because as Hernando de Soto demonstrates in The Mystery of Capitalism, a well defined cadastre is essential to a working finance system.
The minimal, usufruct state does not suffer from any of the ills you're talking about. In fact, it has all the virtues libertarians are always talking about--no taxes, no large central authority, dispute adjudication rather than regulation. It also happens to be the state that people lived under for almost all of human existence.
Your objection also has a problem with the Proudhonistic fallacy - the thing you're accusing the state of doing is only a bad thing if there are "just" property claims that its thievery is harming. If it's all BS anyway, then it's really morally neutral or irrelevant if states organize to seize land and hand it out to reward its citizenry.
I think the murder part kinda stands on its own, don't you? It's not some kind of sterile "organize and seize land." It's killing people, using coercive force to impose your will on them.
It's not like it's anybody else's rightful property anyway.
Yep. Might makes right. Are you actually asserting that this is a basic libertarian view--that because you can kill these people, destroy their homes and move in, you are morally justified in doing so?
Typing troubles.
in order to...
give Lord Baltimore a few hundred thousand acres.
and rates should be rights.
Brian wrote: Should the state take an interest not merely in administering justice between its citizens, but also in making the social interaction between those citizens as smooth as possible? I tend to think that it should try to succeed at the first one, first, and then once that is done we can look at the possibility of going beyond that.
I should think we can find a lot of available ground for flag planting in between the State that only "administers justice", and the State that tries to make social interaction "as smooth as possible".
jayackroyd - Re: "A proper libertarian is an isolationist"
Isolationist is a term often applied to people who combine being against military interventions with the support of protectionism. Protectionism isn't libertarian.
Even the military intervention part isn't inherently anti-libertarian. Freeing people from totalitarian government could be considered a libertarian idea. Of course the problem is your using the state to do it, and war tends to strengthen the state, so you have two libertarian ideas in conflict.
Certainly there is nothing anti-libertarian about being against military interventions, but you can support intervention against a strongly anti-libertarian government and still be a libertarian.
Jay,
You must have a very large cornfield.
I am not an anarchist. Indeed, most libertarians are not anarchists either, though many are confused about the true meaning of anarchy.
I recognize that states have been used in the past to expropriate land from original owners. However, the world is what it is, and not every injustice, or even most, can be undone. It does not take a massive, intrusive state to enforce recognized property rights today- it is only required if the goal is to redistribute from one to another by force.
However, it is pretty pointless to discuss it since we clearly have diametrically opposed views of property in the first place.
Capitalism requires no such thing. It doesn't even really require a state at all, although its my opinion (and obviously yours) that it works better with one.
Protecting property rights, and keeping the peace, doesn't require an "enormously intrusive, profoundly interventionist state". It probably requires A state (although the anarcho-capitalists would disagree), but that state doesn't have to be so enormous or intrusive.
Jayackroyd, you may wish to consult with various pueblo tribes of the American Southwest, and speak to them about how the Apaches "adjudicated", or handled "disputes" once they got there. The people I've talked to, like the Acoma, for instance, hold more historical bitterness towards the Apache than they do the Spaniards, and trust me, it wasn't because they caught the Spaniards in a good mood. True enough, Europeans were more efficient in the application of violence, but that wasn't the point you were making. Regarding violence among new world peoples a little further to the south, before Europeans arrived, here's a nice description...
"Archaeologists for a long time believed the ancient Maya to be gentle and peaceful people. We now know that Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and irresolvable, because limitations of food supply and transportation made it impossible for any Maya kingdom to unite the whole region in an empire. The archaeological record shows that wars became more intense and frequent toward the time of the Classic collapse. That evidence comes from discoveries of several types since the Second World War: Archaeological excavations of massive fortifications surrounding many Maya sites; vivid depictions of warfare and captives on stone monuments and on the ceramics and murals; and the decipherment of Maya writing, much of which proved to consist of royal inscriptions boasting of conquests. Maya kings fought to capture and torture one another."
Romaticizing is a waste of time, jay.
Congratulations, Brian. You've finally got it. Now you are a real libertarian.
"When the sacredness of property is talked of, it should be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. It is very clear that God, as King David says, "has given the earth to the children of men"; given it to mankind in common."
J. Locke, Essay on Civil Government (1690), Sec. 25.
"It is in vain in a Country whose great Fund is Land, to hope to lay the publick charge of the Government on any thing else; there at last it will terminate. The Merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the Labourer cannot, and therefore the Landholder must: And whether he were best do it, by laying it directly, where it will at last settle, or by letting it come to him by the sinking of his Rents, which when they are once fallen every one knows are not easily raised again, let him consider."
J. Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising the Value of Money
"This I do boldly affirm, that the same rule of propriety, viz., that every man should have as much as he could make use of, would hold still in the world, without straitening anybody, since there is land enough in the world to suffice double the inhabitants, had not the invention of money and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced (by consent) larger possessions and a right to them."
J. Locke, On Civil Government (1690), Sec. 34]
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
Adam Smith
"… legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property… Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 1785
"While it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from Nature at all … it is considered by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no one has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land … Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
Thomas Jefferson
"Private property … is a Creature of Society, and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing, its contributors therefore to the public Exigencies are not to be considered a Benefit on the Public, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honor and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or as payment for a just Debt."
Benjamin Franklin
"All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public Convention. Hence, the public has the rights of regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it."
Benjamin Franklin
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
Thomas Paine
"Personal property is the effect of Society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally. Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist, the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation therefore of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes, on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came. This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely, it will be found, that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labour that produced it; the consequence of which is, that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence. It is perhaps impossible to proportion exactly the price of labour to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily, he would not save it against old age nor be much the better for it in the interim. Make then Society the treasurer to guard it for him in a common fund, for it is no reason that because he might not make a good use of it for himself that another shall take it."
Thomas Paine, "Agrarian Justice" 1797
For what it is worth, if I had a time machine, I'd go back to the Constitutional Convention with several cases of good hooch (I bet they were drinking swill that summer in Philly), get all the southerners stinking drunk for days on end, and get them to sign a document outlining a Georgist tax system, based solely on the unimproved value of owned lands. That may have even made slavery far less lucrative.
Capitalism requires no such thing. It doesn't even really require a state at all...
Someone should tell that statist lackey and socialist, George F. Will!
A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.
George Will, This Week with Sam Donaldson, Jan. 13, 2002
Amen! What a list!!
Isolationist is a term often applied to people who combine being against military interventions with the support of protectionism. Protectionism isn't libertarian.
WTF? I'm talking about Washington's "avoid foreign entanglements" And Ron Paul's call to close bases in Korea, Germany and Japan.
This weird projection of stick figures onto stuff that wasn't said impede thoughtful discussion
It does not take a massive, intrusive state to enforce recognized property rights today- it is only required if the goal is to redistribute from one to another by force.
Sure it does. You pay the government to be a trusted third party to determine the boundary of every parcel in the country. The government still owns all the real property in the country, and can can take it back at will. You can't transfer a deed without the government's participation. You can't even research a deed without the government's participation.
The real property management system works parcel by parcel, condo by condo, for that matter.
However, it is pretty pointless to discuss it since we clearly have diametrically opposed views of property in the first place
How so? You think real property is not ultimately owned by the collectivist state? It's true that's it different in some way now, when the state was the king, and personally owned all property, including property in the New World taken by conquest and murder. But that difference is in minor details.
I realize that pointing out that a cadastre represents massive intervention, and can only be created following violent state intervention raises cognitive dissonance. But I do ask that you actually think about this, rather than try to wave it away.
Our definitions of "property" differ not at all.
And this property was acquired by this government in violation of every libertarian principle.
And you say, So?
Protecting property rights, and keeping the peace, doesn't require an "enormously intrusive, profoundly interventionist state".
Let me try this again.
Real property rights, meaning the ownership of land, requires an intrusive, massively interventionist state. You got to hire surveyors to go out and measure parcel boundaries. You've gotta have registrars of deeds. You've gotta have courts to resolve dispute over land ownership.
And first a state has to acquire the land by conquest, which is as massive an intervention as there is.
All the land in the world has been occupied by people, at its carrying capacity for the lifestyle of the occupants (actually, a little more than its carry capacity, see the Anasazi and the Easter Islanders) for at least 20,000 years.
The only way you get to have land where you can build your widget factory is by having a state (not you personally, because you can't borrow money to build a widget factory if you can't prove that you'll still own that widget factory next year) issue you title to that land. The only way the state can issue title to that land is by taking it away from the previous occupant, and then dividing it up among the state's citizens in some way, while also serving as a trusted third party in adjudicating all ownership disputes. (The "claim jumping" in the western US in the 19th century was generally people who had legal title to the land removing people who didn't. People with deeds removing squatters, that is. The only way they got those deeds is because a massive state land distribution apparatus [every single parcel is mapped by the government] awarded them those deeds.)
The collective state ownership of all real property is essential to the creation of a cadastre, which is in turn essential to being able to build on a piece of real estate. It's a serious problem in most of the developing world, because you can't be sure that, to use a de Soto example, you'll still own the sewing machine shop tomorrow. Moreover, at least as importantly, nor can a bank. So you can't expand your business by credit.
And, again, I can offer more minimal states that better achieve the stated goals of libertarianism than an income-transfer free, vice permitting, no public education United states. Which you will not like. The stated libertarian principles are a shuck.
On the contrary, this is precisely the point of the debate, but it is perfectly understandable that you are mystified by this- you and most others simply want to assert that there is no clear distinction between my property, your property, and public property. Libertarians don't accept this assumption. It is notable that this claim to indistinct boundaries to property is always made by those looking for new ways to infringe on the individual's property rights, and they always do it with the claim that they are being unselfish in doing so.
Wow, I say that sometimes property rights are nebulous and so one cannot dogmatically apply the rule "I have the right to apply whatever rules to my property I want."
You, somehow twist that into me saying that property rights are never clearly defined, and argue that this must be wrong so property rights are always defined.
Somehow, I don't see how my point that YOU CAN'T SEE FUCKING SHADES OF GREY is refuted.
You are incredibly stupid, Yancy. You see the world in two ways; your way, and the exact opposite of your way.
Jayackroyd, you may wish to consult with various pueblo tribes of the American Southwest, and speak to them about how the Apaches "adjudicated", or handled "disputes" once they got there
[Sigh]
I didn't say there weren't conflicts across states. I said that conflicts within states were adjudicated, and that anarchy was not the rule. People form societies. That's what they do. Those societies do come into conflict with each other over resources. As I said above, the world has been fully populated by humans at carrying capacity and above for a very long time. That means (to quote the most important influence on contemporary libertarians, Robert Heinlein) all wars are the result of population pressure.
I know there are people who romanticize peaceful, mother earth loving native American culture. That's as ahistorical as the claim that there was ever a state of anarchy in human societies.
We now know that Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and irresolvable, because limitations of food supply and transportation made it impossible for any Maya kingdom to unite the whole region in an empire. The archaeological record shows that wars became more intense and frequent toward the time of the Classic collapse.
Yes, as I said, populations expand to fill the carry capacity at the current method of generating food supplies. And beyond. And then there are wars, and societal collapses.
This has nothing to do with the argument.
The conquest of the barbaric and bloodthirsty Aztecs and Mayans by the barbaric and bloodthirsty Spaniards is how human history has played out, again, for at least 20,000 years. I am not denying that. The Mayans and Aztecs were very similar to their conquerors, with a hierarchical society, totalitarian agriculture with malnourished serfs/slaves/cannon fodder at the bottom of a brutal statist pyramid providing enormous wealth to the people at the top of the pyramid.
The brutal statist regime that won the war over this land was the European one. But they are not different in nature, as you point out. And none of them adhered to libertarian principles.
And, as I said, this conquest profoundly violates core libertarian values. Now in the case of Latin America, you didn't even get a cadastre out of it. (Hence de Soto's book.) That's why I talked about North America, because the statist regime that is necessary for capitalism was optimally set up.
At the price of the deaths of millions, and the imposition of a much more intrusive form of governance than had been in place in the extant societies--where there were, indeed, wars between those societies. As I pointed out in my earlier comment. Among the Sudanese I was living with, their semi-nomadic lifestyle comes into conflict with Arab peoples just to their north who are fully nomadic. They come into conflict over pasture and water resources. Or did, before the state imposed by the British government began engaging in genocide.
Capitalism requires no such thing. It doesn't even really require a state at all...
Capitalism requires credit. Credit requires collateral. Collateral requires a trusted third party to confirm ownership of that collateral. That trusted third party is the state. Moreover, the best collateral is fixed in space, that is, land and improvements on that land. Land can only be acquired, and given ownership status for individual citizens who wish to engage in capitalism, by a state taking it away from someone currently using it. (This is because all land is in use, dating from the populating of South America [and the elimination of most megafauna from the New World] and the South Pacific archipelago.)
You gotta have a state for capitalism. And it has to be one substantially more intrusive than alternative state organizations that do not include real property ownership as part of that organization.
Oh yeah, and it requires systematic murder and genocide to put into place.
Jay, you wrote....
"There were boundary conflicts with other communities that involved occasional violence,"
...which is romantic claptrap. Violence was often constant and chronic, and calling bitter wars of conquest, in which the defeated are enslaved, sacrificed, or tortured is not a mere "boundary conflict". At least not if you are endeavoring to put forth an honest account.
You pay the government to be a trusted third party to determine the boundary of every parcel in the country.
Huh? Parcel boundaries are often set out by metes and bounds, which requires no government intervention, just inclusion in the deed.
The government still owns all the real property in the country, and can can take it back at will.
That a substantial exaggeration, as they must have a "public purpose" (defined more loosely that I'd like, but not "at will") and must pay for it.
You can't transfer a deed without the government's participation.
Untrue. Recordation (the government's involvement) is a very wise idea in that it protects you from third parties and dishonest sellers, but it is not legally required to transfer an estate in land.
You can't even research a deed without the government's participation.
Also untrue; every title insurance office in the country has a private title plant that they rely on. And even if you feel like doing it the government way, the government "participates" in the same way that it "participates" in your research at the local library; it makes the records available and lets you photocopy for a fee.
In any case, I don't see how this is a "massive interventionist state." It's a pretty minimal state: a recording office which does no more than index paperwork you bring in by name and a court (and a sheriff) that only involves itself in disputes when one of the parties asks it to be involved.
Given that the court and sheriff had to exist anyway to do other kinds of dispute resolution, the "massive" addition required for real property ownership is a couple of clerks and a microfilm reader. Nothing says "Leviathan" like "grantor index."
Interesting that we have a deep philosophical discussion here but there is little discussion of McArdle's historical point, which seems to me at the center of her argument.
What I would like to hear is a plausible narrative as to how blacks in the South were ever going to get to a spot where they would have an equal opportunity to succeed and achieve their potential without impositions on property and contract rights that libertarians don't generally agree with.
Without that explanation, I would respectfully suggest that arguments about whether the state has any claim on the property on another, and the like, would not mean too much to some black kid in Alabama born in 1948 who found basically the entire productive sectors of the economy closed off to him. What does libertarianism offer him? And how can you say it would have been superior to the civil rights statutes that were passed?
Dilan, no person can be sure, but there is a chance that if Grant's renconstruction policies had been continued for another generation or two, former slaves and their descendents could have gained enough economic and political power to make private Jim Crow much more economically inefficient, and thus much harder to sustain. State enforced Jim Crow was the support structure for privately enforced Jim Crow. Failure to enforce legitimate standards of liberty after Grant left office may have eventually led to the encroachment on legitimate standards of liberty in the 1964 law. As I said in the thread that spawned this one, however, the encroachment on legitimate standards of liberty prior to the end of state-enforcd Jim Crow were a lot worse than what came with the 1964 law.
Megan's description of her position here is as sympathetic an expression as I can imagine of a reasonable libertarian position on civil rights issues (the long list of state infringements of private liberty she wants to roll back before rolling back state infringement of the right to discriminate in private).
But the thing that remains puzzling to me is that most of the issues on that list that actually are rights issues seem to be piddling abstractions that barely affect anyone. Most of the issues on the list (the idiotic drug war, pruning the tax code, etc.) are fundamentally just responses to bad, ineffective policies. Other ideas (school vouchers, ending "state nannying on health care choices" - ??) are not "rights" issues at all, and are very bad policy ideas themselves. "Eminent domain abuse", where it exists, is a problem of the use of the public sphere for private gain, which is essentially a corruption problem, not a rights problem. And Megan unfairly stacks the deck on the nativity scene issue by stipulating "remote town squares". (So it's a problem if there were a great big nativity scene on the Ellipse, since the Jews would probably bitch about it, but if Cobb County, GA puts up a nativity scene, a local Vietnamese Buddhist sues, and the court sides with the plaintiff, then that's government overreach?)
So for genuine rights issues, we have "get the government all the way out of our bedroom". Fair enough, but, apart from the important campaign for gay marriage, an issue of increasingly peripheral significance in the United States of Girls Gone Wild. And we have "prosecutorial abuse", which I hope would include arresting people on vague terrorism-related offenses that turn out to not exist. And other than that, I just think the list reflects the fact that most of the really serious problems that impinge on people's lives in the contemporary US have nothing to do with government's overreaching interference in our lives. Apart from the drug war, the US has one of the most hands-off governments in the world. People's problems in the US are the problems they have with their credit card issuer, with their health insurer, with their mortgage lender, their phone company, their employer -- the problems they have in interacting with the private corporations that actually structure most of one's everyday life. It just seems absurd to me that, living in the US, with its particular range of problems and pathologies at the moment, one would pick "rolling back government interference in people's lives" as the overarching crusade.
One of the reasons I don't frequent these pseudo-libertarian, right wing extremist sites often is that they are usually fact-free spin zones because of things like this (not knocking Jay, he just was pointing it out but even he succumbs to the right wing distortion and error):
Washington never mentioned "foreign entanglemnts" in his Farewell Address. That was Jefferson some years later. And Washington was not an isolationist, far from it. He was not even a non-interventionist.
GW... The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to domestic nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
President Thomas Jefferson extended Washington's ideas in his March 4, 1801 inaugural address: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Jefferson's phrase "entangling alliances" is, incidentally, sometimes incorrectly attributed to Washington.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/garrity.htm
Cato hasn't been worth a damn since the early 90's. If you have to make up facts to fit your imaginary and utopian world that should be your first clue...
http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html
Huh? Parcel boundaries are often set out by metes and bounds, which requires no government intervention, just inclusion in the deed.
Where do you go to do a title search? The county recorder's office, where the registrar of deeds and mapping office is. You can only own a parcel of land because the state certifies that the land is where it is, and has no other claim on it. Moreover, that ownership is conditional, revocable at any time, and subject to non-negotiable conditions, ranging from zoning regulations to resource extraction rights.
The land belongs to the state, ultimately, wherever a cadastre exists. This ultimate state ownership is essential to the establishment of capitalism.
That a substantial exaggeration, as they must have a "public purpose" (defined more loosely that I'd like, but not "at will") and must pay for it.
No, it's not. In the first place an enormous amount of the property in the US is formally owned by state, local and federal governments. The owner in principle and in fact is the government. In the second place, the state sets the rules of land ownership by individual citizen that it can modify at any time. But IAC, the only way to acquire property rights is to acquire it from someone who was granted ownership, at some point, by the government.
Also untrue; every title insurance office in the country has a private title plant that they rely on. And even if you feel like doing it the government way, the government "participates" in the same way that it "participates" in your research at the local library; it makes the records available and lets you photocopy for a fee.
The fact that these research services are provided by private companies doesn't change the fact that the state certifies ownership and parcel boundaries. The county recorder's office is of little value without the services of the mapping office. The government doesn't merely "record" these transactions. Moreover it is the original grantor, in all cases.
Given that the court and sheriff had to exist anyway to do other kinds of dispute resolution, the "massive" addition required for real property ownership is a couple of clerks and a microfilm reader. Nothing says "Leviathan" like "grantor index."
It is a much more interventionist state than one without real property ownership. Again, my claim is that I can offer a libertarian a state that conforms much more closely to his or her claimed objectives and principles than states that permit capitalism. And the libertarian throws those principles and objectives every time.
which is romantic claptrap. Violence was often constant and chronic, and calling bitter wars of conquest, in which the defeated are enslaved, sacrificed, or tortured is not a mere "boundary conflict". At least not if you are endeavoring to put forth an honest account.
No, it's not. You keep confusing me with people who believe in romantic claptrap, like the people who believe in states of nature, and nasty brutish and short existences "in a state of anarchy, [where] every system participant can seize whatever he wants to the limit of his strength at any moment in time."
Sure, there were wars. There are always wars, ever since people filled up the planet. People who have studied the myriad languages of Papua New Guinea believe the the variety and distinctiveness of the languages there is a result of the need for a rapid mechanism for friend vs foe identification. But that is not the same thing as anarchy.
And, again, this is irrelevant to the central point--that the existence of capitalism depends on the use of coercion and violence against individuals, use which is claimed to be anathema by libertarians. That it further requires the establishment of a large complex state apparatus that is much less minimal than the states it displaced through the use of this violence. And that people who profess concern for libertarian principles are, at best, incoherent when they show an equally strong commitment to capitalism.
Somewhat later on, we will discuss the libertarian definition of property, what that means about children, and the uses to which they may put by their parents in a truly free society.
Will--
Dilan, no person can be sure, but there is a chance that if Grant's renconstruction policies had been continued for another generation or two, former slaves and their descendents could have gained enough economic and political power to make private Jim Crow much more economically inefficient, and thus much harder to sustain.
I recently read an argument that the real problem was Lincoln's alacrity in restoring the confederate states to union status following Appomatox, that he should have required states to go through a process of implementing a slavery-free, equal rights regime in order to be re-admitted.
I don't know much about the period (making me weird in the eyes of publishers, as it seems to be the most widely read historical subject in the US). Is there anything to that argument, in your view?
Jay,
It is absurd that you describe a historical situation where strong groups and tribes would murder their weaker neighbors and seize their goods and property at will, but then deny to me that anarchy ever existed.
The relations between human groups which regarded themselves as separate and distinct have always been anarchistic, and international relations retain a strong degree of anarchy to this day, despite the presence of limited international bodies like the UN.
You obviously passionately decry the state of affairs that existed when [for example] the Spaniards destroyed the Mesoamerican civilization, and seized that territory for themselves. But the way to stop such evils is to establish a single set of property relations and then make each person secure from destruction at the hands of his neighbor. A limited state seems the best available means to do this.
Yep. Might makes right. Are you actually asserting that this is a basic libertarian view--that because you can kill these people, destroy their homes and move in, you are morally justified in doing so?
No. I am saying that if you don't believe in real property, the murder of those people was wrong, but the moving into their homes part by definition cannot have been. This is morally outraegous, of course, but there is no other conclusion to draw from your argument. Theft is only theft if the property claim of the prior holder was valid to begin with. You are arguing that it can never be. I am taking you at your word.
I am also saying that since I do not wish for similar events to occur in the future, I want to establish a system where people are secure in their property, and where their stronger neighbors are not allowed to simply kill them or drive them off and move into their homes.
Why you think that eliminating the concept of property will make people more secure in their property is a mystery to me. As you note,
It's a serious problem in most of the developing world, because you can't be sure that, to use a de Soto example, you'll still own the sewing machine shop tomorrow. Moreover, at least as importantly, nor can a bank. So you can't expand your business by credit.
How is this situation improved by a system without real property? You merely throw all persons into the tenuous state experienced by the sewing machine shop owner.
No, jay, it is isn't irrelevant, because you put forth a fundamentally false historical model of human societal organization, one in which violence could be accurately described as....
"There were boundary conflicts with other communities that involved occasional violence,"
It is impossible to get to other matters until this fundamental inaccuracy is corrected. Wars of conquest, which are not mere "boundary conflicts" , throughout human history, have been chronic, not "occasional" and tremendously violent. The only exceptions is when the populations have been so small, relative to available land to provide sustenance, that societies or tribes didn't compete. This has been the exception, and certainly has no application to the current human condition.
Jay, I'm not sure whether I can correct your many misunderstandings--the recording office does not "certify" land ownership except in a Torrens system, and will cheefully record competing deeds to the same property. Title companies do indeed maintain and rely on private recordkeeping, not merely searches in the county offices. Nor are parcel boundaries actually certified by the state--they place monuments which may serve as the basis for private surveys, but if you want to establish the boundaries, you rely on the metes and bounds description as interpreted by a private land surveyor.
It is a much more interventionist state than one without real property ownership.
Perhaps, but it isn't too much more interventionist than a state with personal property ownership, but no real property ownership. Given the existence of courts and a sheriff to enforce your rights in, say, your car, adding a recording office and the placement of a few surveyor's monuments is a very small addition.
Now, your point that capitalism in general requires a coercive and sometimes violent state apparatus (in the form of courts and sheriffs) is entirely correct. And yet at the same time, if we accept a bit of state coercion, we gain a tremendous amount in personal liberty. I'm not sure that's a bad trade off for a libertarian.
It is absurd that you describe a historical situation where strong groups and tribes would murder their weaker neighbors and seize their goods and property at will, but then deny to me that anarchy ever existed.
First off, Brian, if that is your definition of anarchy, then anarchy rules now, and will rule until there is a single, unified world government. There is no anarchy within these groups, which is the state of affairs in most of the world today, exceptions being Somalia, Iraq and Kenya at the moment.
I haven't spent a lot of time noting that the states of warfare, slavery and abuse that you and Will have mentioned about are at their most extreme in regimes of totalitarian agriculture, as among the Maya, the Egyptians, the Aztec and, of course, Europe during the era of colonizing the New World, where the head of state did literally own all real property.
I haven't done so because this is irrelevant to the argument. You keep assuming (and I understand why you do so) that I am making some kind of anti-European conquest argument. I am not.
What I am saying is that the nature of capitalism depends on such conquest, and that such conquests are fundamentally in opposition to libertarian principles. Moreover, the claim is that the nature of capitalism is such that you need a much less minimalist, much more intrusive, much more coercive state to make a system of real property operate than you would without that system.
I'm saying that libertarians do not believe in their own principles when they interfere with a desired state outcome that requires intervention, like collaterized credit markets, or, in Megan's case compulsory funding of public education. I'm saying that the conflict is so fundamental wrt real property that the libertarian position is completely incoherent, and you really cannot make liberty arguments or morality arguments when you do not adhere to those principles when the results are inconvenient.
You obviously passionately decry the state of affairs that existed when [for example] the Spaniards destroyed the Mesoamerican civilization, and seized that territory for themselves. But the way to stop such evils is to establish a single set of property relations and then make each person secure from destruction at the hands of his neighbor. A limited state seems the best available means to do this.
No, in fact I don't. I'm saying that libertarians if they are to be consistent with their values, must passionately decry this conquest. Instead, they passionately advocate the economic system that depends upon such conquests.
The way to stop such evils, if you're a good libertarian, I claim, is to settle into a non-violent usufruct community. But it is certainly not a good libertarian thing to do to profit from murder. A capitalist society is necessarily a more interventionist state than a usufruct society.
This is morally outraegous, of course, but there is no other conclusion to draw from your argument. Theft is only theft if the property claim of the prior holder was valid to begin with. You are arguing that it can never be. I am taking you at your word.
No I am not claiming that. I am saying that the definition of land as property creates a state that is not minimalist--and can only take place by conquest of a usufruct society by an agrarian one that enforces state ownership and distribution of real property. And that such a conquest, murder, occupation and collectivizing land ownership is entirely contradictory to the libertarian program. The price of capitalism is giving up your claim of moral outrage at conquest and murder--that is, renouncing your belief in libertarian values.
Why you think that eliminating the concept of property will make people more secure in their property is a mystery to me. As you note,
How is this situation improved by a system without real property? You merely throw all persons into the tenuous state experienced by the sewing machine shop owner.
It's not a problem for me. I agree with de Soto. I think, net, capitalism is a good thing. I'm an advocate of capitalism. It's a problem for people who claim to libertarians.
Oh, and for Robb.
One of the things I should have noted is that the reason de Soto wrote that book (and it is a very good one) is to advocate for investing in the development of reliable cadastres and clear, simple ways of getting title to land and improvements in places like Peru (where he happens to be from). He documents how difficult it is to obtain title, especially for poor people, in property they have occupied for some time. This is not because private title search firms are poorly run. It's because the government, which, as I said before, is the de facto owner of all land, has done neither a good job of defining parcel boundaries, nor is playing its role as the source of title properly. There is nothing the marketplace can do in the absence of government certification of the parcel boundaries and ownership history. Because real property is the creation of a conquering, agrarian society.
Wars of conquest, which are not mere "boundary conflicts" , throughout human history, have been chronic, not "occasional" and tremendously violent.
This argument is now semantic. But still irrelevant. I do not think your characterization is in fact accurate. If it were not, then the same examples (Apaches, Aztecs, Mongols, Vikings) would not be hauled out all the time. One hears a lot about them, of course, and not about !Kung non-conflict, or New Guinean inter-tribal raiding or Northwest tribal competition by potlatch because war makes for better reading and has larger effects.
I certainly haven't read about the great 13th century wars of conquest in Africa or Malaysia. Could be a fault in my education, of course.
But, fine, let's stipulate for the sake of the argument that war is a constant and brutal human condition.
How is that a libertarian can claim to support such regimes and also adhere to his or her principles?
Nor are parcel boundaries actually certified by the state--they place monuments which may serve as the basis for private surveys, but if you want to establish the boundaries, you rely on the metes and bounds description as interpreted by a private land surveyor.
I've sat in county mapping offices, and had to adjudicate disputes between the mappers and the registrar of deeds in the order of operations of splitting and combining parcels in order to computerize the operation. Parcel boundaries exist on maps kept by county and municipal offices, and are the ruling authority.
But, again, I turn to the last remark. If government has no role here other than as a repository of copies of information held elsewhere, then why are there problems in other countries that people ascribe to the government?
Why do government officials attend conferences like this one:
http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Community/BE+Conference/Agenda+Tracks/Cadastre.htm
Perhaps, but it isn't too much more interventionist than a state with personal property ownership, but no real property ownership. Given the existence of courts and a sheriff to enforce your rights in, say, your car, adding a recording office and the placement of a few surveyor's monuments is a very small addition.
It's funny you should choose sheriff as your way of referring to state enforcement of personal property rights.
OED (The bracket and ellipses replace archaic forms of the word)
His function, in other words, is defined by his relation to real property owned by the king. The entry goes on to say that after the conquest, the office is referred to in french and latin documents as a viscount. His primary function was related to real property issues, and I strongly doubt that he entered into personal property disputes among the peasantry.
But, again, that's an irrelevant aside. The alternative, more minimal state I'm proposing to you has no sheriff. Personal property rights are enforced by social ostracism, and by hierarchical clan based adjudication. There are no sheriffs. I've been a guest in such a society for an extended period of time, and there were no sheriffs. And, by the way, Will, their conflict with neighboring people over pasture and water rights are episodic and not wars of conquest.
And, as I've said, there are no taxes. Why are such usufruct societies not a much more appealing alternative to libertarians? They are a much better fit with core libertarian values than are capitalist states.
And, as I've said, there are no taxes. Why are such usufruct societies not a much more appealing alternative to libertarians? They are a much better fit with core libertarian values than are capitalist states.
Posted by jayackroyd
Because most of these people are not libertarians.
Simple answers to simple questions.
Because, jay, if war is a constant and brutal human condition, absent the institution of real property which you decry, then your whole point about real property being the cause of wars of conquest and domination, not mere "boundary disputes", falls apart. The question then becomes straightforward; does real property increase peaceful and prosperous liberty, decrease it, or is it neutral?
To answer the last question, in your 11:38 post, they aren't appealing because they won't work in a society which encompasses huge numbes of people, or one in which large numbers of people seek to significantly increase their living standards via resource use. Now, if huge numbers of people are willing to live in a society which is largely unchanging, in regards to material wealth, life expectancy (no cheating by getting medicines, agricultural practices which lessen the risk of death by famine, etc., from societies which do have the institution you decry) and other things most people enjoy, fine. Good luck in finding people who are willing to say, "Ya know, croaking at 40 ain't so bad! Let's do it!!!!!!
Parcel boundaries exist on maps kept by county and municipal offices, and are the ruling authority.
This is true for platted developments, but it is not a fundamental mandatory feature of real property ownership any more than the driving of yellow cars is a fundamental mandatory feature of being a taxi operator. The plat books, like deeds, are merely records, and the mapping office has no adjudicative authority. It is possible to dig through the books and find multiple plats for the same property if, for example, one of the early ones was abandoned because the zoning board didn't like it.
In any case, the actual boundaries of actual property will be determined by private survey firms relying on metes and bounds derived from the maps. The placement of monuments by those firms will control over the plat book maintained by the county in the event of a conflict between them.
In fact, the recording of deeds isn't even a fundamental mandatory feature of real property ownership; it's perfectly possible to have a system of entirely private recordkeeping, in which a seller would be expected to provide to a buyer the physical deeds recording seisen right back to the Doomsday Book. That was the system at common law; recording acts came later. If implemented in the modern world, title insurance would get quite a bit more expensive, but property ownership could continue to exist.
I chose sheriff because in most places it is the sheriff who is responsible for seizing property and evicting squatters to enforce court judgments.
All of which is beside the point; I agree that capitalism requires the use of state force, and I don't know how subscribers to the pompously capitalized "Non-Aggression Principle" resolve the conflict. Fortunately for me, I subscribe to the principle that "There are some people who need to be shot."
Jay, I just read your other posts, and if this dispute is merely about the meaning of the term "libertarian", I'll stop here. Debates about political labels bore me to tears, and if your sense of honest discourse is less offended if I don't call myself "anti-statist" anymore, fine.
The question then becomes straightforward; does real property increase peaceful and prosperous liberty, decrease it, or is it neutral?
Ah, well there's the rub. I'm going to, in the spirit of your last remark, mentally drop the word "liberty" from this question. It's pretty clear that totalitarian agriculture increases prosperity among the wealthy, and for the average citizen, but perhaps not the median citizen. That is, the evidence is pretty strong that being a serf in Europe or a farm laborer in ancient Egypt was worse than being a hunter-gatherer or subsistence farmer.
In the current environment, where mechanization and high yielding varieties have vastly reduced the population required to grow food, it's clear that prosperity is increased in the medium (a human lifetime's) term. Compelling evidence is people leaving their farms in China to work in unpleasant working conditions, or for that matter, Dickensian London, which was an awful place, but apparently better than the alternative back at the farm.
However, it is also clear that the increased surplus of food and time leads to much more efficient wholescale murder and massive warfare. Some of this can be ascribed to arithmetic--more people, more people killed in wars. But that is not a sufficient explanation for Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, or, ftm Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To answer the last question, in your 11:38 post, they aren't appealing because they won't work in a society which encompasses huge numbes of people, or one in which large numbers of people seek to significantly increase their living standards via resource use.
Yes, of course that's obviously my point. And my larger point is that you can't get to this kind of society through the use of liberty arguments. In fact, liberty arguments represent objections. You must use utilitarian arguments of some kind, and toss out your liberty arguments.
Now, if huge numbers of people are willing to live in a society which is largely unchanging, in regards to material wealth, life expectancy (no cheating by getting medicines, agricultural practices which lessen the risk of death by famine, etc., from societies which do have the institution you decry) and other things most people enjoy, fine. Good luck in finding people who are willing to say, "Ya know, croaking at 40 ain't so bad! Let's do it!
Famine is not an issue in hunter-gatherer societies. Famine results from crop failure in agrarian societies. Or did, rather. Now it results from political inability to distribute food effectively.
Life expectancy is largely lowered by infant mortality, not a reduced life expectancy after reaching sexual maturity (unless your male and in a society prone to conflict, like the New Guineans). So the croaking at 40 thing isn't really an objection. Parasites, otoh, are a big problem in a lot of places. And there are diseases, like malaria, that have cumulative effects.
However, there is also the possibility that the current model is not sustainable. Biologist point out that there are three species population models. There are sine waves, as with fox/hare populations, where the population fluctuates based on resource availability. Long winters reduce bunny populations, which reduce fox populations, which then rebound in the following short winter. Population essentially has lower and upper bounds, and fluctuates within those bounds.
The second model is exponential growth and crash, as with a bacterium in a petri dish. Once all the nutrient is consumed, the population crashes to zero.
The third is the human model, which is exponential growth without a crash.
Or maybe, they say, there really are only two models.
Now things have changed a bit since that joke was first told. It looks like human population is going to look like an S-curve, with the exponential part of it ending in about 2 and a half generations, with population maxing out at 10 billion.
But it is by no means clear that this is within the carrying capacity of the world. It certainly isn't if everyone is living a contemporary American lifestyle.
On labels, Will, it's of course more than that. My objection is to the use of liberty arguments as trump cards, of claiming that a state that limits coercion to enforcing property rights is more moral than a state that uses coercion more broadly, and, most importan of all, the claim that a minimal state is a goal to be striven for for its own sake.
Recognizing that capitalism necessarily involves collectivism is the real point here--and that you can't claim collectivism or coercion by the state as inherently evil.
Jay, I just read your other posts, and if this dispute is merely about the meaning of the term "libertarian", I'll stop here. Debates about political labels bore me to tears, and if your sense of honest discourse is less offended if I don't call myself "anti-statist" anymore, fine.
Posted by Will Allen
Just for fun, remove the labels from all your prescription meds and canned foods. Better yet, then have someone come along and replace them randomly. Political labels have meaning or they don't. In politics, one likes to have an idea that what they get when they open a can of peas is not a can of carrots. If you can't define the term in a manner that all agree with, by convention, why do you apply it to yourself unless you are pretending to be something that you are not?
Well, HG, I just said I'm quite willing to not label myself at all anymore. If someone asks about my political beliefs, I'll simply inquire as to whether they have a half hour or so.
Jay, I fail to see how excluding infant mortality gets us anywhere. People really dislike it when their babies die. Show me a large number of people who are ailling to say, "Ya, know, a large percentage of our babies dying young, and a lot of women dying during childbirth, ain't so bad! Let's do it!!!"
Next, you are incorrect about hunter-gatherers, if you are saying starvation does not occur in those societies, but if you are simply talking about the technical meaning of "famine", fine.
As far as the future of humans, well, sooner or later a comet will strike the earth, the Yellowstone caldera will blow again, some celestial radiation event will decimate life forms on earth, or some other really bad day will come down the pike, and all of us, or nearly all of us, will go the way of Triceratops. The natural world is a real bitch, if hangin' around forever is the goal. The only way out of this trap is through the development of artifical intelligence, or being able to download our conciousness into replaceable vessels which aren't dependent on staying on this rock. To do that, we need more smart people, because you can't be sure where the breakthrough will be found. Breed away, campers!
By the way, jay, I've never claimed that collectivism or coercion by the state was inherently evil.
As far as the future of humans, well, sooner or later a comet will strike the earth, the Yellowstone caldera will blow again, some celestial radiation event will decimate life forms on earth, or some other really bad day will come down the pike, and all of us, or nearly all of us, will go the way of Triceratops.
Being concerned about these issues strikes me as extremely optimistic.
Well, HG, I just said I'm quite willing to not label myself at all anymore. If someone asks about my political beliefs, I'll simply inquire as to whether they have a half hour or so.
Retail politics or al a carte? Is it like cafeteria catholics? Most Americans are quite politically unspophisticated. "Libertarians" especially because they are so often evangelistic and think they are The Elect of God. I doubt a European or Canadian would need 30 minutes to cogently and coherently explain his politics to another European or Canadian. At least you acknowledge that your flavor of libertarianism is nothing more than the Marxism of the right, without the the strange, new words, like "proletariat". A rigid and dogmatic utopian ideology that has never and will never be put into practice successfully without dire consequences. And just how conservative have the "conservatives" in the GOP been? But these labels don't matter because, according to you, they are meaningless, or maybe just misleading.
HG, since you realy don't know very much about my political beliefs, other than what you have fantasized about, you appear to be silly. Guess what? Anything and everything ever put into practice will have dire consequences.
If this is your view, why do you care what is put into practice?
HG, since you realy don't know very much about my political beliefs, other than what you have fantasized about, you appear to be silly. Guess what? Anything and everything ever put into practice will have dire consequences.
Posted by Will Allen
And you have the temerity to accuse me of being silly merely because you don't know what you believe in or what to call it? You are by definition a "glibertarian".
HG - So George Will has a different opinion? So what. I enjoy some of his writing, but that hardly means I have to defer to him as some absolute authority on the issue.
Also he was talking about "A properly functioning free market system. I've already said that it functions better with a minimal government to keep the peace, and settle disputes. Where I would disagree is his statement "Capitalism is a government program", which I would consider not only wrong, but nonsensical.
JayAckroyd - RE: "Capitalism requires credit."
No it doesn't. It usually operates with credit, and credit is an important and useful tool for it, but not an absolute requirement.
RE: "Credit requires collateral." -
Again and important and useful tool, and normally used, but again not an absolute requirement.
RE" Collateral requires a trusted third party to confirm ownership of that collateral."
Once again, not an absolute requirement.
RE: "That trusted third party is the state."
I'm starting to sense a theme here... No such requirement.
RE: Land can only be acquired, and given ownership status for individual citizens who wish to engage in capitalism, by a state taking it away from someone currently using it.
Ditto
RE: "You gotta have a state for capitalism."
No you don't. It helps make the system a lot larger, more sophisticated, and more effective, but it isn't a requirement.
RE: "And it has to be one substantially more intrusive than alternative state organizations that do not include real property ownership as part of that organization."
It doesn't have to be that intrusive at all.
RE: "Oh yeah, and it requires systematic murder and genocide to put into place."
Capitalism, like any other system that might be tried. Operates in the context of a history of occasional systematic murder. It can't operate out of the context of that history because it can't change history. But neither can any other system. And there is nothing inherent in capitalism that requires such a history in order to function.
RE: "WTF? I'm talking about Washington's "avoid foreign entanglements" And Ron Paul's call to close bases in Korea, Germany and Japan."
You may have been talking about such ideas, but you used a term that goes beyond such ideas. A proper libertarian is not "an isolationist" in the full sense of the term. Also he or she doesn't have to be an isolationist, even in terms of what you actually meant rather than what you said. A position of not having foreign alliances or taking action against nasty foreign totalitarian governments is entirely consistent with libertarian principles but isn't required in order to be a libertarian.
RE: "I am saying that the definition of land as property creates a state that is not minimalist."
It does not, at least not as an inherent or automatic part of having land as property. A non-minimalist state is likely to arise, but states without respect for rights to privately owned land tend to be a lot further from minimalist.
RE: "My objection is to the use of liberty arguments as trump cards, of claiming that a state that limits coercion to enforcing property rights is more moral than a state that uses coercion more broadly"
Few would want a state that limits coercion to enforcing property rights, except perhaps under the broadest "emminations and penumbra" of the idea of property rights. Your right to not be murdered, assaulted, or raped, is generally not looked at as a property right (although from a certain perspective it could be seen as such), most people, even most libertarians, in a modern society would want some form of control over traffic (although I suppose it could be done by a non-state entity).
But a state that limits its coercion, in a way that includes protection of property rights, but is still limited, is more moral, and better in other ways, than a totalitarian state.
RE: "Famine is not an issue in hunter-gatherer societies. "
Famine -
1: an extreme scarcity of food
2archaic : starvation
3archaic : a ravenous appetite
4: a great shortage
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/famine
All four definitions can, and in the past have existed in hunter-gatherer societies. They might still exist in the present as well but there are so few hunter-gather societies left, so I'm not sure at any given moment, if one of them is facing an extreme scarcity of food.
RE: "Life expectancy is largely lowered by infant mortality, not a reduced life expectancy after reaching sexual maturity"
In primitive hunter-gather societies both where fairly major effects compared to say the modern US. The maximum post maturity life span may not be that much different, but the percentage of people (or even the percentage of post sexual maturity individuals) who approach it is noticeably higher today.
Your probably correct that people dieing before maturity (including infant mortality) was a bigger factor, but the post maturity death rate is also significantly lower in the US today, and likely even in the world as a whole today, than it was in the primitive societies you seem to admire so much.
RE: "The third is the human model, which is exponential growth without a crash."
Check the projections for future population growth. It appears to be leveling out, and not from lack of food or generally not having enough resources, but by people having fewer children. It isn't caused by "carrying capacity" issues.
Also humans have the ability to increase carrying capacity.
I think James Fulford has the best response.
The problem with civil rights laws is that they are enforced on the assumption that on average blacks and whites are equal in their behavior and abilities. The statistical evidence suggests that this is not the case, and so we are left with quotas, an inability to prevent 9/11, cabbies forced to take dangerous fares, and policies that don't allow prisons to use common sense rape prevention methods.