Is Private Property Theft?
8 years ago in #anarchism by lukestokes (76)
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"It is theft because it implies the use of legal privilege to grant “rights” that are unnatural and don’t naturally follow from possession and use in itself. Anarcho-capitalism would ultimately rely on violence in order to defend a privilege that would not naturally exist."
I take issue with that assertion, that property is somehow an unnatural manifestation of human creativity. Even many of the rodents and snakes that populate my back yard are territorial in nature, and they will defend their territory violently.
I think, on the contrary, that property accumulation is a natural consequence of scarcity. Scarcity is a natural consequence of population growth (including in the case of wild animals). All animals, including humans, will tend to expand in population until resources are scarce enough to "cull the herd" so to speak. An individual's survival depends upon property in these situations, and it is certainly not immoral to simply be alive.
There must be a system of distributing property in these situations of scarcity, and the anarcho-capitalist model is the only one I've seen that would rely entirely on decentralized non-coercive systems to allow that distribution to happen. This model contains an acknowledgement of the natural state of things, and so it is structured in a way that addresses inherent problems associated with scarcity that nature dictates.
One major difference between humans and other animals however, is that humans have the capacity to stop procreating in their own self-interest when scarcity dictates. As such, humanity doesn't need to end up in a situation in which the "herd is culled," because we can individually engineer our respective situations to manage our level of wealth or lack thereof. This is the one thing in the scenario of property ownership that isn't natural, or goes against nature, and I say thank goodness for that. This ability to stop procreating when scarcity is sufficiently high is the one thing that's going to save us from famine as we approach the ceiling of our ingenuity (if there is such a thing).
Very well said. I really liked this point:
I'm all for a Star Trek reality, I just don't think that's our currently reality. I also acknowledge we have the power to change "nature" and reality as we've somewhat moved beyond natural evolution to create our own future. It's going to be quite interesting to see where this all goes, but for now humans have different ambitions which, for now, ensure we won't have post scarcity any time soon.
Thanks for a great comment.
No. Private property is not theft. Taxation, however, is.
I would like to know how someone gets to be the proprietor of say a piece of land, what right did he have to get it? You know like the original English settlers in the USA, Australia, West Indies etc, what was their right to gain property of that land?
There has to be a reason for them being able to do this and I know just what it is, it is the use of force, as has always been the case, you grab land because you can and then you invent laws that legalize this. So I would think that property is theft, but then again I think this theft is necessary or else there would really be chaos. I like may anarchist ideas, but I have always had the idea that any human endeavor ultimately ends in a group obtaining too many privileges and forming a ruling group of elites and bam we are back with a government. I think whatever way you take your options you will always end up with the privileged and the guys who have to work their backs off for a living. This is life and it will be very difficult to change it, perhaps in a far distant future when all our needs can be met by artificial intelligence doing all the work and even then I bet there would be a central entity in charge.
Excuse me if it is sometimes difficult to understand what I am writing my native language is Spanish so I might mistake the order of the words in the idea I am trying to express.
Anyway I really enjoyed reading your article, nice for a debate.
This is a very difficult question which few have been able to solve in a satisfactory moral way. Some argue a form of Georgism is the way to go, while still others think use and improvement or homesteading is what matters. Maybe still others will think in terms of protection, like Johan Eliasch who bought up 400,000 acres of rainforest to protect it. Land is quite difficult to "own" because we can't take it with us and it varies widely in quality and availability. It's the home for other valuable resources as well. In many places it's abundant, but undesirable. In others, it's scarce and rich with value do to other externalities like climate, access, and proximity to other communities and resources.
Just because it was obtained immorally in the past by people who are now long dead does not mean we can't strive towards a moral ownership today. To the best of my knowledge, a market system is still the most effective way to determine value and transfer of ownership. Yes, it's massively distorted because of government and corporate banker interests which are directly part of government through their revolving door system and regulatory capture, but that doesn't mean the concept itself of voluntary, mutually beneficial trade via justly accumulated value is invalid. The "have nots" today still have opportunity to build a life for themselves and eventually justly obtain land, though it may take many decades for them while others may inherit it over night.
Nature is not fair. Life is not fair. It's noble of us to strive for equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome, IMO, is not only impossible but undesirable as well. Humans are unique and that leads to many differences.
On the conversation of property, land is surely the most complicated topic. That said, very few people today are actually using violence to obtain it.
Many financially successful people I know work much harder than others. It may not be physical labor, but it's no less taxing from a mental and psychological perspective, full of risk, hardship, failure, and determination. We all have our starting points thanks to our genes. We also have neuroplasticity to rise up and become just about anything we're determined enough to obtain.
We've had the pinkertons and it didn't work out too well because the oligarchs abused it, this is how we got here, do you like what we have today?
Any solution that leaves the banks intact, and in charge of the wage slavery, is doomed from the get go, just as the last few centuries have demonstrated.
Keep working, stop paying, and we work out the rest as we go, gives freedom to those that do the work, today.
Well, we'd have to set a day, say, next Tuesday, then, we keep working, but we stop charging for that work.
The only people that will be upset are the oligarchs.
The worker now gets rent free, lights free, food free, cars free, cameras free, what ever the worker wants is free because all the other workers benefit from the same.
Trolls/bums are contained just as we control them here, by consensus.
Fair point, but we also don't put cats in bags and burn them for entertainment anymore. We don't bring our children to public executions for entertainment. My argument is the concept of human morality has evolved due to the connectedness of the Internet (and other meme transmission systems). Our technology has brought us up higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs which enables more people to think about self actualization and about helping others.
I like your ideas in principle (kind of reminds me of the it's a small world ride at Disneyland), but in practice I think it's very flawed. Nothing is "free" because everything requires effort to create or combat entropy itself. Calling a gift economy or a communist economy or some other economy "free" doesn't make it free. Also, I don't see how this system deals with the widely different ambitions many humans have. I get how some primitive cultures would shame those with personal ambition, and that's certainly one way to deal with it, but I personally prefer to let people rise as high as they want to instead of pulling people down. I'm happy to now people like Elon Musk are out there trying to improve humanities chances in the universe.
Here are two short references that may help you.
This first one left me dumbfounded, I was not prepared to be a communist.
This second one I found many years earlier, it let me know that I was not on an impossible journey.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/624?msg=welcome_stranger http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php
I agree, tanstaafl, if we want consumer goods we have to build the machines that make them possible.
That requires work.
I do not agree that crapitalism is in any way optimal for these endeavors, and in fact, I find it to be counter productive.
Absent crapitalism 100's of millions of people wouldn't have died at the hand of gov't in the last century.
These workers could have contributed to the whole of humanity, rather than to the coffers of the few criminals that kill us to control us.
Good luck finding well fed, housed, clothed, and educated people to wage wars for the crapitalust's bottom line.
Absent the matrix/paradigm already forced upon us as children, and justified(poorly) to us by (seemingly) rational arguments, we would not be as warlike.
We would quickly learn that sharing is caring and begin to populate the planets.
Have you read Origins of Virtue or The Better Angles of Our Nature?
I find that to be a hard argument to justify. If I read the links you supplied above, will I find justification for such a claim? IMO, it's not logical to lay war at the feet of capitalism. That would be a gross misrepresentation of history and the values and motives of humanity (which, I believe, are changing over time).
I think the more people we get up Maslow's Hierarchy, the more we will realize this vision. I also think economic freedom (and yes, that includes the accumulation of capital, investment, and R&D with the intention of creating profit) has contributed greatly to the improvement of humanity. Example:
I think David Graeber's critique of Steven Pinker's book was a good one. Graeber points out that a lot of coercion has been institutionalized and normalized so that it no longer looks like violence. There's systems of violence all around us, we just don't recognize them for what they are anymore. There's been a sublimation of violence, but its still there. They've just dressed up the violence and perfected it--they've perfected violence to the point that physical force is rarely necessary since they can intimidate people into conformity through culture, social pressure, and such. Look at public schools. Forcing kids into these little prisons against their will, where they will be indoctrinated, and their parents are forced to send them there. It's sublimated violence, but the coercive apparatus of the modern State has been so perfected that people conform out of fear or confusion as to alternative options. Kids stand for the pledge of allegiance, everyone at a ball game stands for the national anthem, and they do so out of social pressure--even if they don't believe in the State and don't want to stand, they will do so because they rightfully fear the reaction of the crowd around them if they were to resist. People "voluntarily" pay their taxes. They voluntarily purchase car insurance, get a license before driving, etc. They voluntarily obey a lot of laws (anti-drug laws, anti-homeless laws) most of the time because there is a certain understanding that bad things will happen if you don't obey. Nevertheless, all of this is still predicated on violence. They've just removed the obvious physical violence and replaced it by structures, institutions, and customs that involve violence or the threat of violence on a large enough scale to thoroughly intimidate most people into doing what they want without having to use physical force most of the time.
Are you saying that Boeing and Dynecorp are not crapitalistic or warlike?
If you read the links above you will have an alternative viewpoint not brought to you by those that will kill you to control you.
I have not read those books, yet.
interesting read as always
Thanks Tarzan!
Holy shit. Well done my man very well done. I am impressed and that is not an easy job.
Thanks :)
I skimmed through it for now. I'll have to read it more thoroughly and give a detailed response later.
The article I linked on "Property is Theft" was written by me, but I have since changed my position and embraced geo-libertarianism. I tend to revise my views a lot as I discover new arguments and new ideas. So don't expect this to be a debate as much as a discussion. I will just offer some clarification on certain points and give my thoughts about some of your points.
Excellent! That's what I was hoping for as I read your original post. Too many people are far too dogmatic on these topics, IMO, and if we're unwilling to accept new information and change, we'll never grow.
I look forward to your clarifications and would like to know more about geo-libertarianism.
I'm trying to think of how to go about writing a response to this. My response is gonna be a little scattered. My thought earlier today was maybe moving this conversation to Orkut and linking it on Steemit, that way there could be a more conversational back-and-forth rather than a series of dissertations. Unfortunately, I just learned that Orkut no longer exists. I'd like to have this conversation on a forum where it could be more of a continuous thread for dialogue, but not like a chat room. There's a lot of things that we are approaching from different perspectives and we are using terms differently. I don't think our different definitions are equally valid though, so there's discussion to be had there too.
If you're open to a conversation on a public forum like that, and happen to know of a good forum we can use, let me know. Personally, I just like to do Steemit posts on a single topic, and this seems like it needs to be more of a dialogue on several related topics.
Sorry, I haven't replied to this yet. I'm not very interested in using other mediums at the moment. The nesting limit is annoying, for sure, but dialogues can still take place in a forum-like manner here.
And that is the problem with framing, language, and philosophy. If we go deep enough, we'll find many disagreements on how we view and define words. That's why these discussions often don't really change minds. Hopefully though, over time, people will grab bits and pieces of meaning that they value and use to further shape their views in the future.
I started off as a right-libertarian, having studied Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman shortly after getting out of high school. I was also very religious, deeply influenced by C.S. Lewis, Cornelius van Til, and Eastern Orthodox theology. I ended up reading Rothbard, becoming sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism but rejecting it in favor of individualist anarchism of the Lysander Spooner/Benjamin Tucker variety (partially because I had been influenced by Wendell Barry and by distributist ideas). Ultimately I started drifting more and more to the left, embracing a mixture of mutualism and libertarian municipalism. I also became an atheist somewhere along the way (thanks to Karl Popper and Mises). My general rule is that I follow the logic wherever it leads, so my views tend to be pretty flexible in response to new insights.
I might be open to having a dialogue on Steemit at some point, but I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment with other things.
That's a really great overview of your philosophical journey. Thanks for sharing! Mine is somewhat similar, in many regards, but I came to it later in life, I think. I'm still learning about mutualism and haven't read Wendell Barry, so I'm sure I have much more to learn which will certainly impact my thinking even more over time. One thing I do enjoy challenging my anarcho-capitalist friends with is to clearly articulate what they view as the real emergent properties that exist as many human beings come together and how his philosophy deals with the problems which emerge that are more than the sum of the parts.