Francios Tremblay links to this article against anarcho-capitalism. I think that the article, while not perfect, makes a crucial point that solidifies something that I've been talking about recently (namely that if we do not object to the principle of absolute decision-making power derived from territorialism in general, then liberty is relativized to whatever a property owner allows and consequentially the "love it or leave it" problem persists). This is *not* a mere "anarcho-semantics" issue, it is a substantive one that strikes at the heart of how liberty and property are concieved of in relation to eachother.
The problem reduces to this: that anarcho-capitalism does not object to the principle of absolute/arbitrary authority over people that live in a given geographical area, it only objects to the means with which ownership over the geographical area is obtained. That is, it opposes the state only in the sense that it did not obtain ownership justly; if the geographical claim were obtained through homesteading or exchange, then the authority claim over those who live in the area would suddenly be treated as "legitimate". In effect, this means that everything about the state that anarcho-capitalists would otherwise object to can theoretically become legitimized using an anarcho-capitalist framework on the condition that the ownership claim is based on what is considered to be the right property norm.
Anarcho-capitalists will normally, and quite correctly, object to the "love it or leave it" argument for the state. But their grounds for objecting to "love it or leave it" is only based on the idea that it isn't the state's just property (and the implication of this is that it if *were* the state's just property, then the "love it or leave it" argument would suddenly be valid). What's more, they tend to neglect the failure of "love it or leave it" in any other context (such as that of an individual proprietor). From my perspective, the problem with "love it or leave it" does not merely reduce to the state not having a rightful claim to ownership, but it is problematic for the even more fundamental reason that arbitrary claims of absolute authority over others derived from territory are not justified in general. The problem with authority cannot simply be reduced to a question of who owns what.
Even if someone "homesteaded" or voluntarily traded for a given plot of land, this doesn't give them legitimate absolute authority to control the lives of whoever happens to occupy the area. This, to me, is the glaring contradiction in anarcho-capitalist political theory: that it objects to the state's absolute authority claim over those that occupy the territory while not objecting to any other claim of absolute authority over those that occupy a given territory. Or, to put the matter more bluntly, it objects to the state while simultaneously rationalizing the exact same thing as the state ("ultimate decision-making power" over others based on territory) on absolutist propertarian grounds. Indeed, one could make a justification for a state using absolutist propertarian arguments (which, applied to larger scales, can go something like this: "city X was voluntarily sold to person Y, therefore person Y has ultimate decision-making power over everyone in the city").
The issue, then, reduces to the pressing question of "ultimate decision-making power" in general, not the question of *who* should have "ultimate decision-making power". In relativizing and subordinating liberty to property, hardline anarcho-capitalism ends up looking like a rather hollow creed in the sense that it does not fundamentally object to authoritarianism. Rather, by implication of its own norms, whether intended or not, it ends up justifying authoritarianism on the grounds that it occurs on so-and-so's property and that it's the proprietor's "ultimate decision-making power". This blurs the line between liberty and authority by making it dependant on ownership - if you don't have ownership, you more or less are stuck submitting to the authority of those with ownership, and if you do have ownership, everyone else's liberty ends where your property lines begin.
If this is what the heart of the social anarchist critique of anarcho-capitalism is, then I must confess: I agree with the social anarchists on this general point (although when things get more specific, some notable disagreements emerge). Granted, some anarcho-capitalists tweak their theories to avoid such an authoritarian implication (and I would therefore want to avoid strawmanning at least to that extent), but this should be the logical implication of absolutist propertarianism and an indication of what happens when one fetishizes property and contracts to the point of absurdity and self-contradiction. And in the context of such an implication, combining absolutist propertarianism with anarchism is indeed a gross contradiction in terms and anarcho-capitalism deserves the derision that it normally gets from traditional anarchists.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
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24 comments:
Whose problems would the social anarchist solve?
I doubt enough already that mankind is capable of living in an anarcho-capitalistic world, but at least ancaps address the natural selfishness of 99.999% of humanity.
But a world without private property? That's paradise for a different species. Most humans aren't capable of enjoying such a world.
I don't advocate Franc's position. So you're strawmanning and avoiding the criticism here: which is that ancap devolves into everything it claims to oppose by reintroducing authoritarianism in through the backdoor of absolutist propertarianism. Except when I critisize absolutist propertarianism, I am *not* taking the communist position in favor of the abolition of property, I'm critisizing a particular property norm (particularly as it relates to the land question).
I don't advocate a "world without private property", nor do I believe that such a thing is possible. What I do advocate, however, is a lack of absolute authority over other people in a given geographical area, and I think that anarcho-capitalism may end up being inconsistent in light of this criteria.
I read this post, and struggled to find where the logic broke down, and then realized it more or less correctly describes the 'absolutist propertarian' philosophy, I just don't see how its a problem.
yes, hardline anarcho-capitalism effectively gives property owners autocratic state-powers within their territory. Your post aptly makes that point. Im just not convinced by anything youve written here that is a bad thing or somehow self-contradictory.
I'm not sure this is quite right. An-caps advocate private property in land, but that, at least as I always understood it, is a different claim from sovereignty. Property in a tangible object is essentially a right of exclusion, to say other people can't use the object in question without the owner's permission. In land, it means the owner can kick people off, and thus ultimately control its use.
Territorial sovereignty is a different kind of claim altogether from property, involving rather more far-reaching powers. The sovereign claims, at least in theory, absolute power over the subjects in his territory. If he wants to kick you out just like a landowner could, then he can do that, but he can also prevent you from leaving, or just kill you outright. It seems like a perfectly consistent position to support private property in land but oppose sovereignty.
As for anarcho-capitalism, in the ways I've heard it described the exact relation between the land-owner and someone on his land would be rooted in a dynamically negotiated network of contracts among their respective PDAs, and thus is really an endogeneous feature of the outcome rather than something a supporter of that process is really either advocating or opposing. I have no idea whether that process would actually reproduce sovereign areas in this sense, as opposed to merely private property, but I can't quite imagine being inclined to agree to a contract which gives them power over me in any world but the present one where no non-sovereign alternatives exist.
"anarcho-capitalism does not object to the principle of absolute/arbitrary authority over people that live in a given geographical area"
You're right, such a postion devolves immediately back to the state. But you've knocked down an argument that no ancap I know of has ever made. And no ancap argument I've ever heard implies it. The closest that could come to being true is to note that thin-libertarian ancaps object to nothing that two people voluntarily agree to that doesn't affect others, and that anarcho capitalism is, strictly defined as a political theory, thin.
"You're right, such a postion devolves immediately back to the state. But you've knocked down an argument that no ancap I know of has ever made. And no ancap argument I've ever heard implies it."
The absolutist position on land property *does* imply it. Whether ancaps intend to justify such a thing is another question. But there are plenty of ancaps that argue from the perspective of distinguishing "just authority" or a "government" from a "state" and "illegitimate authority" merely on the grounds that it's a private owner in control.
On the rather vulgar side of things, for example, we have ancaps that advocate a "private city" model that is, in fact, a monarchal city-state achieved through a faux-privatization scheme in which the state sells itself to the highest bidder and the new "owner" has defacto absolute authority over the residents.
"The closest that could come to being true is to note that thin-libertarian ancaps object to nothing that two people voluntarily agree to that doesn't affect others, and that anarcho capitalism is, strictly defined as a political theory, thin."
That may be a good point, in that this criticism applies more to "thin" libertarian ancaps than others. However, many ancaps, in fact, are rather "thin" on just about all fronts and tend to narrow the scope of liberty to a restrictive property norm.
"I read this post, and struggled to find where the logic broke down, and then realized it more or less correctly describes the 'absolutist propertarian' philosophy, I just don't see how its a problem.
yes, hardline anarcho-capitalism effectively gives property owners autocratic state-powers within their territory. Your post aptly makes that point. Im just not convinced by anything youve written here that is a bad thing or somehow self-contradictory."
It's a bad thing if you value liberty, and it's self-contradictary if one claims to be against autocratic states (or all states) in the first place. "Freeing" people on the basis of a definition of freedom that technically preserves everything about the state that one objected to in the first place seems incoherant.
I too am lost in the language. Can we appeal to an analogy to better paint the dilemma? Let me try one and you can correct it as you deem. Someone rightfully sells a city to an individual who then wants to murder (at will) its inhabitants. The argument is thus, this individual is only practicing his rightful claim to property authority. Now, in a city full of renters, couldn’t one claim that some form of either implicit or explicit contract exists that, in case of a change in management, certain rights still apply (for example the right to leave, unharmed). And couldn’t one argue that to purchase this city is, by authority of former contract, to purchase these contracts i.e. these depicted rights?
"I don't advocate a "world without private property", nor do I believe that such a thing is possible."
... replacing property with possession is not nearly as big of a deal as you guys make it to be. I think you merely have a gigantic blind spot.
"I too am lost in the language. Can we appeal to an analogy to better paint the dilemma? Let me try one and you can correct it as you deem. Someone rightfully sells a city to an individual who then wants to murder (at will) its inhabitants. The argument is thus, this individual is only practicing his rightful claim to property authority. Now, in a city full of renters, couldn’t one claim that some form of either implicit or explicit contract exists that, in case of a change in management, certain rights still apply (for example the right to leave, unharmed). And couldn’t one argue that to purchase this city is, by authority of former contract, to purchase these contracts i.e. these depicted rights?"
A number of problems:
1. The ownership claim of the individual or group that is selling the city in the first place is highly dubious. Who technically "owns" an entire city, including all of its infrastructure and homes - other than currently existing states as the defacto proprietor? Hence, it seems like this basically reduces to an intergenerational thief peddling stolen goods.
2. It seems obvious that merely transfering such a dubious ownership claim into new hands does not change the fundamental problem of statism that previously existed - the new "owner", if it's an individual, is a defacto monarch of the city, or if it's a group, they constitute a defacto oligarchal state over the city.
3. How the "title" is legitimately transfered to some new individual or group in the absence of unanimous consent, given the existance of currently existing residents of such a city, is beyond me. I doubt that every resident is just going to voluntarily sell their portion to a single individual or group.
4. Even if the entire city is somehow magically achieved through "homesteading" or pure voluntary exchange and gift, the very idea that owning property grants absolute authority over others is in question here. To make a small-scale analogy, I make voluntarily aquire a home, but that doesn't mean that I can legitimate enslave or murder my house guests on a whim.
5. The "right to leave" is meaningless if it functions as a legitimization for "the right to absolute authority over others" or "the right to murder people". It's the exact same thing as "love it or leave" it in the normal sense that libertarian anarchists would object to. As for the "implicit consent" deal, this is the same thing as the "social contract" argument that libertarian anarchists would normally object to.
6. By consequence of these considerations, this is qualatatively identical to the very statism that our anarcho-capitalist friends would have set out to oppose in the first place. This is the kind of blatant contradiction that I'm talking about.
I too am not a fan of implicit contracts (in fact, I believe it is the reason for the gapping holes in defining private property). If interested, here is a paper in process at Liberty Papers: The Implicit Contract: An Amoral Animal (http://jeremiahdyke.blogspot.com/)
Nevertheless, I believe I have a slightly better understanding of your objection now.
Using your small-scale analogy of acquiring a home via homesteading, gift, exchange, etc. does not yield you absolute authority over those individuals who filter through your property.
I will start with the obvious. If ownership is a claim to a geometrical three-dimensional space (a specific longitude, latitude and altitude) then what other form of ownership is there aside from absolute? And if it is indeed relative, as I believe you are suggesting, then relative to whom or what? Why are you specifically distinguishing between property of a person (i.e. the individual) and property of inanimate figures (like homes, or ground). More importantly, why are you giving precedence the individual? Why do you believe that the individual who is in your living room is anymore of an owner to that three-dimensional space than a dog or a chair? Do they all not occupy the same space that you claim to be yours? Is ownership to be mutual?
There is only few appeals that I can think of if this were my stance. Either that of implied-in-fact contracting (the implicit contract). Meaning, that if you invite someone onto your property, then it is assumed that certain rights are implied. Or, you hold individuals above other property based on some claim to morality.
There is more I will write, but let me make stop here and make sure I understand your argument correctly.
"I will start with the obvious. If ownership is a claim to a geometrical three-dimensional space (a specific longitude, latitude and altitude) then what other form of ownership is there aside from absolute? And if it is indeed relative, as I believe you are suggesting, then relative to whom or what?"
What I mean by "absolute" is not that person X is *the* owner, but that person X being the owner has absolute *decision-making power* not only over the use of the resource, but over the lives of any other person that happens to exist or occupy the area at any given moment. If we want to continue thinking in terms of "self-ownership", my objection translates thus: land ownership cannot legitimately violate other people's "self-ownership".
"Why are you specifically distinguishing between property of a person (i.e. the individual) and property of inanimate figures (like homes, or ground)."
Well, first of all, I do not believe in ownership of persons. I do not consider persons to be commodities or exchangable/alienable property - that leads straight to a justification for slavery. So in this very basic sense, personhood and property do not function in the exact same way in an inalienable theory of personal sovereignty.
"More importantly, why are you giving precedence the individual? Why do you believe that the individual who is in your living room is anymore of an owner to that three-dimensional space than a dog or a chair? Do they all not occupy the same space that you claim to be yours?"
I'm giving precedence to the sovereignty of *all* individuals. I'm not claiming that someone in my living room is *more* of an owner of it, or an owner of it at all. I'm saying that my ownership of it doesn't grant me the authority to suddenly violate all of their rights.
"There is only few appeals that I can think of if this were my stance. Either that of implied-in-fact contracting (the implicit contract). Meaning, that if you invite someone onto your property, then it is assumed that certain rights are implied. Or, you hold individuals above other property based on some claim to morality."
The latter is closer to what I'm getting at - I hold individual sovereignty to be *above* property in a basic sense. I also hold property to be an entailment of individual sovereignty.
To indulge the point, to accept this is to accept mutual ownership of any given space which in and of itself may lead to some logical absurdities (After all, rape is but extreme trespassing). Why can’t we accept that for an individual to trespass upon another’s property they are either bound by certain contractual rights or yield their rights? Maybe they are suicidal? For example, and to save time, let me copy and paste an excerpt from a piece I wrote before that generally applies to how an individual may efficiently contract before entering another’s property. Excuse the longwindedness
Like all contractual ambiguity a remedy to future contract is the mistakes of previous contracts. The remedy is thus intrinsically built into the market for contracting. For example, imagine the creation an all encompassing agreement on prices paid for services received, derived from previous contract law. This type of all encompassing agreement may be designed by two merging insurance companies, one for the consumer and one for the producer. Let this fictional firm operate under the name “TRUST”. The purpose of such a company is to generate a trust between two parties based on explicit agreements of terms prior to the exchange of goods or services. In addition to generating trust, we can imagine this same company insuring from future loopholes by insurance. If a loophole were thus to be found between two contracting parties, which ended in large settlements or losses due to contract deviation, the insurance company, TRUST, would thus be liable for damages to either party. Therefore, we can see how an objection from the stand point of time consumption may be remedied.
If your argument were something to the nature of, after drinking a cup of coffee the owner claims that it will now cost you one million dollars. Thus what is the market policy for such exploitation? Well, if we were dealing with an implicit contract we would thus outsource a decision to a third party who would decide a “true market value” for coffee. These individuals may factor in many variables such as normal market prices, substitutes, any additional complements, etc. We would thus retreat into a realm of arbitrariness in which there is no true ownership. Yet, who possesses the authority to decide the valuation one places on their property except the owner of that property? Who is to say how much one can value a cup of coffee (maybe someone famous owned that coffeemaker, or that cup, etc), and who has the authority to determine price except the owner of that property? Consequently, I can see no other characterization of an implicit contract than that of property violation.
Now, returning to our image of a firm that provides insurance against such exploitation (TRUST) and assuring loyalty between the contracting parties, the new question that surfaces is whether these two individuals are participants of this firm? If they are, than these terms should be determined. The clause may simply state that in a willing two-party transaction one may not sue for above three times the market price of the product transferred--thus, more than three times a market price of a cup of coffee. The language used here is of course completely arbitrary. It serves only as an example, not as anything remotely concrete. Yet its purpose is to signal how the problem may be approached, especially how it may be approached when a firm like TRUST is liable to any mistakes within the contracting. Therefore, let’s paint a possible picture of how a transaction may occur without implicit contracting.
Here is a possible scenario
• Individual A desires a cup of coffee
• Individual B owns a coffee shop
• Individual A notices a sign “operating member of “TRUST” and thus feels safe with entering the shop
• Individual B must show identification that he is a member of “TRUST” to secure the sale of coffee
• Individual A believes he is safe from exploitation and buys the coffee
• Individual B worries that he could be sued by individual A for something (like making him sick), thus individual B takes out added insurance from “TRUST” that protects him from lawsuits of such.
"To indulge the point, to accept this is to accept mutual ownership of any given space which in and of itself may lead to some logical absurdities (After all, rape is but extreme trespassing)."
I believe you're misunderstanding my point, because I'm not talking about "mutual ownership" of land (or any resource for that matter) and it doesn't logically follow from what I'm saying.
"Why can’t we accept that for an individual to trespass upon another’s property they are either bound by certain contractual rights or yield their rights?"
I'm saying that the entire norm of rights completely collapses if we have a property norm that effectively says that you have no rights at all once you're on someone else's land.
“I'm saying that the entire norm of rights completely collapses if we have a property norm that effectively says that you have no rights at all once you're on someone else's land.”
Yet, this is assuming there would not arise a market to correct for this. I believe you can have it both ways. No one would rationally enter someone else’s land under the conditions of absolute rights (or thus under the condition of yielding all rights), thus, either our complex system of social interaction would cease to exist or individuals would need to find way to contract with one another. We must be able to accept that if there is demand for interaction a market can arise to fulfill this void.
Simply we have absolute rights over our property. If we wish to exchange with others we must contract with them to grant them certain rights (thus, in the end, yielding our absolute authority). I believe this conundrum that you are worried about is a naturally correcting within the market. Only, instead of appealing to some higher morality in which to take away another’s absolute rights over his property, he himself will yield his absolute rights in order to have interaction.
Wait, I don't get it.
Alex, it sounds like you're suggesting that the following two things can be true at the same time:
1) Some individual X utilized a formerly unowned plot of land in a way that was socially recognized as entitling X to a persistent, exclusive claim on the land within the bounds of prevailing private property norms. (Or else, X acquired title to such a plot of land from its former owner in a recognized manner.)
2) X can still act wrongly within the boundaries of his plot of land, perhaps even to the point where others might legitimately seek to intervene (and perhaps, if you're really willing to jump off the deep end, they might even intervene ON X's LAND).
This seems clearly preposterous. Don't you realize that by trying to argue this point, you're presupposing that your audience owns themselves and therefore they can rape and torture and murder on their own property if they want to and no one can do anything about it except ostracize them? IT STANDS TO REASON!
(Or, for the commies who aren't on board with rape, torture, and murder ON PEOPLE'S OWN PROPERTY, replace those terms with "tax and legislate and regulate and conscript and detain.")
It's almost as if you think property norms are built on a complex foundation of, on one hand, economic theories seeking to leverage free markets and tendencies toward mutual adjustment to secure emergent order and the general weal, and on the other hand, conceptions of the respect to which individuals are due in light of the special role that property plays in individuals' lives, plans, and overall well-being. What a maroon! Not only does this have nothing to do with the historical liberal defense of property, and not only does it clearly contradict all normal intuitions about the limits of private authority, but it clearly ignores the basic fact that absolute libertarian conceptions of property rights are TRUE A PRIORI. You obviously need to realize that A is A.
This is totally contingent upon the theory that capitalist anarchism puts ultimate decision-making power in the hands of territory owners.
I consider human life to be absolutely superordinate to property. Property, in whatever form it exists, exists in support of and relation to human life. So if a person walks on to my property, I have no right but to remove them from my property. I may not kill them, nor may I fine them or imprison them.
"So if a person walks on to my property, I have no right but to remove them from my property. I may not kill them, nor may I fine them or imprison them."
Stop being so mealy-mouthed. You know very well that all such laws are ultimately based on violence. If someone refuses to be removed, then violence will be used. Either by the State or by you.
" Not only does this have nothing to do with the historical liberal defense of property, and not only does it clearly contradict all normal intuitions about the limits of private authority, but it clearly ignores the basic fact that absolute libertarian conceptions of property rights are TRUE A PRIORI. You obviously need to realize that A is A."
You got me, Danny. You got me. Now I'm uncertain which part of your post was serious critique and which was jest.
"I consider human life to be absolutely superordinate to property. Property, in whatever form it exists, exists in support of and relation to human life. So if a person walks on to my property, I have no right but to remove them from my property. I may not kill them, nor may I fine them or imprison them."
If you support the right of self-ownership then you can't support the right of property in land where all land is privately owned because there would be no place to exercise that right
Every bit of it was the God-honest truth, commie.
"Stop being so mealy-mouthed. You know very well that all such laws are ultimately based on violence. If someone refuses to be removed, then violence will be used. Either by the State or by you."
Yup. And I do not see a problem with it. *shoots Franc on his lawn*
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