First of all I dont have any leader to follow around, youre confusing quoting a poster on a fraction of my OP with "following" them.

When you said that moorobot and phil were smart but misguided I must admit that I thought that aplied to everybody else who was smart and disagreed with u, btw I love how you assume my misunderstanings of what u are trying to tell me are all my fault, perhaps you are not communicating your message well enough?


Lol at extreme capitalism being the most fair system out there.

a free-market but just not that free, I dont have the exact amount of freedom required in the market but I think that the amount of freedom proposed by ACists is way too much.

Oh and btw you ignored my counter-critique to youre critique of my definition of freedom( a definition of freedom which you made up to mock me btw)

This is definitely a better way of saying what I wanted to, I left out that this whole idea is murky and the norms that govern it are going to change and be determined over long periods of time (centuries of human societies).

And natedogg is right. Why does the solution to this problem have to be involuntary? Like I said in my other post, one of the things that pisses me off the most is that people act like ACists don't care about this probably, and that is flat out 100% untrue.

What is your reaction going to be when I knock on your door and inform you that me and my people have decided you have too much freedom, and we need you to give us something or provide a service. And it's something you wouldn't do if you had the choice to decline it. Also, we have guns.

I am only demonstrating the fact that respect for exclusive property rights is not necessarily in line with the "Golden Rule". I am not trying to convince anyone of any other point with that statement.

And this is news to me that ACists believe that 100K acres is illegitimate. What is your rationale for challenging the legitimacy here? Are you trying to say that there is a cap on how much land one can acquire legitimately? If not, then I don't understand your reaction to my statement.

I dont redifine coercion, I just come up with a new type of coercion( the coercion I call" coercion caused my non-moral agents")


Like I said Im not redefining anything, Im just coming up with a new concept.

Are you kidding me? ACists constantly give more importance to "coercion done by moral agents" over "coercion done by the state of nature" If one type of coercion is constantly undermined you might as well say they dont care about it.

Im implying that some force of natural state problems need a state not that ALL of those problem need a state.

Except that knocking on my door with big guns and informing me I have too much freedom is not the same as a democratic election in which I have a vote.

edit: and btw I meant freedom market, I forgot that most of you think market freedom = life freedom

But I don't see how any poster here would ever make a claim to 100,000 acres of land and start sniping trespassers, so how does it violate the golden rule? They would "not" do unto others.

Well, some here who support property rights have stated the fact that ownership is indeed a black and white issue, so your agreement that the issue is murky is a positive.

My doomsday scenario is hardly as you describe. Do you really think ownership of 100,000 acres is some wild-eyed fantasy?

Btw what amount of acres are we talking about before it counts as coercing others? I propose a gradual scale, if you own 1 acre you owe a bit of that acre to the community.

Ummm, I think most every poster here would make that claim (well, you added the sniping bit, not me). Are you suggesting that private property proponents would NOT agree that ownership of 100,000 acres can be legitimate? And are you suggesting that private property proponents would NOT agree that defending one's property claims is part of self-defense?

I don't understand your reaction to my statement unless you believe that ACists believe in some imaginary cap on property and they are against the use of force to defend their property. And such a belief is obviously absurd.

No, but hoarding 100,000 acres of unowned (and presumably valuable) land without mixing it with any labor and shooting all trespassers is.

You really think that is a fantasy?

So in AC land, if you aren't working on your land or using it in some way, then you believe that others can move in and take it from you against your will?

Okay then. This is a whole new side of the debate.

So, if I inherit my father's 100,000 acre estate in AC land and sit around living the life of luxury, you are hereby declaring my claim to the land null and void? And what mechanism enforces this proclamation of yours? Everybody grab what they want from me? Wow, this is really news and I eagerly await your rationale of how my claim suddenly became illegitimate.

And once you make that case, you'll have also made the case why its okay for me to homestead in the backyard you rarely use, and if you try to force me off....well, you already have stated that shooting trespassers is against your beliefs.

Kaj,

It seems to me like those kinds of arguments assume that someone who does not own any land in a society with property rights is somehow being disenfranchised, and the implication seems to be that even staying alive under this arrangement should be difficult, since you will always be trespassing on someone else's property and of course they are going to be shooting at you for these indiscretions.

How do the millions of US citizens who do not own (or claim to own) any land survive? Why aren't they constantly dodging bullets?

My impression of your scenario was that someone came across untouched land and just said "Oh hey this is all mine, now I will defend it with a gun." That the land would be theirs just because they said it was and they had an absolute black and white right to it. Sorry but I don't think you did a very good job of explaining yourself at all and that's why I commented that it was a worthless point and was never going to convince anyone. Obviously if someone exchanges goods for different parcels of land they can ultimately accumulate 100,000 acres of land, there is no "cap".

You said the guy had a gun (obviously implying he was going to shoot people if they didn't respect his property claim), I said sniping. That's a pretty nit point if I've ever seen one. It makes zero substantive difference whatsoever. It's late and this is not one of the more productive discussions I've ever had so I think I'm done with this. Property rights are definitely one of the things that have been hardest for me to formulate my views on.

Again, non-sequitur?

Hoarding unowned land =! inheriting/trading for legitimately owned land.

I guess this debate really isn't all that interesting to me since most of the world currently has some system of property rights as a social norm, and for the most part (to my knowledge) there are not huge swaths of unowned land out there littered with valuable resources. (Well, maybe the ocean - maybe I could be interested in that aspect.) I am not making an argument ad status quo here - it just seems like the most difficult hurdle (initial land distribution) has already been done, and even if it has been done unfairly, unless there is some individual who has a more legitimate claim than the current owner, there is no reason for a change to current ownership rights. This was addressed at length in a recent thread with regard to land being taken away from Native Americans 500 years ago.

Do you mean you need to be convinced government < free market for you personally, or that you need to be convinced that government < free market for everyone in general?

I am making no such argument.

Again I am only pointing out that what one might perceive as a "universal" (the golden rule) does not necessarily imply a respect for all property rights ("legitimate" ones by capitalist definition).

The rest of the implication you are making is your own imagination, not mine.

Why because you say so?

And I never said anything about "unowned land". You inserted that adjective and then attempted to tear down something I never asserted. (And it doesn't really matter as you yourself have admitted that claims of legitimate ownership are murky anyway.)

So is your claim that inheriting 100,000 acres from your daddy and doing nothing with it is "not hoarding". Why? Who are you to define what one views as "hoarding" for the rest of the species? What is your objective rationale to make such a statement other than your personal (subjective) value system?

And yet again we see an ACist portray his personal values as objective truths.

Um, no. From the practical standpoint, i've acknowledged countless times that the concept is not some absolute standard. I've acknowledged that force can unseat legitimate owners. This is just a sophisticated variant of the death star objection.

Nobody suggests that people who say murder is wrong "refuse to accept" that murder occurs.

If one man believes in property and 1000000 don't, the one guy is going to lose. It's obvious. Nobody disputes it.

This has been covered. It doesn't matter if morality is subjective or not.

If it is, then as you point out, transactions cannot be legitimate without recognition - consent from both parties in the transaction. They have to agree on the rules of legitimacy. if they do not, the default position must be that transactions are illegitimate. This is 100% in line with the AC position.


Are you done tilting at windmills yet?

This is upside down thinking. ACists don't propose any "amount of freedom". Freedom is not something that is provided.

Ownership is black and white. Determination of ownership is murky.

A person either owns something or he doesn't. However, we can never be 100% sure who owns something. We can usually be pretty close to 100% sure.

I'm not portraying anything as an objective truth - I have already admitted the opposite in fact. And the matter has nothing to do with my "personal values." The fact of the matter is that property rights are a social norm that the vast majority of people in the entire world agree on, and to me seem logically derived from self-ownership. I mean I guess you could also say that defending yourself against physical harm doesn't conform to the Golden Rule either, in a strict sense, but I don't see why that's an interesting discussion or relevant to the point I was trying to make initially. What of people who don't believe in self-ownership? (Self-ownership is not an objective truth, either.) Does this give them license to go on a murderous rampage on a whim?

Though I typically dislike resorting to utilitarian arguments because I am mainly a moralist, Borodog is right when he says that without property rights/capitalism, only stone age subsistence would be possible.

What you haven't acknowledged, and are cleverly but painfully yet again avoiding, is the point that the whole concept of legitimacy is itself something that YOU are defining based on YOUR values. And that is the whole crux of the issue. Yeah, force can overpower legitimate claims. But the point is that the legitimacy of the claim itself is only based on your notion of what legitimate ownership means. Your view would be that it is illegitimate for 100 people to claim a piece of your land and move in and take it without your consent. Well, that's a fine view. I might even agree. But that is still a wholly subjective view and there is no basis for your claim of "legitimacy" other than your own words ... or force to back it up.

Labeling this the "death star objection" is your usual tactic to dismiss these types of points. This has nothing to do with some wild-eyed far-fetched scenario and has everything to do with the core belief that private property has some inherent legitimacy in itself.

I am for the ownership of private property (including land, with some possible caveats), by the way. I am just not blinded any more to believe that there is something sacrosanct about it.

This is a ridiculous post and shows how simple minded your thinking is on this issue.

Goodnight, Kaj of 10 years ago.

Ah, more black and white extremist statements.

Your statement above does not imply that curtailing some property rights would be detrimental to our level of subsistence. The world isn't bound by the extremes "property rights do not exist" and "all ("legitimate") private property is sacrosanct and cannot be taken against one's will".