Political Crossfire Forums

[cap'n queasy]

I don't feel that viewpoint has much validity. I feel the right to own property is a natural right, it's your territory, and humans are a territorial species. Instead of fighting for our individual territories and social status, like animals, which people will readily would resort to if need be, we have over time developed a method to adjudicate individual territorial disputes and determine status within society that is based on trade rather than force of arms, for everyone's mutual survival. And it works pretty good, I see absolutely no valid reason to change it. Additionally, there is no valid reason to tie land ownership or social status to the amount physical movement that one utilizes to make their living.

Social schemes that ignore reality are based on a faulty premise and will eventually cause more misery than they cure.

[cap'n queasy]

The only thing that imparts any social significance to one's labor is what one does with the proceeds.

[RueTheDay]

thefranzkafkafront wrote: RueTheDay wrote: thefranzkafkafront wrote: RueTheDay wrote: thefranzkafkafront wrote: Hegelian_Center wrote: Is the Libertarian Party an attempt to recover the Republican Party's traditional roots?

No its brining classical liberalism back to the U.S, essentially we belive above all else in the rights of the individual.

Libertarianism has almost nothing to do with Enlightenment-era classical liberalism. We already beat that subject to death in another thread.

Did we now.

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Ragnar Danneskjold pretty much summed it all up. If you want me to go into it more philosophically (this being the forum for it) i'd be happy to.

Philosophically speaking, libertarianism boils down to the belief that private property and contracts are sacred, a belief with no logically coherent foundation whatsoever.
No it boils down to the idea that coersion is unjustifiable, property rights are only a small part of it and most certainly not respected as naively absolute.

Claiming an exclusive property right in land and natural resources implies coercion against everyone else who would want to use the land and natural resources. Thus, libertarianism is inherently self-contradictory. Well this really all comes down to what property is, as i've argued before the essential basis of property is production or labour,

Right. And neither land nor natural resources are the product of labor.

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i've also argued that you can own land and nat resorces by manipluating them in some fashion, thus by labour owning them.

We've been through this a thousand times - "manipulating in some fashion" does not make land a product of labor and does not confer a property right to the land.

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Prehaps yes, when coal is sitting under the ground its non-ownable. But how can it be deined that once someone uses labour to build and mine and extract said coal that he has made it his property via labour?

When coal is in a coal mine it is a natural resource and not ownable. Once the coal has been removed from the mine, it is no longer a natural resource, it is a product. At that point it becomes subject to a private property right (however, a severance tax should be paid by the person who transformed the coal to compensate others for depleting the resource).

[RueTheDay]

cap'n queasy wrote: Whether or not a piece of property is used to produce something is irrelevant in regards to ownership.

One does not have to use the land for anything to own it. Who cares if non-owners are denied any resources on my land I choose to own use only for recreational purposes? I certainly don't. It's my land, I bought it. Only my opinion of how the land is used is valid.

If you want to get to them, you are going to have to buy the property from me. And I'm going to charge you a lot.

I bought it therefore it's mine is a kindergarten level argument.

Slave owners "bought" their slaves. Does that make the slaves their legitimate property? Buying something is not a logically sufficient mechanism for conferring a property right. No serious thinker would ever claim that it was.

[RueTheDay]

I posted this in the Economics forum, but it's probably worth posting here as well:

The land issue has been a matter of grave concern and contention for many in the libertarian tradition.

If you get a chance, read Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, The State" some time. Nock was one of the very first US libertarian authors. He also clearly delineated the propblem with the private ownership of land in the book I mention above, and was very sympathetic toward Henry George's proposal.

Benjamin Tucker, perhaps the leading man in the US individualist anarchist movement, was also opposed to what he called "the land monopoly". Unfortunately, he also opposed Henry George and instead of the LVT proposed instead a completely unworkable scheme of equally dividing land up among people and having land titles immediately become void upon the holder no longer actively using the land.

David Nolan, the founder of the US Libertarian Party, was a staunch supporter of the LVT.

Robert Nozick, the leading libertarian academic, built an entire philosophical edifice around private property despite openly admitting that he was unable to provide any sort of defense for the private ownership of land and would simply proceed as if one existed even though he identified fault with all existing attempts at providing such a foundation for private property in land.

Even Hayek, in the Constitution of Liberty, acknowledged the theoretical validity of Henry George's argument, but opposed it on the practical grounds that he felt it was difficult to distinguish between land value and improvement value for a given parcel of real estate.

Land has ALWAYS been a central problem in libertarianism. Early libertarian authors were always clear and upfront about this. It didn't really start to get "glossed over" until Rothbard and his followers rose to prominence within the party. Unfortunately, many libertarians do not know their own history.

[Roy L]

Ragnar Danneskjold wrote:
3.Wealth Redistribution

LP Is agianst everything that relates to Wealth Redistribution
Except redistribution of wealth from the productive to idle, parasitic owners through government-issued privileges such as land titles, IP monopolies, etc. that can be thought of as Sacred Property Rights:
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4.Property Rights

Propery Is Sacred, and not to be regulated by any goverment

Except insofar as government creates property rights for some by violating the rights of others:

http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

[cap'n queasy]

RueTheDay wrote: cap'n queasy wrote: Whether or not a piece of property is used to produce something is irrelevant in regards to ownership.

One does not have to use the land for anything to own it. Who cares if non-owners are denied any resources on my land I choose to own use only for recreational purposes? I certainly don't. It's my land, I bought it. Only my opinion of how the land is used is valid.

If you want to get to them, you are going to have to buy the property from me. And I'm going to charge you a lot.

I bought it therefore it's mine is a kindergarten level argument.

Slave owners "bought" their slaves. Does that make the slaves their legitimate property? Buying something is not a logically sufficient mechanism for conferring a property right. No serious thinker would ever claim that it was.

Slavery is illegal in our society because we have determined that trade is the method of acquiring property and status rather than force of arms.

We define acquiring property and status by force of arms as criminal behavior so equating a criminal act with a legitimate method of acquiring property and status in society is an obvious logical fallacy.

The reason it is valid to acquire property by trade is that it is clearly a much better alternative the the method it replaced, which was force of arms. We define slavery as criminal behavior. Human being cannot be legally be owned by another human being according to our law, so your argument is meaningless.

The only ethical argument against ownership of human beings as an institution is that people are physically forced to give up their personal sovereignty.

It is not the method of transfer of slaves that makes slavery immoral, it is forcing them to give something up by force, which is what you are basically arguing in favor off by attacking property rights. So I don't see how your stance has any validity at all.

[Roy L]

thefranzkafkafront wrote:
Well it all comes down to where property comes from, the general concensus is from labour, but people differ on what can be produced from labour, and exaclty what that means.

As i've said I belive that includes natural resorces and land.
But by definition, it doesn't.

The only way to make natural resources into property is by depriving others of them, never by bringing them into existence. And the only way you can justly deprive others of what they have a right to is by making just compensation to them for it.

[Roy L]

cap'n queasy wrote: I feel the right to own property is a natural right, it's your territory, and humans are a territorial species. All available evidence indicates that human territoriality is naturally tribal, not individual. Before the advent of agriculture, individual property in land was not only non-existent but inconceivable.

Your feelings and $3.50 will get you a double mochaccino latte at Starbucks.
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Instead of fighting for our individual territories and social status, like animals, which people will readily would resort to if need be,
No, that claim is false. In hunter-gatherer societies such as human beings lived in for 99% of our existence as a species, there was no fighting over individual territories at all. The territorial conflicts were over community territories.
Quote: we have over time developed a method to adjudicate individual territorial disputes and determine status within society that is based on trade rather than force of arms, for everyone's mutual survival. You forgot production. And anyway, that is false; as natural resources are not products of labor, they can never originally be acquired by either production or trade, only by force of arms.
Quote: And it works pretty good, I see absolutely no valid reason to change it.
Hehe. Let me guess: you're a landowner.

Quote: Additionally, there is no valid reason to tie land ownership or social status to the amount physical movement that one utilizes to make their living.
But there is a very valid reason to employ strawman arguments: you don't have any others.
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Social schemes that ignore reality are based on a faulty premise and will eventually cause more misery than they cure.
Words to live by, champ. Words to live by.

What would you call the social scheme that ignores the reality that no one produced natural resources, and is based on the premise that some people should rightly own everyone else's opportunities to earn a living?

[Roy L]

thefranzkafkafront wrote: Well this really all comes down to what property is, as i've argued before the essential basis of property is production or labour, i've also argued that you can own land and nat resorces by manipluating them in some fashion, thus by labour owning them.
But as we have proved to you so many times already, "manipulating" or "discovering" a natural resource in no way implies that you acquire a right to extinguish others' rights to use it, without compensating them.
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Prehaps yes, when coal is sitting under the ground its non-ownable. By George, he's got it!
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But how can it be deined that once someone uses labour to build and mine and extract said coal that he has made it his property via labour? He has made the extracted coal his property. Not all or even any of the coal that is still where nature put it millions of years ago.

[MplsBison]

RueTheDay wrote:
Claiming an exclusive property right in land and natural resources implies coercion against everyone else who would want to use the land and natural resources.

I don't think it involves coercion as much as an actual act of physical violence.

IE, if you're on my land without my permission, you're going to get shot.

[cap'n queasy]

Quote: No, that claim is false. In hunter-gatherer societies such as human beings lived in for 99% of our existence as a species, there was no fighting over individual territories at all. The territorial conflicts were over community territories.


This is non-factual, first of all. Many primitive societies recognized individual or family territories for hunting or farming, and private property in general. And there was plenty of fighting over it.

And how things were done thousands of years in a lawless primitive society when humans were shackled to tribalism, an inferior social construction, is not relevant to how civilized human beings have decided to adjudicate property acquistion today. Private property has been recognized as a right since the earliest law codes. Since the time of Hammurabi private property law has been a major concern for civilization.

Modern methods of acquiring private property by trade have produced the highest standard of living in history. And everyone has access to the same methods. Claims of oppression in our free society are all grounded on logical fallacies.

Social structures that have not recognized the right to private property, like the Soviet Union, have collapsed, and/or never really achieved a very desirable standard of living for the majority of people. Individual liberty is defined by the right to private property ownership, and there is no valid reason to force society by force of arms to revert to a type of social structure based on primitive tribal communalism and lack of individual sovereignty.

In fact, any effort to take private property by force would be rightfully defined as criminal activity, based on those grounds, and dealt with accordingly.

So unless you are talking about buying property and owning it communally, which is perfectly legal in our free society, your arguments are pretty much useless for practical purposes and will remain on the fringe of modern society, where they rightfully belong.

[RueTheDay]

tman_ndsu08 wrote: RueTheDay wrote:
Claiming an exclusive property right in land and natural resources implies coercion against everyone else who would want to use the land and natural resources.

I don't think it involves coercion as much as an actual act of physical violence.

IE, if you're on my land without my permission, you're going to get shot.

Ok, that's fine. Then my statement becomes - the ownership of land implies actual acts of physical violence. Thus, your entire philosophy is built upon a foundation of physical violence.

[cap'n queasy]

RueTheDay wrote: tman_ndsu08 wrote: RueTheDay wrote:
Claiming an exclusive property right in land and natural resources implies coercion against everyone else who would want to use the land and natural resources.

I don't think it involves coercion as much as an actual act of physical violence.

IE, if you're on my land without my permission, you're going to get shot.

Ok, that's fine. Then my statement becomes - the ownership of land implies actual acts of physical violence. Thus, your entire philosophy is built upon a foundation of physical violence.

Thus the preferable method of trade rather than force of arms to adjudicate property ownership.

You are simply advocating regression back to force of arms to remove property rights and tranfer them to the state. So by your own ethical standards your argument is flawed.

Unless of course you are not advocating force to remove people's property, in which case your argument is moot because there is no other way to remove an individual's property from his possession.

[thefranzkafkafront]

Yes we all know you love Geogism.

My point on land is thus as with natural resorces.

When a man develops that land or resorce is he not in the same way working wood or clay the way a potter or carpenter would?

[Roy L]

thefranzkafkafront wrote: Yes we all know you love Geogism.
I love the truth. Henry George happened to have identified some truths that many people are very committed to concealing and erasing.
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My point on land is thus as with natural resorces.

When a man develops that land or resorce is he not in the same way working wood or clay the way a potter or carpenter would?
No, because he is still depriving others of the unaltered resource, namely the location, whose area, latitude, longitude, etc. he is forever powerless to affect. When someone works with wood, clay, etc. there is nothing of the unaltered resource in the product (the exception would be, e.g., a sculpture in situ, like the Mount Rushmore monument).

You seem to be permanently refusing to know the fact that the relevant criterion is whether one inflicts a deprivation on others, not whether or how one uses any given resource.

[Roy L]

cap'n queasy wrote: RueTheDay wrote: Then my statement becomes - the ownership of land implies actual acts of physical violence. Thus, your entire philosophy is built upon a foundation of physical violence.

Thus the preferable method of trade rather than force of arms to adjudicate property ownership.
Of course (btw, you seem not to understand that production is necessarily prior to trade, and also confers an ownership right -- perhaps you would rather not think about production, as the landowner's non-contributory role in it is rather too apparent).

But as natural resources can never initially become private property through either trade or production, but only by force of arms, the logically inescapable conclusion is that no just method of adjudicating property rights can ever result in private property in natural resources.

Your whole position thus collapses.
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You are simply advocating regression back to force of arms to remove property rights and tranfer them to the state.
Utter garbage. You could with precisely identical "logic" claim that forcible repossession of stolen goods by the police is "regression back to force of arms to remove property rights and transfer them to the state." Likewise with emancipation of slaves, or abolition of taxi medallions. The plain fact is, private property in natural resources is not a crime that only happened once, in the distant past. It is a constant, ongoing, relentless violation of people's rights, just as slavery and taxi medallions are.

Quote: So by your own ethical standards your argument is flawed.
Refuted above. Quote:
Unless of course you are not advocating force to remove people's property, I definitely advocate force to remove people's property, when that property consists in nothing but an unjust privilege of forcibly violating others' rights.
Quote: in which case your argument is moot because there is no other way to remove an individual's property from his possession. There is likewise no other way to remove people's rights to use what nature provided equally to all, which proves that private property in natural resources is nothing but constant, relentless, forcible theft from the productive for the unearned benefit of idle, privileged, parasitic landowners.

[Roy L]

cap'n queasy wrote: Quote: No, that claim is false. In hunter-gatherer societies such as human beings lived in for 99% of our existence as a species, there was no fighting over individual territories at all. The territorial conflicts were over community territories.


This is non-factual, first of all. No, of course it isn't. It is well known. What on earth do you imagine you gain by denying such evident and indisputable facts? It is notable that every time you falsely claim that a statement of mine is non-factual, that claim is invariably accompanied by your own non-factual claims:
Quote: Many primitive societies recognized individual or family territories for hunting or farming, That is just a flat-out falsehood. Primitive societies DID NOT recognize individual hunting or gathering territories, that claim is just flat false. As for farming, I have already stipulated that when societies advance beyond the primitive stage and begin to practice agriculture, ONLY THEN does the concept of private property in land appear.

It is thus YOUR claim that is provably non-factual, as has invariably been the case every single time you have ever claimed that a statement of mine was non-factual. I will thank you to remember that the next time some little voice urges you to falsely claim that I have made a non-factual statement.

Quote: and private property in general. We are talking about private property in natural resources, not private property in general. Stop trying to change the subject. Quote:
And there was plenty of fighting over it. More falsehoods. Kindly cite one, single, solitary, scientifically credible source that claims there has EVER been ANY fighting over individual hunting or gathering territories in primitive societies. Just one.

Thought not.
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And how things were done thousands of years in a lawless primitive society when humans were shackled to tribalism,
??? "Shackled" to the only form of existence that made economic or biological sense at the time, a societal form that allowed human beings to rapidly multiply and dominate their environments, to the point where most wild animals evolved an instinctive avoidance of contact with human beings? What on earth do you imagine you are raving about? Other than trying to bad-mouth any form of society that does not consider private property in natural resources a sacrament, that is...
Quote: an inferior social construction, is not relevant to how civilized human beings have decided to adjudicate property acquistion today.

Thank you for retracting your proven-false claim that individual territoriality is an inherent part of human nature.
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Private property has been recognized as a right since the earliest law codes. Since the time of Hammurabi private property law has been a major concern for civilization.
But private property in natural resorces was NEVER, EVER recognized in any pre-agricultural society, except where it had been learned through contact with agricultural societies.
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Modern methods of acquiring private property by trade have produced the highest standard of living in history. Post-hoc fallacy. And you don't seem to be willing to know the fact, which I have identified for you before, that many of the most rapid increases in standard of living have been achieved where private property in land is not, repeat, NOT recognized, such as Hong Kong, or where the largest amounts of land rent have been recovered for the purposes and benefit of the public that creates it, such as Singapore, Taiwan, Meiji Japan, the German colony of Liaochow, California and Western Canada in the late 19th and early 20th C, ancient Egypt and Rome, Moghul India after Akbar the Great, China after Kang Xi, etc.

Quote: And everyone has access to the same methods.
I see. So, in your mind, when you are privileged to charge others for access to the resources nature povided for free, and others must either pay for such access or go on welfare, that's "everyone having access to the same methods"?

Somehow, I kinda figured it'd be something like that...

Quote: Claims of oppression in our free society are all grounded on logical fallacies. Garbage. Just because the privileged -- like you, perhaps....? -- do not feel oppressed does not mean no one is oppressed.
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Social structures that have not recognized the right to private property, like the Soviet Union, have collapsed, and/or never really achieved a very desirable standard of living for the majority of people.

Of course. But we are not talking about rightful and beneficial private property in the products of labor, are we? We all agree on that (well most of us do -- there seem to be a few communist holdouts here). We are talking about the wrongful privilege of private property in natural resources, which has been associated with economic failures just as abject as the Soviets', as may be seen in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa.
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Individual liberty is defined by the right to private property ownership, Wrong. It is defined by equal rights to life, liberty, and property in the products of one's labor. Rights to private property have routinely been associated with fascist regimes, slave-owning societies, and other social arrangements that any honest person must admit are very far from individual liberty.
Quote: and there is no valid reason to force society by force of arms to revert to a type of social structure based on primitive tribal communalism and lack of individual sovereignty.
Another ridiculous, outrageous strawman. Who here has advocated anything of the sort? Me? RueTheDay? Let's see a direct, verbatim, in-context quote to that effect.

Thought not.

You know, I was suspended twice for calling people liars when they persistently repeated strawman arguments after I had informed them of the facts. You're not going to be one of those kinds of people, are you?
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In fact, any effort to take private property by force would be rightfully defined as criminal activity, based on those grounds, and dealt with accordingly. Another outrageous and absurd strawman. We are advocating a change in laws, not violent redress of wrongs in defiance of the law. Why can't you stay on topic?

[thefranzkafkafront]

Roy L wrote: thefranzkafkafront wrote:

My point on land is thus as with natural resorces.

When a man develops that land or resorce is he not in the same way working wood or clay the way a potter or carpenter would?
No, because he is still depriving others of the unaltered resource, namely the location, whose area, latitude, longitude, etc. he is forever powerless to affect. When someone works with wood, clay, etc. there is nothing of the unaltered resource in the product (the exception would be, e.g., a sculpture in situ, like the Mount Rushmore monument).

Well for one you've noted the exeption, even then how is a potter using clay or a carpenter using trees 'not' depriving others of a unaltered resource?

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You seem to be permanently refusing to know the fact that the relevant criterion is whether one inflicts a deprivation on others, not whether or how one uses any given resource.
And you like being pretencious and not thinking critically, good on you.

[MplsBison]

RueTheDay wrote: Thus, your entire philosophy is built upon a foundation of physical violence.

Yes...and?

Humans are violent entities.