6 ms·

Excuse my ignorance, but how can one then have a concept of property without implying the use of force?

by ap22213 10y ago

aminok 10y ago
Force in defense of property is self-defense. Force in pursuit of other people's property is aggression. Aggression is the problem, not force in general.
- dagss 10y ago
  But most aggression comes from disgreement over who property belongs to! Whose property is Israel/Palestine again? Who "owns" the air and can expliit the resource of increasing its CO2 contents? Is it obvious that humans can own large areas of land simply because their grandfather did? If so, then in the case of US, why do you start tracking property after the natives who originally used it were forced off the land? And so on. Property is not a simple concept and something to easily be for or against. Property is almost always disputed and almost always linked to use of force somehow.
  - aminok 10y ago
    >Whose property is Israel/Palestine again? Yes, but we recognize that as a disagreement over who has legitimate claim to the property. With taxes, we take property that practically everyone, except the most snobbish socialist intellectual, and certainly the courts, would recognize as belonging to the individual. It's on a totally different scale in terms of how certain we can be that it's a violation of property rights.
    - dagss 10y ago
      I disagree that it is obvious. Most of the taxes are a cut of income that would not have been generated if taxes had not been invested 20 years ago in education and defense and infrastructure. And who granted anyone else the ownership right to destroy the air I breathe and destroy the climate I depend on? Some taxes are a way to compensate for that. It is more like a forced VC capital investment in your life... you get a big chunk of education and defense and security paid for you, but if you hit it big you have to pay a lot back for it.
      - aminok 10y ago
        If I mow your lawn without your asking, and you set up a lemonade stand on your lawn, and as a result, benefit financially from the lawn mowing service I provided, because it led to more people visiting your lemonade stand, that does not give me the right to threaten to imprison you to force you to pay me $20 for the service.
        dagss 10y ago
        At least make the example straight: The majority of the neighborhood decided that all lawns should be mowed, because they don't want unmowed lawns that are bad for the economy. And that neighborhood are the only ones who protect you from the squatters outside with nuclear weapons ready to take the lawn, so they think they have a say. (Unfortunately you are surrounded by neighbors on all sides, so they cannot stop rendering protection services due to laws of geometry). And they are the descendants of the neighbors who helped your great-great-grandfather take the lawn from the Indians in the first place. I don't agree that there are cleae cut simple examples when it comes to property.
        aminok 10y ago
        I'm not talking about unmowed laws that are bad for the economy though. That's a negative externality for which there are many more justifications for government intervention (though not for an income tax). It you want to nitpick on my thought experiment, you could also bring up the fact that a lawn is on top of land, and that there are strong moral arguments against an individual having a natural right to absolute private ownership over land, which in turns provides various justifications for government dictating land-use rules and collecting taxes on land/real-estate. But I was not trying to make a comment on negative externalities or the right to private land ownership. I was making the point that the government spending money on something, and this action ending up benefiting you, does not grant the government the moral right to threaten you with imprisonment to force you to pay for that something.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  Sure, you can define it like that, but in doing so you've just rolled an extremely complicated economic system (property) into the otherwise very simple concept of non-aggression. I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously correct.
  - aminok 10y ago
    Laws against stealing are one of the basic laws of society. Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.
    - aninhumer 10y ago
      >Property is not extremely complicated. Yes it is. How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? What about if you're using a hose in your garden and you accidentally damage my laptop next door? What about if I sell you the laptop and it breaks a few days later? There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
      - aminok 10y ago
        >How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? How do we determine that you assaulted me? It's your word against mine. We're not talking about the complexity of determining the true account of events, which is obviously great. We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all. >What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? Then common law, which springs from the first principles of personal and property rights, would preside. We'd have a similarly difficult time determining if a hockey fight classifies as assault. Or if in a traffic altercation, you stepping out of your car and aggressively approaching me justified my preemptive (or aggressive?) first punch. >There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them. The system of laws being complicated does not mean that it is not generally straightforward to determine what a person has property rights to. The complexity comes from the edge cases, but most cases are not edge cases.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lliamander 10y ago
Fair question, the answer is that you cannot. However, note that I did not say libertarians reject all uses of force, only that "they would rather appeal to people's self interest to achieve social outcomes than resort to force". I think we would both agree that the generosity of your neighbors represents the ideal. But if they weren't so generous, how you get them to share their coffee plow your drive way? Would you lobby for regulations to be passed to force them to stop hoarding their coffee? Have the police requisition their plow for the greater good? Or would you offer to compensate them for their goods and services? And if they refused, would you peacefully resign yourself to some other means of getting your needs met? The socialist often invokes the spirit of generosity with his rhetoric, but when others are (in his view) insufficiently generous, he is too quick to trade the pen for the club.

Excuse my ignorance, but how can one then have a concept of property without implying the use of force?

by ap22213 10y ago

Excuse my ignorance, but how can one then have a concept of property without implying the use of force?

Force in defense of property is self-defense. Force in pursuit of other people's property is aggression. Aggression is the problem, not force in general.

dagss 10y ago
But most aggression comes from disgreement over who property belongs to! Whose property is Israel/Palestine again? Who "owns" the air and can expliit the resource of increasing its CO2 contents? Is it obvious that humans can own large areas of land simply because their grandfather did? If so, then in the case of US, why do you start tracking property after the natives who originally used it were forced off the land? And so on. Property is not a simple concept and something to easily be for or against. Property is almost always disputed and almost always linked to use of force somehow.
- aminok 10y ago
  >Whose property is Israel/Palestine again? Yes, but we recognize that as a disagreement over who has legitimate claim to the property. With taxes, we take property that practically everyone, except the most snobbish socialist intellectual, and certainly the courts, would recognize as belonging to the individual. It's on a totally different scale in terms of how certain we can be that it's a violation of property rights.
  - dagss 10y ago
    I disagree that it is obvious. Most of the taxes are a cut of income that would not have been generated if taxes had not been invested 20 years ago in education and defense and infrastructure. And who granted anyone else the ownership right to destroy the air I breathe and destroy the climate I depend on? Some taxes are a way to compensate for that. It is more like a forced VC capital investment in your life... you get a big chunk of education and defense and security paid for you, but if you hit it big you have to pay a lot back for it.
    - aminok 10y ago
      If I mow your lawn without your asking, and you set up a lemonade stand on your lawn, and as a result, benefit financially from the lawn mowing service I provided, because it led to more people visiting your lemonade stand, that does not give me the right to threaten to imprison you to force you to pay me $20 for the service.
      - dagss 10y ago
        At least make the example straight: The majority of the neighborhood decided that all lawns should be mowed, because they don't want unmowed lawns that are bad for the economy. And that neighborhood are the only ones who protect you from the squatters outside with nuclear weapons ready to take the lawn, so they think they have a say. (Unfortunately you are surrounded by neighbors on all sides, so they cannot stop rendering protection services due to laws of geometry). And they are the descendants of the neighbors who helped your great-great-grandfather take the lawn from the Indians in the first place. I don't agree that there are cleae cut simple examples when it comes to property.
        aminok 10y ago
        I'm not talking about unmowed laws that are bad for the economy though. That's a negative externality for which there are many more justifications for government intervention (though not for an income tax). It you want to nitpick on my thought experiment, you could also bring up the fact that a lawn is on top of land, and that there are strong moral arguments against an individual having a natural right to absolute private ownership over land, which in turns provides various justifications for government dictating land-use rules and collecting taxes on land/real-estate. But I was not trying to make a comment on negative externalities or the right to private land ownership. I was making the point that the government spending money on something, and this action ending up benefiting you, does not grant the government the moral right to threaten you with imprisonment to force you to pay for that something.
aninhumer 10y ago
Sure, you can define it like that, but in doing so you've just rolled an extremely complicated economic system (property) into the otherwise very simple concept of non-aggression. I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously correct.
- aminok 10y ago
  Laws against stealing are one of the basic laws of society. Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    >Property is not extremely complicated. Yes it is. How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? What about if you're using a hose in your garden and you accidentally damage my laptop next door? What about if I sell you the laptop and it breaks a few days later? There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
    - aminok 10y ago
      >How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? How do we determine that you assaulted me? It's your word against mine. We're not talking about the complexity of determining the true account of events, which is obviously great. We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all. >What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? Then common law, which springs from the first principles of personal and property rights, would preside. We'd have a similarly difficult time determining if a hockey fight classifies as assault. Or if in a traffic altercation, you stepping out of your car and aggressively approaching me justified my preemptive (or aggressive?) first punch. >There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them. The system of laws being complicated does not mean that it is not generally straightforward to determine what a person has property rights to. The complexity comes from the edge cases, but most cases are not edge cases.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

lliamander 10y ago

Fair question, the answer is that you cannot. However, note that I did not say libertarians reject all uses of force, only that "they would rather appeal to people's self interest to achieve social outcomes than resort to force". I think we would both agree that the generosity of your neighbors represents the ideal. But if they weren't so generous, how you get them to share their coffee plow your drive way? Would you lobby for regulations to be passed to force them to stop hoarding their coffee? Have the police requisition their plow for the greater good? Or would you offer to compensate them for their goods and services? And if they refused, would you peacefully resign yourself to some other means of getting your needs met? The socialist often invokes the spirit of generosity with his rhetoric, but when others are (in his view) insufficiently generous, he is too quick to trade the pen for the club.