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By that argument, how can you justify reserving the section of earth (by force of arms if necessary) that your house resides on? Aren't you taking away others'

• Nursie 12y ago
  >> By that argument, how can you justify reserving the section of earth (by force of arms if necessary) that your house resides on? Aren't you taking away others' access to that land? That's actually exactly what I'm talking about! Not the festival but the general principle. >> Presumably they paid to reserve the land for a week, just like you can pay to reserve a house and the land it sits on for a period of time. Who are you paying? You presumably haven't paid the whole of the rest of humanity in perpetuity, yet it can be considered right to defend a piece of land you consider your property with deadly force? All I'm saying is that it's not really consistent with the non-aggression principle.
  • icebraining 12y ago
    It's not an inconsistency, it's a disagreement over property and aggression. To you, land belongs to whole humanity and therefore it's an aggression on others to prevent them from accessing. But you shouldn't assume that everyone believes the same. To many a libertarian, lands initially belongs to nobody, and anyone can appropriate it freely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle And of course, there's a whole field of libertarians who reject property, regardless of what the prevalence of right-wing libertarians on the Internet might indicate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
    • Nursie 12y ago
      >> It's not an inconsistency, it's a disagreement over property and aggression. In the same way that I disagree that taxes are a form of violence, yes. However if we're reducing everything to violence (as libertarians tend to) then I don't see these as different. >> To you, land belongs to whole humanity As something of a pragmatist, I consider property rights to be useful rather than absolute and have no particular views on universal owenership. I'm not exactly a Marxist. But I wonder what the philosophical basis is for appropriation of land in a system that (on the surface) claims to be absolute, particularly in the principle of non-aggression. Homesteading is wonderful in a system where land is unlimited, it can be seen as an extension of the moral right to the work of your own hands. But in a system where land is limited, the very act of appropriating does deny the resource to others, and any defence of that appropriation would surely be violent? In fact Locke appears to have acknowledged this (from the page you linked to) - The Lockean Proviso. And yes, left-wing libertarians are not often encountered on tech boards in my experience :)
      • john_b 12y ago
        > "However if we're reducing everything to violence (as libertarians tend to)" Libertarians tend to reduce arguments to discussions of violence since it is the fundamental primitive around which most governments (or lack thereof) are organized. Specifically, a government (at least from a libertarian view) is any institution which exercises a monopoly on violence in a particular region. The mechanisms by which they maintain and exercise this monopoly serve to classify them. This reduction is just a starting point though. It is to philosophies of government what evolution is to biology: a founding principle that serves as a lens to understand the rest of it. But there is much more to biology than just a knowledge of evolution, and likewise libertarian thinking. Libertarians also, as a rule, follow the non-aggression principle and are not opposed to violence in all cases (e.g. self-defense, defense of others who did not initiate violence themselves, etc) [1]. This is a little less common amongst left-leaning libertarians, however. > "Homesteading is wonderful in a system where land is unlimited, it can be seen as an extension of the moral right to the work of your own hands. But in a system where land is limited, the very act of appropriating does deny the resource to others" Any philosophy of government has to deal with the blunt fact that the world is one of finite resources. Libertarians of different stripes have a lot to say about property in various forms; it's not something they always agree on. Libertarianism does not have as its direct goal maximizing the efficiency of resource usage, though many would argue that libertarian policies would have that result indirectly. Virtually all would argue that privately owned resources are at least available to others via the market (i.e. for a price), whereas any resource that is publicly monopolized is only available to others if the controlling government decides to share it (which is more likely in democratic societies, but not by their nature, required). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Personal_autonomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Personal_autonom...