Anarchy And Property

[Aloysius]

I believe the impasse we've always come to is this: you believe property rights to be absolute, and I do not. I divide the right to property into several different types of rights, not all of which are absolute and some of which imply a positive responsibility due to the shared ownership one has (for God is the owner of all things, and human owners only share in His ownership; because He intended all things for the use of all people, there is a responsibility that nothing be hoarded against fair use by all of humanity)

despite your assertion that there is no collective ownership of the whole earth by the whole of the human race, which I find unfounded and completely contrary to the Catholic understanding, the lack of a collective will does not deny that the whole human race holds the rights over all the earth, contained within the gift of dominion over all things which God gave to Adam. the Catholic defense of private property is predicated upon this simple fact: that every member of the human race has the right to the use of the earth because it is owned by the whole human race... but I suppose we may be getting into more disagreements in the semantics of the term 'own'. I believe in different levels of ownership in which property owners share; such that God owns everything on the earth and gives it to all men for all men's good use, and men partition that land according to certain social definitions; but each private owner first shares his ownership with God, and then in part with the whole human race and in particular the local community. so I would formulate it that God has THE ownership of all property, while a private owner has AN ownership of that property; the local community as AN ownership of that property as well, as does the whole human race.

in any event, since those are the impasses that seem to clash our entire philosophies of ownership, and since you have adequately answered against the point of this thread that you support the use of violence by some authority to enforce Lockean principals of property (for I had hoped to find common ground on the definition of property by a rejection of the state's use of violence to enforce that definition, but your answer is that your type of anarchy permits authorities which defend that type of 'property' through violence so there is no common ground where I had hoped I might find some), with your permission I'll simply take this thread in a new direction and attack the Lockean principal of property itself, the first ownership principal you defend.

Let us continue with the Irish example, for I thought you might say something of the sort. It is true that by conquest the situation was created in which the majority of the Irish were not able to be landowners. But then, through some lineage of legitimate voluntary contracts of sale, those who currently own the land in Ireland now own it. For they bought it from someone who bought it from someone who bought it from the Irish Free State who bought it from the thieves themselves. How can we respect first ownership if the first ownership is one of theft? A thief cannot legitimately sell property he has stolen, can he?

I am a descendant of the Dochartaigh clann, whose land in Inishowen was stolen by the British landlords. Every landowner in Inishowen somehow purchased that land from those thieves... shouldn't I, and all who share my name, have some claim to it based upon 'first ownership'? Was it not stolen from my ancestors?

Most property in the world today does not have any type of pure history at all that could trace back fair exchanges from the 'first owners'. Heck, the 'first owners' of the Americas were the Native Americans who first 'homesteaded' here, were they not? All the land currently owned in these United States was somehow bought from those who stole it by conquest. How can we defend any property rights according to first ownership if the first owner was a thief?

[quote]I might add, how can you be opposed to this as inherently unjust yet favor states? The difference between states and landowners is primarily that states did not acquire their land legitimately.[/quote]
don't type-cast me as a heartless statist, my friend. in the thread on anarchy I was in an uncommon position for myself, I am not used to being the one who is on the side of the state, but I only side with it on the fundamental principals of authority and support of what you define as "coercion". make no mistake, I am no friend of the modern state. in fact, my examples were designed to do what distributists like to do ever since Chesterton... and that is to show that big government and big business are both alike in terms of their actual affect on the rights and abilities of the average man through the centralizing of power. I suppose I succeeded in those terms, because you questioned why I opposed the arrangement I described while not opposing the state's arrangement; and the answer is: I do oppose the state's arrangement. just not in the same way that you do.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='Aloysius' date='08 November 2009 - 09:03 AM' timestamp='1257685405' post='1998164']
I believe the impasse we've always come to is this: you believe property rights to be absolute, and I do not. I divide the right to property into several different types of rights, not all of which are absolute and some of which imply a positive responsibility due to the shared ownership one has (for God is the owner of all things, and human owners only share in His ownership; because He intended all things for the use of all people, there is a responsibility that nothing be hoarded against fair use by all of humanity)[/quote]

I can only speak for myself, but I don't think either King's Rook's Pawn or I believe that we have no obligation to help others, or that neither of us believes in the universal destination of goods. Believing in the universal destination of goods is different from saying a property right is not absolute. A right, insofar as it is a right, [i]is[/i] absolute. However, that does not mean one may use any means to defend one's rights, including initiating violence against innocents. One does not become "guilty" because one believes that continuing to feed a coercive monopoly is more damaging than it is beneficial. I believe that the State, [i]qua[/i] redistributive monopoly on violence, is a deadly and counterproductive means of guaranteeing that the universal destination of goods is recognized.

Property rights are based on a claim to usage. Does the fact that my property is more than I absolutely need, or that I am not using something [i]right now[/i] mean that I cannot save money for retirement?

I believe that it is not wrong to take a loaf of bread from a baker, if one is starving. It is wrong to steal a loaf of bread from three other people who in the same situation as you are. It is not wrong to claim a sleeping bag or a tent if one will freeze without them. It would be entirely unreasonable to deny someone these means. However, you wish to empower a coercive monopoly with the ability to decide these things. That is a dangerous wish. That is my problem with distributism.

We do not live in a land where many people are starving to death, or dying of exposure. There are such people all over the world, but that is primarily due [i]to [/i]the violent monopoly redistribution State, not [i]despite[/i] the violent monopoly redistribution State. If you wanted to really uphold the universal destination of goods following the distributist method, you would have to have a violent monopoly above all others, to prevent one local subsidiarity-principle violent monopoly from refusing to share its claimed resources with the others in the world. Voluntaryists do not have this problem, because we recognize the only solutions to the question of fair distribution of goods are charity (the type of charity that does not flow from the barrel of a gun) and mutually beneficial, voluntary free trade, uninhibited by States.

But I become an "enemy of society" if I dare to believe that a violent monopoly has been the vehicle for more violence and injustice than it has ever prevented.

~Sternhauser

Edited November 8, 2009 by Sternhauser

[Aloysius]

I never said you cannot own more than you absolutely need. You of course can.

And I never said you had to be using something [i]right now[/i]... in fact I just got through clarifying that that is the straw man of my principal of regular usage.

You steered a bit far off course from the present discussion. This thread isn't about states redistributing anything. That's for other discussions. This thread presupposes the absence of the state and asks the question of how we define property in the absence of a state. I maintain that ownerships over great distances are only possible because of the existence of the state coercive power, that a man is limited by locality and regular use in his capacity to own things because a man is not omnipresent. I do NOT say that he has to be using them at any one point in time in order to own them; I merely say that he must have regular physical power over it and live in proximity to it or else he doesn't really own it.

Anyway, property rights are not absolute; and not all rights need not be considered 'absolute' either, but I think there's a little bit of muddled semantics around all that. and it all comes down to our different usage of the term "property"--you have a Lockean first-use concept that I challenge, my most recent challenge was the question of why, when the chain of ownership dating back to the first use is tainted by acts of coercion or theft, can someone really obtain property through that chain... because if it comes down to the chain of who has passed it down, you get to a thief selling stolen property that he has no right to sell because he stole it.

[King's Rook's Pawn]

[quote name='Aloysius' date='08 November 2009 - 09:03 AM' timestamp='1257685405' post='1998164']you believe property rights to be absolute, and I do not. I divide the right to property into several different types of rights, not all of which are absolute and some of which imply a positive responsibility due to the shared ownership one has[/quote]

And I don't think we'll ever settle anything if we totally disagree on what rights are. You explicated your idea of "rights" in the minimum wage thread. Frankly, I consider this conception of "rights" absurd. As I perceive your position, you believe that rights are simply privileges gratuitously given by God in order to fulfill "moral duties." This is completely foreign to my conception of rights and so distinct from it that we may as well be using two different terms, to clear up the semantic confusion. I don't believe that the things you call "rights" exist, and I think that you don't believe that the things that I call "rights" exist.

The things that I call "rights" are claims of sovereign authority (what is sometimes called "self-ownership," though I don't like the term) rooted in the existence of the human mind, with it's possession of sentience, will, and reason. Most basically, each human has a "right," a claim of sovereign authority, over his mind. No other human being on Earth has [i]any[/i] authority whatsoever over another person's mind. This is because each person [i]is[/i] his mind; it is his essential being. Were any other person to claim any sort of authority to control your mind, he would attempt to divide you from your mind, thus destroying both you and it (since they are one and the same). I would argue that even God could not remove this right from an individual without destroying that individual, because it would involve a logical contradiction. The person would no longer be an individual human for he would no longer possess free will. Therefore, the idea of an individual free-will-possessing human soul [i]without[/i] this sole, sovereign authoritative control over its mind is logically self-contradictory. For I believe that this is logically self-evident and axiomatic. Further, I believe that all other "rights" are based, logically and axiomatically, upon this one right, this principle of "self-ownership," of sovereign authority over the self. If fact, one might say that all other "rights" are merely [i]aspects[/i] of this one, most basic right. This is what I mean when I use the word "right," described as precisely as I know how. Do you agree or disagree with this analysis?

[quote]the lack of a collective will does not deny that the whole human race holds the rights over all the earth, contained within the gift of dominion over all things which God gave to Adam.[/quote]

As you can see from my words above, the idea of a collective-anything holding a right over anything is semantically nonsensical and absurd according my definition of the word "right," since all rights, according to my definition, are based on individual authority over the self.

By the way, if the whole human race collective owns the land, then how does a farmer own his land even when he works on it? Now your ideas sounds more like Henry Georgism, which claims that all land should be held in common. In that case, the question of the legitimacy of "absentee" ownership is moot, since there are no individual owners at all.

Do you believe that your ideas apply to all scarce goods or only to land? Is there some unique property to land not present in say diamonds, apples, or houses?

[quote]you have adequately answered against the point of this thread that you support the use of violence by some authority to enforce Lockean principals of property[/quote]

I support [i]retaliatory[/i] force against acts that I consider aggressive. A person with a legitimate claim to a plot of land has every right to forcibly evict a squatter, since the squatter acted aggressively by trespassing, invading that person's legitimate property.

[quote]It is true that by conquest the situation was created in which the majority of the Irish were not able to be landowners. But then, through some lineage of legitimate voluntary contracts of sale, those who currently own the land in Ireland now own it. For they bought it from someone who bought it from someone who bought it from the Irish Free State who bought it from the thieves themselves. How can we respect first ownership if the first ownership is one of theft? A thief cannot legitimately sell property he has stolen, can he?

I am a descendant of the Dochartaigh clann, whose land in Inishowen was stolen by the British landlords. Every landowner in Inishowen somehow purchased that land from those thieves... shouldn't I, and all who share my name, have some claim to it based upon 'first ownership'? Was it not stolen from my ancestors?[/quote]

This is a good question and one that has been much discussed by market anarchists. I say that principle should be that if a legitimate claimant can be found, then he does indeed have a right to be given the land regardless of how distant in time the theft was. Of course, the practicalities are not that simple. First of all, someone has to actually press the claim. If no one presses a claim, there is no dispute regardless of what happened. So you would actually have to find an actual plot in Inishowen that you believe was stolen from your ancestor and press a claim against the current landowner. You would then have to prove that you are the actual legitimate claimant as the next of kin of the person that this particular plot was stolen from, not the Dochartaigh clan as a whole, but the individual Dochartaigh of whom your are the alleged next of kin. Other descendants, of course, might very well have competing claims. If you managed to prove your just ownership to the satisfaction of whatever arbitrator you and the defendant have mutually chosen to adjudicate the case, then you would indeed get the land back.

Of course, such distant aggressions are almost impossible to prove, in terms of individuals versus individuals, since so much evidence has been lost in time. If a previous legitimate owner cannot be found, being lost in the mists of time, then the land in theory fell out of ownership at some point and was open to homesteading. Of course, the first homesteader would generally be the current user, who, thereby, does indeed acquire just ownership. Those are the basic principles as I see them. It's not a perfect solution, of course, but I think it's the best you can do.