Sure. (If Albert J. Nock and Frank Chodorov aren’t part of the family, who is?)

> how about Catholic Distributists/Southern Agrarians?

I confess I don’t know very much about their views.

> the Georgists I hang around with (Sullivan, Altmann,
> Smith, Hartzok, Flo, Kyriazi) don’t think land should
> be “owned at the community level but managed by
> individual possessors”

Yes, certainly all my descriptions of the various views are over-simplifications in need of qualifications/clarifications; those were just the cartoon versions.

the Georgists I hang around with (Sullivan, Altmann, Smith, Hartzok, Flo, Kyriazi) don’t think land should be “owned at the community level but managed by individual possessors”

land ownership is a bundle of rights with use, possession, exclusion, transferability retained by the individual while the economic rent is owned in common and shared equally amongst neighbors in the community to uphold the excluded’s absolute right to their labor.

since the economic rent only appears beyond Locke’s Proviso homesteading free and clear prior to without any obligations is just.

the difference then with mutualism is that there would be a huge amount of land free to homestead and not much economic rent.

regarding anarcho-communists…ownership in common and collective ownership are opposite because common ownership is an individual right that requires no prior consent before access/use but only judge afterwards if it is just whereas collective ownership requires the consent of ALL owners (or their delegated authority) prior to use.

how about Catholic Distributists/Southern Agrarians?

sorry Brad I don’t have a blog and don’t have the time to blog extensively as I am devoting fulltime efforts to the Second Vermont Republic…

a) Issue 3 of The Industrial Radical is going to be devoted inter alia to the question of Georgist vs. Lockean vs. mutualist vs. etc. approaches to land ownership; we eagerly solicit contributions from all view points on this topic. To submit an article see here:
http://praxeology.net/industrial-radical.htm

b) For anyone interested, here are links to some defenses of the Lockeanism-plus-common-ownership position:
- by Carlton Hobbs:
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=362
- by Randall Holcombe:
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/19_2/19_2_1.pdf
- by David Schmidtz:
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~schmidtz/manuscripts/InstitutionofProperty.doc
- by me:
http://libertariannation.org/a/f33l2.html
http://libertariannation.org/a/f53l1.html

Since most Lockeans think you lose property rights if you “abandon” a piece of property, one could say the fundamental difference between mutualists and Lockeans is a question of what counts as abandonment (a point Kevin Carson has made). If you look at it that way, it’s not obvious that mutualists are closer to Georgists than to Lockeans.

Among those who accept some version of private ownership, another difference is whether the possibility of common ownership is also endorsed. David Schmidtz, Carlton Hobbs, Randall Holcombe and I have all defended the position that there could and should be cases of legitimate common ownership in a libertarian society. Most Rothbardians reject this view. (I don’t mean that they reject the possibility of contractually-formed partnerships and the like, but they do tend to reject the idea of less explicit and less rigidly bounded forms of common ownership.)

I don’t see why Kropotkinite, Georgist, mutualist, Lockean, etc. forms of property couldn’t peacefully coexist in a libertarian society. There’ll be disputes about title, etc., sure, but under anarchy there’ll be an incentive to resolve such disputes through peaceful arbitration rather than through violence.

On Austrian vs. mutualist economics: well, Kevin’s version of the labor theory of value is much more subjectivised/Austrianised than the better-known Marxian version. There are still differences between Kevin and the Austrians, but they’re more nuanced.

Incidentally, the next issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies features an exchange between Kevin and several Austrians/Rothbardians (including me) on questions of land ownership and economic theory. It will be apparent that there’s a wide range of opinions among Austrians as to how great or small the commonalities between Austrians and mutualists are.

In any case, I don’t think that making common cause between Rothbardians and mutualists has to mean that either side gives up its own views about economics or ownership or stops arguing with the other. But I do favour treating it as a friendly, inside-the-family dispute that doesn’t hinder our working together. A world in which the chief political dispute was between Rothbardians and mutualists would certainly be far preferable to the present one.

If you’d like to debate Georgist vs. Rothbardian views on land ownership, we can do that. Do you have your own blog? We could each link to each others posts/responses and go back and forth. It’ll work out great that way for both of us in terms of Google PageRank and a higher profile for the debate generally on Technorati and similar. Contact me if you’d like help setting one up.

whereas exclusive use of land (title or no title) is just up until a certain point beyond which it has to violate the absolute property rights to labor of those being excluded.

the title is not the problem but rather the exclusive use beyond a certain point which creates economic rent that is monopolized (with title backed by the state) by the excluder without expending any labor and actually capturing the socially creating surplus land values.

if Rothbardians were trully interested in the greatest amount of equal freedom for the greatest number of people they would calling for the voluntary sharing of economic rent to STRENGTHEN property rights to labor for all.