http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem

…is that it seems rather silly/self-contradictory to assert that since it supposedly IS impossible to derive “ought” from “is”, that we OUGHT not make reference to “ought”.

I don’t think natural law ethics — Rothbard’s or anybody else’s — is best understood as trying to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Natural law theories generally start off with some ‘ought’ that they claim is rationally mandatory — not because it follows from some ‘is’ but because we can’t deny it without some sort of prgamatic incoherence. (Rothbard, for example, takes this line in _The Ethics of Liberty_. So did Socrates, so did the Stoics, so did Aquinas, etc.) Then the further ‘oughts’ are derived from the *conjunction* of that ‘ought’ with various facts about human nature.

“Rothbard’s natural law theory and radically anti-state version of Lockean property rights theory serves the same role.”

doesn’t the radical version of Lockean property rights have to include Locke’s provisos?

- spoilage
- enough and as good

mutualists are Lockean deviationists because they have taken what money had made moot for spoilage and extended it it to occupancy and use.

georgists are Lockean deviationists because they take the enough and as good proviso to it’s logical conclusion

People can agitate for there to be no such thing as private property all they want, doesn’t mean it’s possible. Being realistic, even collectively-held property is still property, and comes with all that applies. Rather than hold onto images of no one owning anything at all, it is vastly more useful to simply consider how they got it.