A comment at c4ss.org listed some questions that I felt needed longer answers than I’d care to put in a comment, so my answers will be a longer post here on this blog.
1. how can private property be considered libertarian?
maintaining a small piece of private property seems to be a reaction to encroachments of the state. in other words, if a state exists, then only under those circumstances would private property be necessary to secure a bare minimum of the means to achieving that which you need to survive. absent the state (or any institutionalized system of expropriation), from who would you need to utilize the protection of private property against.
First, a bit about terms. The term “private property” is one that has multiple operative definitions and sets of related connotations depending on one’s political subculture. As a result, this writer prefers to avoid the term in order to try to avoid potential confusion, preferring instead simply “property”. The free-market libertarian habit of referring to “private property” is to distinguish it from “public property” in the colloquial sense of a euphemism for government property. But, since genuine libertarians don’t believe the state (as, basically, a bandit gang writ large) can legitimately own any property, the term “private property” is mostly a redundancy. All true property is non-state property. Thus, simply “property” is typically clearer in my opinion.
The above query actually contains two related but distinct questions:
- How can property be considered libertarian?
- Isn’t property unnecessary without the state?
We live in a material world. Agreed upon rules about which people (individually or collectively) “properly” control which scarce material resources are thus a feature of just about any society. From my perspective, that is a de facto property system. A far more interesting question is the matter of the content of those rules, or in other words, “What is the correct libertarian theory of justice in property?”
Apart from the state’s direct expropriation, its monopoly of legal services allows it to designate property as belonging to particular people without regard to whether or not their circumstances match any theory of justice in property. As a result, the owners of property in an ethical sense are often not the owners in the eyes of the state — and as a result, “property” becomes incorrectly associated with injustice. Proudhon went down this same path, saying both that “Property is theft” and “Property is freedom”. Those are both true because the word property can refer to either a statist privilege or a consensus-based ethical phenomenon grounded in reciprocity. In my view, social justice is best achieved not by attempting to abolish property but, instead, by achieving clarity on the matter of who rightfully owns what — and addressing it.
How can property be considered libertarian?
Is not the state’s expropriation injustice? Why? And if you’ve been robbed by a non-state actor, is that not also injustice?
Isn’t property unnecessary without the state?
States are essentially large bandit gangs. Expropriation by small bandit gangs is also a hazard, as there has throughout history always been a sociopathic minority of people who would rather use violence to steal rather than peacefully produce and exchange — takers rather than makers.
1a. isn’t private property, just like any other monopoly, but of land resources and thus not libertarian? doesn’t private derive from the same latin roots as deprive?
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/privare#Latin
I’m not referring specifically to land, but perhaps you are. I believe my remarks above address the concerns behind the first of these two questions and I would like to give you a chance to discuss that before proceeding with this discussion if you would still like me to. I will say that I believe the property theory I espouse addresses the issue of land monopoly, which I view as arising from state assignation of property titles (property as statist privilege).
As to the matter of etymology…
You do realize this same line of reasoning would then apply to words like “privacy” as well, don’t you? Merriam-Webster lists the derivation of the word this way:
Middle English privat, from Anglo-French, from Latin privatus, from past participle of privare to deprive, release, from privus private, individual
I’m no expert in Latin, but since privare can be either deprive or release (as in “released from military service”, for example, and now in private life), it seems to carry a principal connotation of simply “seperate”, which would fit with the word origin ultimately going back to privus for simply an individual.
2. existentially speaking, what’s the point of business and enterprise anyway? seriously? in a stateless society, everyone–person, family, tribe, community, whatever–would be able to provide the necessities of life because there would be no entity to prevent them, or take it away.
What do you mean by “business” if not production and exchange? Does it stop being business if you don’t wear a tie?
3. isn’t any kind of profit based on some kind of coercion; either by force or deceit? if an exchange of goods, services, money, etc. is an even exchange, where does profit come from? is it even possible to make a profit on an even exchange?
Carson’s views on this are somewhat different than mine, although we reach similar conclusions — so I’ll just qualify my remark by saying you should talk to Kevin about his particular take on value and exchange.
The question assumes value is absolute, whereas I maintain it is subjective. If I have an apple and would prefer an orange while you have an orange but would prefer an apple, we might decide to trade because we would each perceive a gain in value from the exchange and thus have an incentive to engage in the action we call “trading”. Purely voluntary exchange results in mutual gain, which would be impossible if value was absolute.
Exchange is not completely voluntary when its context is shaped by statist plunder. For example, wage negotiations with a company that has received a large government bailout are colored by the economic influence their ill-gotten loot brings. That’s no indictment of exchange, but of the looting in the first place that warped the context of the exchange.
3a. if that exchange does produce a profit, where does it come from if not from coercion?
See above. There’s much more that could be said on this set of topics, but I’m trying to be succinct.
4. another existential question. that’s it? all we have to look forward to after the end of the state is seemingly paranoid homesteaders with guns (for protection only, of course) who only relate within their communities insofar as they can out-manoeuvre each other for the profit of their enterprise.
what would entice an anarchist to break ranks and consider libertarianism that is more than bare-bones (as carson puts it)?
No offense, but you may be projecting a bit here. I’ve placed no constraints on how anybody relates beyond asserting that aggression is bad and mutually voluntary interaction is fine. I’m not saying that production and exchange are all there is to life, but only that the production and exchange that does occur ought to be voluntary.
UPDATE: See also Kevin Carson’s followup comment…
As Brad says in his post, a lot of the trouble is just semantic. Property is libertarian because it’s a place you can exist and do what you like without permission or interference, and a set of moveable objects that you require to support your life or express yourself likewise without permission or interference.
There is a limited number of plots of land capable of supporting an individual within easy access distance of any community, and moveable objects are scarce because they take labor to create. People need dependable use-rights for the land and tools they use to support their lives, and confidence that nobody else will take their labor product without their permission. To obtain this state of affairs, we need a set of rules governing who has priority access to a given piece of land or moveable object, which is all that “property” is, strictly speaking.
I believe that most of the current return on land and capital, as such, is a rent on artificial scarcity created by state restrictions on competition in the supply of those factors. But entrepreneurial profit is non-coercive; it is a scarcity rent that results from anticipating shifts in demand and being one of the first suppliers when demand outstrips supply. The natural state of affairs is for entrepreneurial profit to gravitate toward zero, when market entry is free. And as Brad says, psychic “profit” in the sense of trading effort or objects in possession for something else you prefer is the whole point of production for trade.
I suppose a fair number of libertarians are paranoid and own guns, but I don’t think most of them are anywhere near as sociopathic or uncooperative as you seem to think. If anything, they tend to be more genuinely warm-hearted on average than non-libertarians, because they understand cooperation as something that is achieved by agreement between equals, and not simply organized through a state that can force people at gunpoint to cooperate whether they want to or not. IOW, they recognize the integrity of people as individuals, rather than regarding them as means to ends (an assumption I think lurks, however unconsciously, behind all the touchy-feely soccer mom rhetoric of liberals).
