Ambrose Bierce is right: if the entire world becomes private property, every person born after that date for all eternity will be born a slave. I’m as partial to Lockean ideas as most of the people here, but it has to be recognized as merely a very useful social convention or, at most, a right tempered by the proviso to avoid absurd results.

And the funny part about Rothbard’s championing of Locke’s theory of property as the only valid theory is that, since he rejects the proviso, he doesn’t even agree with Locke!

I posted my own piece on property theory on my personal blog a few days ago, titled Is Property Theft?, at http://anarchywithoutbombs.com/2010/03/07/is-property-theft/

However this post gives me an opportunity to address something that has always niggled me. I hear Rothbard’s criticism (friendly it has to be said) of Georgists in “For a New Liberty” and the less friendly criticism of people like Walter Block that I’ve heard in one of his talks at a Mises event. And they both seem to get a major aspect of Georgism wrong. He is not for “nationalising” land, nor denying ownership. All he says is that owners do not have a right to the rental value of that land, and that doing so amounts to a tax on everyone else who is, by that owner’s enclosure of his land, obliged to avoid it. Now sure, people could say that is sohpistry, for if you don’t pay the rent to whatever authority gets to collect it, you lose it, but surely the same would be true if, absent a state title authority, you fail to protect your land adequately.

I am always, however, haunted by the entry in Ambrose Bierce’s the “Devil’s Dictionary”:

“LAND: A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy, and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognised. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.”

You see, it seems to me that even if we accept that usufruct rights are fine (and I accept, as here, that they are better than absentee rights obviously), we still ignore that the owners of “prime sites” impose what amounts to a tariff on those excluded from those sites - that Ricardo’s “law of rent” still applies in effect, because the costs of, say, travelling further to work because you are excluded from the most appropriate sites closer to work still impose a penalty on people.

The other day I came across an academic here in the UK - he originates from your side of the pond - called William O’Brian. He describes himself as a left-libertarian and teaches Law at Warwick University. One of his papers, which I confess I have not read fully yet, tries to justify Land Value Tax based on the “Harm Principle” (if you have access to papers at SSRN that is). I’m only about half way through, and I follow the logic so far. I’ll be interested to see if he posits a way in which his idea can be made to work in a completely stateless society, or whether he is proposing the sort of minimal state George does. Nonetheless his argument for some form of equalising payment on the basis of the “Harm Principle” might be interesting.

Jock

That’s why Carson’s insight about property being a totally separate issue from natural rights and “self-ownership” (IMHO a perverse projection of the human condition into the narrow paradigm of material property) gives me a sense of hope that an anarcho-pluralist approach could lead to more peace.

Perhaps this is what we should do: articulate a variety of approaches to property and discuss how they could co-exist, just as we do so with law. If we raise our banner on that pole, rather than simply the pole that represents our personal view, we could make a real breakthrough, I think. Frankly, I’m surprised Carson hasn’t stressed this issue more.

We don’t have to get people to reject the narratives, necessarily, I think - we just need to get them to see that they *are* narratives, that they are arbitrary and have little truth value, and that they need not be adhered to literally. Or maybe human nature is too rigid, I dunno.

In any case, well done, Brad.

BTW, that isn’t intended as a rebuttal of your views. Needless to say, we have many common ideas on this subject. I just wanted to summarize my own on this subject cleanly.