In case you're interested, there are quite elaborate theories of distributional justice. For example, New Theory Of Fairness And Social Welfare by Marc Fleurbaey and Francois Maniquet is a very good recent book on the topic, if you're fine with a decent amount of economic apparatus.
That makes absolutely no sense. That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer. I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources that you've appropriated and applied work to in order to turn it into something highly valuable (whether that be soil, water CO^2 and sunlight that you converted into food and then into bodily mass, or sand that you melted into silicon and turned into a microprocessor), deprives others of their rights.
Things like land, mineral resources, and water are definitely not "abundant and practically free", but in most places, scarce and highly contested. Furthermore, the people who control them to a large extent did not work for them, but inherited them. So to what extent you have access to some portion of these scarce resources doesn't depend on your own labor, but on whether you happened to get lucky in the birth lottery and get born to someone who, in the 19th century, signed a favorable water-rights contract in California, or a favorable ranching/mineral-rights contract in Texas. You'd have to have quite some metaphysical faith in the "labor mixing" theory to believe that because some pioneer in the 1850s got a good deal on land or water, it metamorphosized into "his land" in perpetuity, even though he didn't create it. Or, in many cases, even put any actual labor into it in the first place (many of these deals were "paper" deals where east-coast financiers acquired Western land holdings, and sent other people to work them).
What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others.
That does not mean it can not be legitimate - we reduce the liberty of others for various legitimate reasons all the time.
It does mean that whenever we enforce property rights we are making a tradeoff between the liberties of differents sets of people.
>What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others.
All property is scarce, which is why it has market value. You're saying people have no right to the property they create, if it happens to be scarce (which it always is).
Maybe you have some vague arbitrary definition of "scarce" that allows you to claim that the property rights you exercise over your possessions are legitimate, while the property rights of those with much more than you are not.
There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas, and extractive rentier capitalism, which is a zero sum game that works on the principle of monopolised control of limited resources - to the extent that it may actually deliberately limit those resources purely for profit. (See also Enron, pharmaceuticals, OPEC, and many other examples.)
If I own a significant amount of property in a town I can increase rents to "the level the market will bear" - which will have the sole effect of enriching myself at the expense of everyone else in the town.
Proponents of capitalism who don't understand how capitalism actually works always say "Yes, but someone can always compete with me and charge lower rents."
Except they won't, and this never happens, because once an exploitative individual begins creating a monopoly, the feedback loop never works in that direction. It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own.
Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results.
Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous. A more nuanced definition of economic rights would severely limit rentier capitalism while encouraging creative capitalism - but intervening to maintain innovation before monopolies or cartels become the main political and economic players.
It is absolutely absurd, and my first example makes perfect sense if one has the capacity to understand what is being discussed.
>There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas,
Proudhon's argument is that all property is "theft", so there is no such distinction in his philosophy. He was the angsty teenager with the edgy arguments of the 19th century.
>It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own.
Government is a monopoly of force. You want to cure market monopolies by expanding the power of a monopoly that employs threats of violence. Good luck with that.
>Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results.
This is unscientific quackery. You have provided no evidence at all for this inflammatory fearmongering. You're making a very specific argument about the cause of a particular outcome, in a system with an untold number of factors at play that could explain any set of outcomes.
>Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous.
Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights.
Trying to justify this grotesque violation of human rights with economic quackery that you are trying to pass off as fact (just another variation of the "if you don't rob the rich guy, you'll starve to death" snake oil that is always used to justify socialist ideology that violate human rights) is childish idiocy.
I really wish libertarians would stop using this facile rhetorical device: "Government must be bad, it relies on THREATS OF VIOLENCE!!"
But if you're talking about property rights, unless you're suggesting enforcement by stern warnings, you're already talking about using threats of violence to coerce people.
I mean if you're going to criticise libertarianism, at least learn the basics, like what the Non Aggression Principle (notice it's not called the Non Violence Principle) is.
Libertarianism is just the formalization of common decency and common sense. People denigrate it so that they can term basic decency as the tenet of some fringe ideology and get a pass to promote tyranny over other people through political action.
Of course. But my objection is that libertarians like to imply that violence coercion is inherently bad for rhetorical effect when criticising government.
>Using violence to punush someone for refusing to hand over a share of currency they receive in private trade, or for being 'too successful' at selling a widget and therefore being categorised as a monopolist, is not.
Well clearly we disagree. I think asking participants in society to pay for the benefits it affords, and discouraging anti-competitive practices are perfectly reasonable uses of violent coercion, and lead to better outcomes overall.
If you disagree that those policies are effective, that's fine. But please don't elevate your economic theories to morality.
>at least learn the basics, like what the Non Aggression Principle is (notice it's not called the Non Violence Principle).
I know what the NAP is, and I agree right up until libertarians start trying to define aggression to include theft. Honestly, the NAP seems at best like an awkward attempt to simplify a political philosophy, and at worst like a rhetorical device to hide property rights inside something that seems superficially unobjectionable.
>Libertarianism is just the formalization of common decency and common sense.
Yes, that's certainly how it likes to portray itself, but my impression is that as soon it gets into details, it's all about property rights.
I think society should be designed in the way that leads to the best utilitarian outcomes, and I think property rights are a very effective tool and should be part of that system. But they are not perfect, they are not morality, and they're certainly not "common decency".
I was implying that using threats of violence against non-violent people engaging in voluntary trade with other consenting adults is wrong.
>Well clearly we disagree. I think asking participants in society to pay for the benefits it affords, and discouraging anti-competitive practices are perfectly reasonable uses of violent coercion
So you're willing to use violent coercion against non-violent people for their refusal to pay a debt they did not voluntarily assume and/or for their engaging in too much voluntary trade with other consenting adults. Your moral framework is essentially sociopathic.
So are you. Theft is not violence. If you walk into my house and take my valuables, at no point have you done anything violent.
So you can't use the moral weight of the former to make responding to the latter with actual physical violence seem significantly more necessary to me than responding with physical violence to people who don't pay taxes.
This argument will be a lot more interesting as soon as someone demonstrates a functioning advanced economy absent a sovereign state, as we commonly think of it, and without someone or something else becoming the de facto sovereign in short order, since then we'll know the state isn't entirely necessary for the levels of wealth and advanced commerce and industry we presently enjoy, as it currently very much appears to be. I'm not holding my breath.
Or you could destroy it by reducing the power of government to use violence to guarantee exclusionary land use.
> Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights.
I would be fully for giving you the right to live untaxed if you also agree to not make use of any of the shared goods paid for by those taxes. That would be including most roads, of course. Have fun trying to earn more that way.
Exclusionary land use is necessary for anything as basic as having privacy in your home and personal security. Shifting taxes from income to land would certainly be beneficial, but it would not eliminate monopolies.
>I would be fully for giving you the right to live untaxed if you also agree to not make use of any of the shared goods paid for by those taxes. That would be including most roads, of course.
And that would be absolutely fine. The vast majority of taxes are used for forcible income redistribution (social welfare) and government largess (e.g. miliarily occupying other countries).
If government stuck to providing national defence and roads, it could collect all the revenue it needed from something like a split-rate property tax, and there'd be no need for a human-rights-violating income tax.
We can play your game the other direction. If using "practically free" natural resources doesn't deprive you of your rights, you would have no objections to a company rolling into your neighborhood with bulldozers and taking all of the nutrient-rich soil so that they can turn it into something highly valuable and sell it to other people. You would have no objection to a company like Nestle claiming ownership of a local river and prohibiting nearby residents from drinking from it.
I have no problem charging private entities rent for the appropriation of natural resources. What I have a problem with is demanding a share of the private property that they fashion out of those natural resources. From a public standpoint, it should make no difference if someone appropriates a ton of iron ore and places it in their living room as a collector's item, or if they use it to create a supercomputer. They should pay the same fee to the public in both cases, since it is the natural resource usage that should be charged, (and that the public has a legitimate right to charge a fee for), and not their private actions upon that material. But current tax laws, and Proudhon's argument which the parent comment cites, delegitimizes the value that one adds in the process of creating the latter.
Before your body was formed, there was no "you", so the concept of ownership didn't apply. The "offender" in that case was the laws of physics, or some deity if you prefer.
People starve to death because we find protecting property rights more important than letting them eat. How does it not make sense?
I am not saying that reducing enforcement of property rights does not negatively affect the owner. I am saying that there are plenty of cases where property rights reduces the ability of others to make us of it.
This makes it a tradeoff, not something worthy of absolutes.
> That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer.
And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it.
Liberty is not some absolute - pretty much every one us would agree that directly harming someone infringes more on their liberty than outlawing it would.
It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection. But one that simultaneously increases our overall liberty by constraining a tool of oppression.
> I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources
If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access.
But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so.
> deprives others of their rights.
If you starve to death because you can not afford food, much less land to grow a crop, nor afford to move anywhere else, you might think otherwise.
That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island.
They were deprived of their right to life because others property rights were given precedence - to the extent of the UK giving military escorts to ships exporting food.
Were those who died not deprived?
You're not framing the situation accurately. The question to be asked is: should people starve to death because we refuse to rob someone? The answer is yes.
Even if you don't care about the moral reasons for this, you must see that a legal system which allows those who are resource-poor to legally plunder those who are resource-rich perverts incentives and misallocates capital, leading to less innovation and development, and consequently, less progress in reducing the total number of deaths.
>And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it.
My point was that even if they would be richer for being able to cannibalize you, denying them that 'right' is not morally wrong. They do not have a right to feast on you. Even if a group of people were starving, and murdering and cannibalizing you would let them all survive, it would be morally wrong for us as a society to allow that to happen.
>It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection.
Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to another individual's person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means.
>If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access.
You're not getting my point. I'm saying that if someone takes abundant resources, applies work to it, and produces something of value that is scarce, they should have full moral rights to it, yet Proudhon's argument, as well as yours, denies them that right.
>But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so.
And therefore it's perfectly suitable to tax valuable land. What is not appropriate is taxing everything a person generates.
Let's say that each tonne of iron ore extracted from the crust costs society $10.00 in diminishment of natural resources, and in environmental damage. Let's say society charges an iron ore miner $50 to extract a tonne of iron ore, to compensate for these costs.
Now if the iron ore miner pays the fee, mines the ore, smelts the iron, and fashions the iron into an incredible machine, you have absolutely no right to what the machine produces. An income tax is not a tax on using scarce natural resources, or a charge for damaging the environment. It is robbery against someone successfully generating economic value. It is a human rights violation.
Proudhon's argument rationalizes the violation of human rights and legalized plunder against those who strive and succeed.
>That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island.
The Corn Laws prevented the Irish from importing food. It was not liberty that caused the Great Famine in Ireland.
> His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.
I keep hearing this argument. And its so obviously illogical.
Establishing the concept/law of property and property ownership is probably the first thing a society does as soon as it gets formed.
Post-property rights, I no longer have the freedom to walk and inhabit any space I want. I can't walk into your living room and stay there. I can't sleep in your bed. Your "right to own property" has severely curtailed my ability to move freely about the world. Men with guns will come after me if I don't leave your bedroom.
Your "private property" has imprisoned me into a tiny rabbit warren of publicly-owned spaces.
So you did not lose right to move in private properties (because you did not have any) but you gain right/assurance to move freely in public properties without danger to your person.
If aliens invade earth and set their own property laws it would not be stealing. It would be nothing. Because we dont have any contracts with aliens that we can claim aliens have broken.
That does not automatically mean it is bad - to determine that you need to first consider whether a given reduction in liberty is justified. Sometimes it will be, and sometimes it isn't.
And so are autocracies, inequality between genders, slavery, feudalism, rule of the strongest etc...
Private (not personal) property doesn't a priori have to be more of a natural law than any of those.
Private property is every bit as natural as personal property. Both are enforcing exclusive usage of some part of the natural world for one's own self. Both are required for one to be able to enjoy the full value that they create through their own efforts. The personal/private distinction an arbitrary one with no philosophical basis. It's purely done for sophistry.
That is demonstrably wrong, given that a large number of people throughout history has enjoyed the full value that they create without enforcing property rights.
If you want to make an argument that property rights are beneficial, then make that argument, because that is an argument that you may be able to defend depending on your underlying assumptions.
But the very point of property law is to limits others ability to make use of property. Its very point is to reduce the liberty of those who does not have ownership.
It's ok to feel that this is an acceptable, justifiable reduction of liberty, but it doesn't change the fact that it places substantial restrictions on others, and trying to pretend that it doesn't will not change that.
That is not demonstrable at all. That's idealising the past for ideological convenience.
>But the very point of property law is to limits others ability to make use of property. Its very point is to reduce the liberty of those who does not have ownership.
Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to your own person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means.
I can image a society where the first is considered ridiculous. The second, not so much
We could require all owners of property to pay rent for their use of natural resources, at a rate commensurate with the value of said natural resources, and there would still be trillions of dollars worth of private property, and socialists claiming a right to an equal share of it based on some contrived justification.
>or paying someone only part of what their labor is worth, you're enjoying more than just the value of your own efforts.
If someone voluntarily gives you more labour than what you pay them for, that's still a voluntary transaction, and anything you earn from that labour is legitimately yours. If you build me a shed in exchange for $1, because you're such a generous guy, I still have full rights to that shed. Of course in most cases people do not accept a job that pays them below market rates.
I assume you're implying that profits are the surplus value of labour that is unfairly provided to employers, which is simple Marxist ignorance.
Profits are the compensation the employer earns for the organisation and capital they provide. Labour is worth whatever its market price is, not whatever revenues are generated in enterprises where it's employed.
It's sad that I have to debunk 150 year old Marxist fairy tales on hackernews.
So my point was not that if something is accepted in society ==> Its right. There is no such thing as right/wrong/moral/etc. Its about consistencies in the contracts we humans sign with each other.
I feel his argument was a utopian and philosophical one, and is quite hard to consider practically, hence the other replies less articulate indignance to the idea.
His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.
Sometimes that may be worth it: the deprivation of others may be small, and the benefits to the individual of being able to wall something off might be high.
Even the vast majority of anarchists and communists would draw a sharp line between private property + the "means of production" vs. personal property. To put it rather pointedly: Pretty much everyone agrees that granting every random stranger the right to use your toothbrush deprives us of more rights than it provides us.
Where exactly the line goes on what should be shared and what should not is one of the major differentiating factors of political ideologies, but that there is a line is recognised by every present-day government in the world.
The enforcement of exclusionary property rights might enhance everyones rights and freedoms when what is walled off is so common that there is no perceptable increase in freedom from protecting part of it or when the benefits of exclusionary access are large enough to overcome the downsides, and it might enhance some peoples rights all the time, but it may also cause a drastic, profound reduction in the rights of many once something is scarce enough that allowing some people exclusionary control of it has the potential to significantly deprive others.
To take an extreme example: If all the resources you could have used to obtain food belongs to someone else, you've just de facto lost the right to live and having a de jure right to life does not help you.
This also acts as its own counter-example: If you don't have right to control your own wealth, then the ability to eat depends on the willingness of socity to let you.
And therein lies the problem with looking at a right to controlling your own wealth: Depending on how the society you happen to live in today is structured in terms of your ability to obtain wealth, and who has ownership, you may have more de facto rights with a right to control your own wealth or more without it. And that structure can change, and suddenly reverse the effect.
In other words, a "right to control your own wealth" does not provide a universal good, but one that is conditional on circumstances. That is my biggest problem with considering it as suitable to be a human right.