Owning land and conditional residence (for ACs)

[foal]

Can you explain how my scenario is a lot better than a traditional state?

[mosdef]

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Can you explain how my scenario is a lot better than a traditional state?

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It would require an understanding that there is a party that owns the land that has a legitimate claim to define the rules on that land based on property rights. If everyone in your hypothetical land believed in property rights, it is unlikely that the land owners would enact rules that are as in the same vein as the rules imposed by current governments.

[Borodog]

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Thought experiment:

Say I buy up a bunch of farmland. I let people live on it as long as they agree to follow a set of rules or "laws" that I've come up with and pay me a certain percentage of their profits or "taxes".

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Instead let's say that you agree to *pay* them a certain percentage of *your* profits or *wages*, since *you* own the land.

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With the money I make off of this I hire a security force or "police force" to enforce my set of rules and to make sure people pay me what they owe me.

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How about the people purchase insurance to make sure that they are paid what you agreed to pay them in wages instead?

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Other rich individuals see this as a good idea and start doing similar things. A group of land owners and myself decide to pool together and join forces to create a single company and eventually we own a very large portion of land. If people don't like our rules they are free to not live on our land, but the utility of the land provides strong incentive. We provide further incentive by using our profits to try to make life pleasant for our residents. If we feel very generous we may even make all of our residents joint owners in our company and let them vote to decide who gets to fill our executive and rule making or "legislative" positions. It's quite unlikely that we'd be this generous, but it could happen.

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If you don't use violence to enforce a land cartel, workers would be free to move from one owner's land to another. And since land owners are greedy evil capitalists who want to make the most money, they will compete for workers to work their capital, and will bid up wages and and improve working conditions, until total wages (monetary wages + working conditions) paid to the workers tended to equal their marginal revenue product.

And if you aren't using violence to maintain your land cartel, then it isn't a state.

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My idea is of course that AC could result in something resembling a state or a group of states. I am being bogus? Basically I'm asking this, because I want to gain a sense of how ACists interpret land ownership.

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Nozick came up with a similar argument for how a coercive state could arise from a stateless voluntary society entirely through voluntary transactions and hence no violation of rights; it's in Anarchy, State and Utopia. It's been adequately debunked in my opinion. It's clearly false on the face of it. You can't go from "all voluntary transactions" to "lots of coerced transactions" without starting coercing people somewhere in the middle, and that immediately is a violation of rights. And if the stateless voluntary society is of the type that free market anarchism requires in the first place, one of libertarian social norms, the minute that started it would be seen for the aggression it is and wiped out.

The system you are describing is essentially feudalism, and while in many places feudalism was based largely on coercion, there were in fact places where it largely wasn't, and worked very well. Workers could move freely from one landlord to another, were paid about 70% of what they produced in wages (whereas today it averages about 80%, not counting what government steals in taxes, which totals about 50% of wages, leaving workers far worse off now, at least in terms of what they get to keep if not in absolute productivity and hence absolute wages, than they were 1500 years ago). Landlords had no special rights that commoners did not; they just owned land. There were literally thousands of small decentralized units that competed with each other for workers. Wars were infrequent and constrained to the personal armies of the warring landowners, usual over land inheritance disputes. Their costs could not be externalized on the populace, non-combatants and their property was largely left alone, conscription and requisition were rare. The allodial system of property rights and the roots of the modern notion of individual liberty actually grew up . . . under feudalism. But again, this was not universal.

It's actually a really fascinating topic.

[foal]

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Thought experiment:

Say I buy up a bunch of farmland. I let people live on it as long as they agree to follow a set of rules or "laws" that I've come up with and pay me a certain percentage of their profits or "taxes".

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Instead let's say that you agree to *pay* them a certain percentage of *your* profits or *wages*, since *you* own the land.

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With the money I make off of this I hire a security force or "police force" to enforce my set of rules and to make sure people pay me what they owe me.

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How about the people purchase insurance to make sure that they are paid what you agreed to pay them in wages instead?

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I don't think this is either an efficient or an intuitive way of thinking about it. The profits from their work will be received by them and then they'll give a percentage to me. It's much easier to think of it as them paying me a percentage of their profits than vice versa. They will be the ones with initial access to the profit so it makes much more sense for me to go to lengths to make sure I get my cut than for them to go to lengths to make sure they don't simply give me everything (that's easy to manage). Not that the semantics of this matter all that much, except that my security force example seems more likely than your insurance example. How about part of the agreement I have with them is that the profits resulting from their work will be theirs as long as they give me a cut.

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And if you aren't using violence to maintain your land cartel, then it isn't a state.

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I only use violence in self defense. If someone is refusing to pay or refusing to follow my rules then forcibly seizing their assets and forcibly keeping them from my land may be my only choice. If another land owner hires his security force to attack me with the intention of stealing my land then I will obviously defend myself with my own force.

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And if the stateless voluntary society is of the type that free market anarchism requires in the first place, one of libertarian social norms, the minute that started it would be seen for the aggression it is and wiped out.

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Huh? What would be wiped out?

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The system you are describing is essentially feudalism, and while in many places feudalism was based largely on coercion, there were in fact places where it largely wasn't, and worked very well. Workers could move freely from one landlord to another, were paid about 70% of what they produced in wages (whereas today it averages about 80%, not counting what government steals in taxes, which totals about 50% of wages, leaving workers far worse off now, at least in terms of what they get to keep if not in absolute productivity and hence absolute wages, than they were 1500 years ago). Landlords had no special rights that commoners did not; they just owned land. There were literally thousands of small decentralized units that competed with each other for workers. Wars were infrequent and constrained to the personal armies of the warring landowners, usual over land inheritance disputes. Their costs could not be externalized on the populace, non-combatants and their property was largely left alone, conscription and requisition were rare. The allodial system of property rights and the roots of the modern notion of individual liberty actually grew up . . . under feudalism. But again, this was not universal.

It's actually a really fascinating topic.

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Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

But if these feudal units started merging into larger groups or even into one large group then I think the result would resemble a state.

We could think of the United States government as being a company that owns all the land which comprises "the united states". They may not claim to own the land, but in effect they do. What they claim isn't really important. They do not practice selling their land, because this would conflict with their interests. An AC objection is that the government did not obtain this land legitimately. Alright, but suppose they had. This is a thought experiment. What about the united states couldn't come to pass from AC roots?

[pvn]

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What about the united states couldn't come to pass from AC roots?

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Of course it's *possible* that *everyone* living in the geographical area of the united states would voluntarily cede their property to the collective and voluntarily sign the constitution.

But it's pretty dang unlikely.

Just look at secession. The civil war was basically a war of conquest against a group of people looking to establish independence, following the same rationale as the revolutionaries used in their secession from the british empire. It's hard to see how such a war could be justified starting from "AC roots".

[foal]

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What about the united states couldn't come to pass from AC roots?

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Of course it's *possible* that *everyone* living in the geographical area of the united states would voluntarily cede their property to the collective and voluntarily sign the constitution.

But it's pretty dang unlikely.

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It doesn't have to work that way. As I explained it could be the gradual result of landowners joining forces. I'm not saying it could happen over night.

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Just look at secession. The civil war was basically a war of conquest against a group of people looking to establish independence, following the same rationale as the revolutionaries used in their secession from the british empire. It's hard to see how such a war could be justified starting from "AC roots".

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I already know ACs don't think the US owns its land legitimately given it's actual history. I'm saying one could imagine a history in which our current society or state was formed by means that an AC would consider legitimate.

[tomdemaine]

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What about the united states couldn't come to pass from AC roots?

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Of course it's *possible* that *everyone* living in the geographical area of the united states would voluntarily cede their property to the collective and voluntarily sign the constitution.

But it's pretty dang unlikely.

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It doesn't have to work that way. As I explained it could be the gradual result of landowners joining forces. I'm not saying it could happen over night.

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Just look at secession. The civil war was basically a war of conquest against a group of people looking to establish independence, following the same rationale as the revolutionaries used in their secession from the british empire. It's hard to see how such a war could be justified starting from "AC roots".

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I already know ACs don't think the US owns its land legitimately given it's actual history. I'm saying one could imagine a history in which our current society or state was formed by means that an AC would consider legitimate.

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Similarly one could imagine all the atoms in this apple I'm eating spontaneously splitting apart creating a blast powerful enough to destroy the entire building I'm in. I'm still gonna risk eating it though.

[pvn]

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What about the united states couldn't come to pass from AC roots?

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Of course it's *possible* that *everyone* living in the geographical area of the united states would voluntarily cede their property to the collective and voluntarily sign the constitution.

But it's pretty dang unlikely.

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It doesn't have to work that way. As I explained it could be the gradual result of landowners joining forces. I'm not saying it could happen over night.

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I didn't say it would have to happen overnight, either.

[foal]

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Similarly one could imagine all the atoms in this apple I'm eating spontaneously splitting apart creating a blast powerful enough to destroy the entire building I'm in. I'm still gonna risk eating it though.

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Can you explain why you find my scenario this astronomically unlikely? To me it seems natural that state-like configurations would emerge and that they would become larger and more centralized over time.

[foal]

I have two main points.

The first is that AC conditions could easily lead to state-like conditions.

The second is that "states" are not essentially different than businesses. Both are human organizations with power structures and property. Thinking about the government as something fundamentally different than the market is a mistake IMO. We could think of the government as a business that happens to own the land. Since it owns the land, enforcing rules and conditions for those living on it's land is perfectly legitimate under ACism. And actually a democratic government such as the one we have in place is probably preferable to the sort of state-like structures that would emerge in an AC environment.