Owning land and conditional residence (for ACs)

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]

Borodog:

[ QUOTE ]
Think of it this way. Say you own the land and you work it yourself, and you have no other workers. Who owns the product of the land? You do, of course. Then lets say that you become so prosperous working your land that you want to hire some hands to help you. You pay them a portion of your profits as wages. Eventually you hire enough people that you don't have to work at all. It's still your profit from your land, and you are paying the workers wages deducted from hose profits.

[/ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
No, they aren't the ones with "initial access to the profits." That would be the homesteader, or whomever holds the land in an unbroken chain of voluntary exchange therefrom. The fact that you hire workers doesn't change this. Think about what you are suggesting. You are suggesting that if a cobbler makes shoes, and then wants to hire a worker to make more shoes, using the tools and materials belonging to the cobbler, that suddenly the shoes belong to the worker and not the cobbler. Not only is this crazy, but if everyone believed this, nobody would ever hire a worker.

[/ QUOTE ]
That isn’t the situation I’m describing. I’m not hiring them to do specific work. I’m letting them live on my land and do whatever they want (as long as they’re not breaking my rules) as long as they give me a cut of profit from any work they decide to do.

[/ QUOTE ]

I doubt this highly. If, for example, they decided to do absolutely nothing and hence give you a cut of nothing, would you happily accept it, or fire them all and hire new workers? I suspect the latter. Or how about they decide to raze the property to the ground and destroy the capital value of your property? I doubt you would sit idly by and then happily take your 20% of the ashes.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]
I suppose you can do that, but I have no idea why you are bending over backward to avoid the fact that the product of the land belongs to the landowner and that he simply pays his workers an agreed upon wage.

[/ QUOTE ]
I’m not bending over backwards. I’m charging them to live there, I’m not paying them to work for me. It’d be like if I bought a condo which I rented out and made tenants sign a contract saying “I will pay you 20% of my yearly income while I live here”.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's a separate issue. You can certainly charge them rent, but you are just as assuredly paying them a wage to work your land if that is what they are doing.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Your claim is essentially that the government owns *everything*, and pays us a wage (including temporary use of things like houses and cars) to work its capital. However, this is still coercion on a massive scale since none of us have ever signed a contract.

[/ QUOTE ]
If you’re born on land someone else owns you still have to respect the rules set forth by the land owner, do you not?

[/ QUOTE ]

Not necessarily. His rules cannot violate my rights. Remmber, this is a libertarian society we're talking about. You are trying to show how free market anarchy can give rise to states. The landowner cannot force me to work for him, or attack my person or steal my property. And if I don't like his rules, I can move elsewhere, because property owners are numerous and parcels are small. The transaction costs of moving are low and the competition for workers/renters is high. States are very different. They coercively create and enforce territorial monopolies, steal, murder and enslave, enforce their unilaterially enacted non-contractual "rules" over hundreds of square miles, and erect high barriers to entry and exit.

You are trying to take a flawed thought experiment down a blind alley, and there is simply no recovering it. You cannot get from a voluntary, contractual society to a coercive, non-contractual one without initiating force somewhere along the line. A free market anarchic society, which requires a libertarian social norm and the associated stricture against the initiation of force, would not allow you to get away with this.

[foal]

I was not familiar with this idea of a libertarian social norm being a prerequisite of an AC society (being new to the topic). I'm glad to hear you say that. It makes the whole thing sound a bit more viable. That would change my example slightly, in that land owners imposing non-libertarian-style rules would be a less likely occurrence.

[ QUOTE ]


I doubt this highly. If, for example, they decided to do absolutely nothing and hence give you a cut of nothing, would you happily accept it, or fire them all and hire new workers?

[/ QUOTE ]
Not realistic. But perhaps I'd charge an annual minimum fee in addition to a percentage of their profits.

[ QUOTE ]
You are trying to take a flawed thought experiment down a blind alley, and there is simply no recovering it.

[/ QUOTE ]
I'm not seeing a flaw.

[foal]

[ QUOTE ]
Or how about they decide to raze the property to the ground and destroy the capital value of your property? I doubt you would sit idly by and then happily take your 20% of the ashes.

[/ QUOTE ]
Ok so I would hold them liable for property damages.