Owning land and conditional residence (for ACs)

[pvn]

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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.

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Now all you have to do is demonstrate how the entity known as "The United States" has legitimate property rights to all of the territory it claims.

States acquire land either by buying it (with stolen funds), by decree (which does not confer a legitimate property right) (also note escheat would fall into this category), by conquest (effectively robbery), by emminent domain (a subset of conquest), or by "working" the land (which would not confer property rights in the case of government, since they are working the land either with conscripted labor or they are purchasing labor with stolen funds).

[foal]

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Now all you have to do is demonstrate how the entity known as "The United States" has legitimate property rights to all of the territory it claims.

States acquire land either by buying it (with stolen funds), by decree (which does not confer a legitimate property right) (also note escheat would fall into this category), by conquest (effectively robbery), by emminent domain (a subset of conquest), or by "working" the land (which would not confer property rights in the case of government, since they are working the land either with conscripted labor or they are purchasing labor with stolen funds).

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I've already said that I'm not arguing that the US obtained the land legitimately, so I'm not sure what this adds.

[pvn]

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Now all you have to do is demonstrate how the entity known as "The United States" has legitimate property rights to all of the territory it claims.

States acquire land either by buying it (with stolen funds), by decree (which does not confer a legitimate property right) (also note escheat would fall into this category), by conquest (effectively robbery), by emminent domain (a subset of conquest), or by "working" the land (which would not confer property rights in the case of government, since they are working the land either with conscripted labor or they are purchasing labor with stolen funds).

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I've already said that I'm not arguing that the US obtained the land legitimately, so I'm not sure what this adds.

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That's the entire crux of the issue! Ownership of the land is what seperates legitimate rule from illegitimate rule.

[foal]

I'm not talking about "what seperates legitimate rule from illegitimate rule". If "legitimate rule" is all ACists are concerned with, then it clearly has nothing to do with what's practical or effective in terms of benefiting human life and society. If "legitimate rule" is not all ACists are concerned with, then my points are something that need to be tackled.

[vhawk01]

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Key word is "resembling".

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Exactly. Maybe an AC world would result in something very much like a state, a nice comfortable place to live, except it wasn't based on violent coercion.

Wow, what a fatal flaw in AC! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[vhawk01]

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I'm not talking about "what seperates legitimate rule from illegitimate rule". If "legitimate rule" is all ACists are concerned with, then it clearly has nothing to do with what's practical or effective in terms of benefiting human life and society. If "legitimate rule" is not all ACists are concerned with, then my points are something that need to be tackled.

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The fact that they do not ever claim to own the land and could never legitimately claim to own the land is exactly the problem. Take a look at the "if you don't like it, leave!" arguments. These are predicated on the idea that the US owns the land legitimately, but they do not. And since they do not, the argument "if you don't like it, leave" is inherently flawed. And so, if I don't like it, I DONT HAVE TO PARTICIPATE. This is the main point. If I don't have to participate, I don't have to pay taxes, people can't vote to take my money or subject me to laws, and we live in an AC world. The fact that it looks a lot like a statist world is irrelevant.

[foal]

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Wow, what a fatal flaw in AC! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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I never said it was a fatal flaw in AC. I'm actually new to the idea of AC and am trying to learn how you think so I'd prefer discussing this productively if possible, not getting into a "you're stupid!", "no, you're stupid!" style argument.

I've gotta run, I'll respond to the rest of your post when I get home.

[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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I don't think this is either an efficient or an intuitive way of thinking about it.

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It is, however, the correct way to think about it. The product of the land belongs to the land owner, who hires workers and pays them a wage to work that land. If you want to reverse this, what you're saying is that the land owner is not actually the owner at all, but rather the workers are, and that the land owner is stealing from them (this is the scenario as propounded by Marxists). If that's what you want to go with fine, but that isn't the scenario you specified. Nor is it the scenario in the real world. In the real world it is the landowner who either homesteaded the land or acquired it in a chain of voluntary exchange from the original homesteader. It's possible that back along the line the land was stolen from the rightful owner, but that doesn't change the conceptual nature of land ownership.

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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.

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No, it isn't. 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.

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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).

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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.

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Not that the semantics of this matter all that much,

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It's critically important. The entire market process depends on private property and ownership, and bastardizing the definition of ownership destroys the smooth working of markets.

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except that my security force example seems more likely than your insurance example.

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I'm sure that you will provide a security force to protect your land and provide a safe working environment for the workers you pay. And I'm equally sure that the market will produce institutions that help ensure the workers in society that they will be paid what they are owed for their labor. If you want to wave your hands and claim this won't happen, you have to demonstrate why, since it has in every society that ever existed.

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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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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.

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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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Again with the refusing to pay. You are the one who has agreed to pay the workers, not vice versa. Is it your land or isn't it?

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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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Aggression. Wasn't your whole point that a completely voluntary contractual arrangement could somehow turn into a state? A state is by definition coercive and non-contractual. So if you get from A to B you have to start coercing people, and in a libertarian society this would be immediately seen for the aggression it is and 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.

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Resembling a state is not the issue. To be a state, it has to be a coercive, non-contractual territorial monopoly. Again, no coercion, no state. To get from A to B you have to start coercing people, and if the society is libertarian, which is a prerequisit for free market anarchy, this will not be allowed.

Besides, land parcels do not have a tendency toward agregation on the free market. Parcels are joined, but they are also subdivided as well, and there isn't any net trend in the long run except that determined by the market conditions and the highest and best use of the land. Land size is like firm size; there is an optimal size for land parcels being put to different uses under different conditions. Cattle ranching takes a lot of land. Too little won't work, too much is uneconomical. In urban areas and suburbs land parcels sizes tend to be small.

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We could think of the United States government as being a company that owns all the land which comprises "the united states".

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A) The United States explicitly claims to NOT own all the land within it's borders, so I fail to see how this is a useful analogy.
B) The United States does not *legitimately* own the land even if you accept that it *does* in fact own the land in every meaningful way, since the government did not homestead the land or acquire it through voluntary exchange from the rightful owners.
C) 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. The government unilaterally decides what the "social contract" is, and unilaterally coerces you into complying with it. If you resist, it will kill you. In effect, such a system is mass enslavement of the population. Personally I don't think it is that bad, because the government does *not* claim to own everything, and still leaves larges segments of property rights intact. Luckily for us, or the economy would collapse in short order, as happened in the Soviet Union under Lenin from 1917 to 1921 under so-called "War Communism". I.e. total communism, the abolition of private property in the factors of production, the nationalization of all industry, the abolition of market prices in factors of production, the abolition of economic calculation, and the advent of total central planning of the economy. By 1921 so little was being produced that mass exodus of the cities had begun, factories had been stripped of their machines and sold for food, people turned to foraging the countryside for food and roving banditry reigned. Only by relenting and allowing a return to limited private property, prices, and economic calculation was the abortion of Soviet experiment in state socialism averted.

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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?

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Coercion. Again, it comes down to what are the social norms of the society? In a society where everyone believes in Gods and angels and demons they will build churches. In a society where everyone believes in the necessity of a special caste of people who are required to commit crimes to stave off chaos, they will build governments.

Can you ever get to a society where the social norms are libertarian? Damned if I know. But I do know that there is nothing illogical or against human nature about it (just the opposite, in my opinion), and it is damn well worth trying to get to.

[mdob]

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Now all you have to do is demonstrate how the entity known as "The United States" has legitimate property rights to all of the territory it claims.

States acquire land either by buying it (with stolen funds), by decree (which does not confer a legitimate property right) (also note escheat would fall into this category), by conquest (effectively robbery), by emminent domain (a subset of conquest), or by "working" the land (which would not confer property rights in the case of government, since they are working the land either with conscripted labor or they are purchasing labor with stolen funds).

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I've already said that I'm not arguing that the US obtained the land legitimately, so I'm not sure what this adds.

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That's the entire crux of the issue! Ownership of the land is what seperates legitimate rule from illegitimate rule.

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Who owns land legitimately? In the US most of it was stolen from the Indians, if they can be considered to have owned it legitimately in the first place.

[Borodog]

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Now all you have to do is demonstrate how the entity known as "The United States" has legitimate property rights to all of the territory it claims.

States acquire land either by buying it (with stolen funds), by decree (which does not confer a legitimate property right) (also note escheat would fall into this category), by conquest (effectively robbery), by emminent domain (a subset of conquest), or by "working" the land (which would not confer property rights in the case of government, since they are working the land either with conscripted labor or they are purchasing labor with stolen funds).

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I've already said that I'm not arguing that the US obtained the land legitimately, so I'm not sure what this adds.

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That's the entire crux of the issue! Ownership of the land is what seperates legitimate rule from illegitimate rule.

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Who owns land legitimately? In the US most of it was stolen from the Indians, if they can be considered to have owned it legitimately in the first place.

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Just because theft exist does not mean that ownership does not.