A Critique of Rothbardian Natural Rights (sorta long)

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What you're advocating is pure ANARCHY.

These guys are advocating anarcho-CAPITALISM.

A world of difference-

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No, it's not different at all.

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ANARCHIST : "Property is theft".

Anarcho-CAPITALIST : "Property is sacrosanct".

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False. Anarchist just means !government. It doesn't imply anything about property. If you want to make a statement about what property should be, you need to add some form of adjective to the label "anarchist".

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Ofcourse not, if you want to make claims to authority over property in an anarchist society you have to make contract. Property rights beyond right of use (gathered through cooperative means) is meaningless to a true anarchist, if property rights are an inviolable absolute then you give the state legitimacy over land in the same degree you give someone who pointed at an unowned piece of land 500 years ago legitimacy over it. There would be no difference.

As for the anarchism = no government thingy, that is...well...half true.

[Misfire]

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The line is active vs passive. Me buying a burger drives up the price of burgers for you (though by an inperceptable amount) but that is a passive "loss" to you. Activly stealing from someone is different just like pointing a gun a someone and pulling the trigger is different from flying a plane near them.

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While both raise the price of burgers, actively stealing from Burger King has a victim that purchasing a burger doesn't have. A better example might be pollution, or drunk driving where there is no specific victim against whom the action is intended.

Either way, since there is an argument that everything you do has the possibility of injuring another, at what point do your intrusions on their rights, passive or active, become unacceptable? Can I smoke a cigarette? Can I drive an SUV? Can I operate a factory with a smelly smokestack?

[mrick]

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If property is theft, who is being robbed? And what are they being robbed OF, exactly?

[/ QUOTE ]If you had been reading your grandfathers more diligently, you'd know that everybody owns everything. Which is the same as saying that nobody owns anything. This is the original meaning behind terms such as "common", "commune", "communism".

If you take the faucet from the schoolyard fountain and start using it as your own personal faucet, you are a thief.

[mrick]

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As for the anarchism = no government thingy, that is...well...half true.

[/ QUOTE ]Anarchists have come to power, in History. in 1848, in Paris, France, also in 1937, in areas of Spain, etc. They have never abolished all government. They were anarchists, not fans of Jesse James. (Though some anarchists were ex-bandits.)

What they did is they tried to establish direct rule, i.e. participatory democracy, through the rule of local councils. They tried to have as much as possible participation of all classes of people except for priests, landlords, bosses and the like, but without any other restrictions as to sex, nationality, etc. Workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia were supposed to have an equal say with prostitutes in this. Of course, all preconceived, bourgeois notions of individual morality were trashed. Yes, the anarchists were serious about the slogan "All Power To The Soviets!" while the true-red Communists of the (official) communist party were certainly not. The Commies wanted all power to the party...

"Soviet" means "council", in Russian.

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As for the anarchism = no government thingy, that is...well...half true.

[/ QUOTE ]Anarchists have come to power, in History. in 1848, in Paris, France, also in 1937, in areas of Spain, etc. They have never abolished all government. They were anarchists, not fans of Jesse James. (Though some anarchists were ex-bandits.)

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Yeah this is pretty much what I meant. What seems to trouble most anarchists about a government isn't that it is a government, but how it governs.

[mrick]

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Self ownership (i.e. the right of people to own their body) in no way entails the possibility of world ownership (i.e. the right of people to own parts of the external world). It is completely consistent for someone to believe in one and not the other, and so to equate them is just wrong.

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But to sustain your body you have to eat. In eating food you are denying it to everyone else on the planet and are taking ownership of it.

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Eating, breathing, clothing oneself, etc, in order to sustain oneself are not acts of "taking" or "stealing" from someone else. They are acts of survival. Saying "Just by being alive, you're taking up space", is not an argument -- not outside kindergarden yard. To state the blatantly obvious, an organism needs to survive and sustain itself before everything else, e.g. before said organism starts philosophising about political economy systems.

The argument about sustaining oneself starts becoming relevant to our debate about what's individual freedom and what are its limits, if any, when we consider limitations on what the individual needs to sustain oneself. It's OK if I eat meat but what about if I wanna eat so much meat that my neighbors will go hungry? The ancient tribes of Man faced this question hundreds of thousands of years ago and solved it rather quickly and efficiently. Consult your local cave wall.

[pvn]

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If property is theft, who is being robbed? And what are they being robbed OF, exactly?

[/ QUOTE ]If you had been reading your grandfathers more diligently, you'd know that everybody owns everything. Which is the same as saying that nobody owns anything. This is the original meaning behind terms such as "common", "commune", "communism".

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Wow, condescension ftw. I've read it. It's all a bunch of handwaving. If "everyone owns everything" then you've already got a concept of property. The people who claim property is theft are just generating slogans. They don't think property is theft, they think particular distributions of property are undesirable and use propaganda smear tactics in an attempt to appeal to emotion. That's what I was getting at with my mostly rhetorical question, though I was secretly hoping someone would take the bait.

[mrick]

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If property is theft, who is being robbed? And what are they being robbed OF, exactly?

[/ QUOTE ]If you had been reading your grandfathers more diligently, you'd know that everybody owns everything. Which is the same as saying that nobody owns anything. This is the original meaning behind terms such as "common", "commune", "communism".

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I've read it. It's all a bunch of handwaving. If "everyone owns everything" then you've already got a concept of property.

[/ QUOTE ]Nope, you have a negation of property.

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The people who claim property is theft are just generating slogans.

[/ QUOTE ]This is not an argument. Only, possibly, an expression of annoyance. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] "Generating slogans" could just as easily be said of your lot too, the ACists. Well, I'd rather discuss things with you rather than hurl broad characterizations. [ QUOTE ]
They don't think property is theft, they think particular distributions of property are undesirable and use propaganda smear tactics in an attempt to appeal to emotion.

[/ QUOTE ]Again, the classical, non-hyphenated anarchists started by procliaming that the sacrosanct attributes of human private property are alien to the natural order of things on Earth. The anarchists claimed that property of things on Earth by single individuals is like stealing that thing from everybody else.[ QUOTE ]
That's what I was getting at with my mostly rhetorical question, though I was secretly hoping someone would take the bait.

[/ QUOTE ]So, you presumed everybody has read the classics and knows their positions, and you posted a strictly rhetorical question secretly hoping to "bait responses".

Who's being condescending here, then? And a little trollish.

[pvn]

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If property is theft, who is being robbed? And what are they being robbed OF, exactly?

[/ QUOTE ]If you had been reading your grandfathers more diligently, you'd know that everybody owns everything. Which is the same as saying that nobody owns anything. This is the original meaning behind terms such as "common", "commune", "communism".

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I've read it. It's all a bunch of handwaving. If "everyone owns everything" then you've already got a concept of property.

[/ QUOTE ]Nope, you have a negation of property.

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Wrong. You can't have it both ways.

If nobody owns resource X, then nobody has any legitimate reason to complain when resource X is consumed.

If someone does have a right to resource X, than that person has an ownership interest in that resource.

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The people who claim property is theft are just generating slogans.

[/ QUOTE ]This is not an argument. Only, possibly, an expression of annoyance. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] "Generating slogans" could just as easily be said of your lot too, the ACists.

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My lot? Other people do it, so you want to accuse me of doing it?

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Well, I'd rather discuss things with you rather than hurl broad characterizations.

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That's what I'm trying to do. You threw out the "property is theft" line.

You decry hurling broad characterizations, but you have a beef with me because "my lot" of ACists (not me specifically) might generate slogans.

I think I see where this is going.

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So, you presumed everybody has read the classics and knows their positions, and you posted a strictly rhetorical question secretly hoping to "bait responses".

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No, YOU presumed anyone who questioned your edicts had NOT read them. I was actually presuming YOU had read them (and not making presumptions about anyone else) since you were, you know, name dropping.

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Who's being condescending here, then? And a little trollish.

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If exposing inconsistent but slickly-phrased arguments is condescending and trollish, then guilty as charged.

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ACists are not anarchists no matter how much they like to tag the wikipedia pages. There is no legitimacy to a property claim in a truly free society unless it is obtained through cooperation with others.

This isn't because it is socialistic or communistic, but because such authority is rejected under anarchist principles.