Someone just pointed me to an interesting 1997 FFF article by Sheldon Richman has, Property as the Key to Self-Determination. He has some points, but not sure I agree with every aspect of this sort of meandering piece.
Richman notes that some leftists might object to property because it is a means of oppression. Even if that were so, the question remains, why do they trust the state not to oppress? Richman makes a similar critique of the socialists who are hostile to property near the end of his piece, when he shows that even if capitalism permitted some people to be “tenants” of others, even if some people are at the mercey of landlords or employers, it is even worse if we become subjects of the state. Likewise, if the leftist opposes free enterprise because of the problem of monopolies, it makes no sense to advocate a far greater state monopoly as the cure.Elsewhere Richman note that a question arises as to whether liberty, or property, comes first, or whether some ethical theory is antecedent to them.
Libertarians hurt themselves to the extent they think they can do political philosophy without first doing ethics. A sure sign of that approach is the common reference to the “nonaggression axiom.” An axiom is an irreducible proposition. It is self-validating. How does the nonaggression axiom validate itself? It is unclear. There is no contradiction in denying it (such as there is with the law of identity). Thus it must be derived from something else, in which case it is not an axiom at all.
I tend to refer to it as the non-aggression principle, instead of axiom, for a similar reason. But I think Richman goes astray here:
Nor can we say that property rights are needed to prevent conflict, since there are other ways of doing that. (The government sets rules on the use of parks; that is a conflict-averting measure.) The libertarian slips into danger when trying to define property in terms of liberty and liberty in terms of property. The argument becomes circular. Which comes first — the egg of liberty or the chicken of property?
If the government sets the rules on parks, it is setting up a property right. The state is asserting ownership--property rights. Additionally, this solution is not without conflict since the state has to engage in conflict to come to own the park.
But the point here is that every political system has some property rights distribution and method. What distinguishes these systems is the different rules for assigning property titles. And if one’s goal is to find rules that make conflict-free interaction possible, then it is not the case that any property assignment rule is as good as any other. The libertarian rule (first use) is far superior, for various reasons discussed elsewhere: see, e.g.:
- my articles A Theory of Contracts: Binding Promises, Title Transfer, and Inalienability and
- Defending Argumentation Ethics, esp. the section “Objective Links: First Use, Verbal Claims, and the Prior-Later Distinction,” and the links in this piece to various writings by Hoppe on this issue
- blog posts The Essence of Libertarianism? and
- Thoughts on Intellectual Property, Scarcity, Labor-ownership, Metaphors, and Lockean Homesteading
