Looks like I fell way behind. And now the server is slow, and I have only a couple of hours. The discussion has drifted anyway to one of comparing libertarianism with majoritarianism (not just for clarity, but for debate), which was what I didn’t want to happen. However, the topic of property ownership is interesting to me. I’m going to open a thread about it, to deal only with the theory. Hopefully, what everyone will do is post his own theory, defend it, and attack others (theories, not posters).
Gah. It turns out I don’t have two hours after all. I have only about fifty minutes. I’ll do the property ownership thread some other time, but I would like to address a couple of things in particular. And I really don’t want this thread to die. (Sorry about all this hurried typing…)
Oh, sure — if one is not already there. If it is you drawing the polygon, I suppose it would suit you fine. But if a mob walks up to your door and announces, “Hey, we’ve drawn a polygon, and your property is within it. You have a choice to obey us or move,” that is not a choice — that is a threat. It is the same sort of dilemma you face when you have a gun to your head or a knife in your belly. To call that a choice is to render meaningless real choices, which are made by free people with control over their own volition.
You are able to say that only because your model minimizes the role of property ownership. Those laws transcend what you have meekly defined. But the exact same laws can be deduced from property ownership, when ownership is defined as deriving from birth. A man owns his body, and therefore another man may not murder him. Shooting a trespasser in many cases would be a coercion (specifically when such force is excessive to removing him). But if a law allows a man to come onto your land and begin building a home, or chopping down your trees, or burning your house, or dumping toxic waste — then that law is unethical to the extreme. Your model requires you to write up such things as exceptions to the more general law. You need hundreds of very specific injunctions against this or that behavior because, for you, it is not a question of who owns what, but of a clash of wills — clashes that are a direct result of laws that are wrongly conceived to start with.
Usurpation, not ownership, is based on coercive force. To clarify, libertarianism does not assign to you ownership rights because of a piece of paper. The piece of paper represents a free and volitional economic praxis. That’s why you own the property; it’s the praxis, not the paper — because you used property that you already owned peacefully and honestly to obtain it. You are, in fact, born with certain proeprty (your body and mind), which no other human being may own. Usurpations of your body and mind are coercions. A thief is not the owner of that which he has stolen. It is a failure to adhere to that principle that causes your model to reach for something that transcends property ownership. Your definition effectively gives the property to the thief, basing ownership on coercive force, and you must write exceptions to take it back.
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. — Thomas Paine
Your definition ignores that nearly every piece of property has been stolen numerous times. Let use England as an example off the top of my head I can say that the Norse, Jutes, Danes, French, Romans, Saxons not to mention the various peoples native to England all controlled parts of it at one time or another. Its unlikely that any ancestors of the original owners of any piece of land are still around or even exist so who rightfully owns England?
Certainly everyone in America by your definition does not own their property.
Just a nitpick here, but this isn’t quite true. A trial court’s decisions have negligible value as binding precedent outside of the court that issued it (though its reasoning may be persuasive to other courts); it isn’t until you get to the appellate courts that opinions start carrying more far-reaching consequences. So a decision has to filter through at least a couple of layers before it is truly applicable to everyone – it isn’t just one judge.
Having said that, your point is a good one. A series of individual arbitrators with plenary authority to decide issues however they please, without regard for how similar issues have been decided in the past, is a recipie for an unpredictable legal environment. And that’s bad for business and society. It is vital to be able to know in advance that a particular course of conduct will have a particular set of consequences.
And having said that, it should be noted that arbitration exists as an option today. In some cases, it’s a good alternative, especially when the parties are relatively sophisticated and understand the uncertainties in electing to use arbitration. But I don’t think that should be the rule for every case, all of the time – most of the time, predictability is a virtue.
I’m still at a loss to understand why you think any system of governance can be meaningfully discussed without comparing it to the available alternatives and evaluating their relative merits and drawbacks.
A disingenous statement, Lib, considering your posts. You slam majoritarianism in your first response and then ask why people wouldn’t prefer a better system (and what system will Liberal recommend the readers wonder) in your third post.
True enough, but I’d argue this is evidence of the point I was making. Judges at the trial level aren’t setting precedents because most precedents have already been set (usually at higher courts). The “majority view” has spoken and the issue has been decided. All the judge is required to do is be aware of what the applicable precedent is.
Coecions which can be effected by others owning that which your body and mind depend upon for their continued existence, thus enslving you to them and their property ownership. That is why I consider that such coercion is minimised by individuals renting (ie. paying for temporary and conditional monopolistic use of) what is actually owned by everybody.
Like “your” land, for example.
Um, can I be obtuse and ask what property rights have to do with majoritarian systems in any way? I don’t get it… unless someone has proposed a tie-in between property and a voice in government?
This thread has experienced topic drift.
Personally, I just want to see an answer to the question of how you decide matters where wills collide, without majoritarianism. Examples of matters where wills collide are treatment of criminals and the establishment of an age of consent. Both are necessary and neither can be decided without imposing somebody’s will on somebody else.
Of course, Gomi - I’ll agree that the link is not obvious, but I certainly consider it crucial.
As I said to Lib, this is all about a polygon on a map in which a certain decision holds sway. Lib asks how one can justify the decision of a majority in a large polygon being applied throughout, even to comparably tiny polygons on which stand individuals who disagree with the decision to be applied.
I suggested that “ownership” is all about who makes decisions in whichever polygon. If you “own” something, you make the decisions about it - that, I suggest, is ultimately what ownership is. I further suggested that “owning” something still doesn’t mean that the owner can make any decision regarding it, since those decisions might very well conflict with those of other people.
Thus, I suggested that majoritarianism is simply the least worst way of resolving the conflicts which differences of opinion and decision necessitate. I suggested that the poeple who really “own” your land, and who are thus charging you rent in the form of taxation allowing you to consider it (temporarily and conditionally) “your” property, is everyone else. Like a tenant considers the house he lives in “his own”, our landlord is an entity comprising millions of people.
Thanks for the detailed description.
At the risk of further hijacking into a defense of all things libertarian…
What about those who abut those polygons of ownership - Do they get a say? What about if a resource is shared between polygons, such as rivers or air? What about if “ownership” is vague at best?
As a broader point, who owns it? People who reside within it? Only the people who paid for it or worked on it? What about if I just use the resources from the polygon - does that infer ownership as I am taking from it and potentially using that polygon?
Am I totally off on a tangent?
I suggest that, ultimately, everybody owns everything (save perhaps, for the sake of argument, one’s body and mind) and that a pragmatic, democratic system of “rental” in the form of taxation is how conflicting decisions are resolved with the least amount of violence and suffering: ie. that people can “own” things, but that a representative democracy can trump that ownership at any time in accordance with the law.
I have asserted (several times) that majoritarianism creates conflicts of will where none existed before. So far, that assertion has been roundly ignored.
If it is held that the criminal has forfeited his consent, and a child is incapable of giving meaningful consent, then there is no conflict of will, where will is defined as the exercize of consent. Again, it is the practice of making decisions on behalf of other rights bearing entities that causes a conflict of will.
I haven’t ignored it, merely disagreed with it. I hold that there are situations of conflicts of will that cannot be avoided.
But there is a conflict of will. A relative of the murderer’s victim may want to see him killed, a relative of the murderer may want to see him get treatment, and the reactions of other people will span this whole range. Some people will want people to stop being children in the legal sense at 15, others at 20. Who gets to decide?
Without majoritarianism, how do you decide these matters? In a non-majoritarianist society, who decides what the age of consent is?
As Priceguy noted, others have not ignored that premise they have just disputed the validity of it. Admittedly, it’s impossible to prove whether it’s true or false. Based on human experience the likely scenario is that conflicts of will existed and governments were formed to resolve them. However it’s theoretically possible that there was a time when humans never suffered any conflicts between themselves but for some reason chose to invent a means of resolving potential conflicts which then arose because of this newfound system.
We’ve run into this wall before. Liberal believes that a libertarian society would work because there would be no conflict of wills in such a society so methods of resolving such conflicts are unnecessary. Pretty much everyone else feels a libertarian society would not work because conflicts of will would still exist and the society would fail because of the lack of methods for resolving them. The issue cannot be settled because no libertarian society has ever existed so nobody can prove whether Liberal is right or the rest of us are.
Well, if the rest of us cannot come up with any conflicts of will that would still exist in a libertarian society, we’re going to have to credit Lib with at least a technical knockout. That’s why I’m asking specifics, such as the age of consent (which must exist even in a non-majoritarianist (libertarian or otherwise) society and must be the same for all in that society).
If that libertarian society is composed of humans, then this knockout’s impossible. You’re still going to have people who rob, murder, assault, and defraud, and those of us who don’t engage in these activities will still have to decide how to handle them.
You could go the Lockean route, which is (if I recall correctly) to give the victim of the slightest crime absolute power of life and death over the slightest criminal. Steal a pack of gum from my store, and I’m allowed to roast you over an open fire and feast on your flesh. However, that solution is unrealistic: there’s absolutely going to be a conflict of will between myself (the fleshroaster) and most other people, to the extent that most other people will resort, if necessary, to lethal violence to prevent me from carrying out my plan.
Majoritarianism, as I said earlier, provides an imperfect means for deciding what to do with the gumstealer. It’s imperfect, but it’s going to lead to a lot less bloodshed than a system that allows the most powerful to decide what to do with criminals.
Daniel
Exactly, which is why I want to hear Lib’s answer regarding how to decide that without majoritarianism.
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Plenty people have responded and the consenus (outside you) is that you are wrong. Wills collide regardless regardless of governmental systems. You haven’t answered what happens to the murder or what happens to the river? These answers are the crux of majortiarinism i.e. the way that you decide is the way that benefits the most people. When wills do not collide then everyone in this thread agrees that each should be allowed to exercise that will. If the sticking point is that wills don’t collide without a majoritarian government system then I direct you towards the Falkland Islands. British and Argentine wills collided despite the absence of a majortarian government governing them.
Fair enough. I think of it in terms of moral agents and moral subjects: how do we decide, as a society, what to do with moral subjects?
Children, of course, are moral subjects. Criminals are arguably moral subjects. Animals are arguably moral subjects. None of them (with the possible exception of criminals) are able to respect our rights; yet all of them (in my opinion) possess at least some of the rights that we assign to moral agents.
If I were supreme dictator, they would receive recognition of exactly the rights that they should receive recognition of. But y’all inexplicably won’t let me be supreme dictator. Majoritarianism is a distant second-best way to figure out what those rights are. Majoritarianism frequently results in incorrect decisions, but I can’t figure out a better system that y’all will actually let me implement.
Daniel
No, no, no, he doesn’t. And believe me, I have that on good authority! 
Look, how many times must I state this uncomplicated idea before I am no longer credited with holding the opposite belief? A conflict of wills is always created whenever one will is imposed upon another.
That happens in Libertaria, except that in Libertaria, it is called “crime” (coercion). Okay? 
And there IS a method to resolve such conflicts. It is called “government”.