Although I consider myself to be firmly anarcho-capitalist, I disagree with ~90% of the anarcho-capitalists I've met regarding property rights (in particular, on land claims).The position I typically hear is that property rights are determined by the t

Name
Email
Subject
Comment *
File	Select/drop/paste files here
* = required field	[▶ Show post options & limits] Confused? See the FAQ.

Anonymous 03/06/18 (Tue) 03:22:09 No.78820

Although I consider myself to be firmly anarcho-capitalist, I disagree with ~90% of the anarcho-capitalists I've met regarding property rights (in particular, on land claims).

The position I typically hear is that property rights are determined by the transformative work someone puts into an unowned piece of material, and the property rights act as an absolute defining line for who has control over it. I think this view is misguided, and is incubated by living with a state enforcer of property rights for many decades. Effectively, a monopolistic police force allows for end-all-be-all consensuses on property claims to be made, which is not how a set of competing DRO's would act.

Instead, I believe that property rights in Ancapistan will work much the same way as prices. I.e. they are ultimately subjective, and while people can easily come to an agreement about what is a ridiculous price, they can not easily come to a consensus on what is an optimal price. This is a _feature_, and not a bug of free market economics, because it allows for human desire to self-regulate human desire.

The issue with imagining an individual's property claim as objective is analogous to imagining the price a merchant sets for a good as objective. While you can objectively survey what people think a particular price should be and survey who they think should own an object, that does not make the claim itself any less subjective. (In fact, that would be the reason one falls-back to a survey in the first place.)

For example, what exactly defines "transformative work"? What if others consider themselves to have put more work in the material than you? What if others consider the work you put into the material to have made it worse? How is the conversion ratio between different kinds of work calculated?

No matter what rationalizations are used or how many steps towards property rights are inserted, subjectivity is still there. And that should be expected, because property rights themselves exist _exclusively_ within the minds of conscious beings, not as an exact physical phenomenon. Do not think I'm implying this means property rights are useless, because that would be as ridiculous as claiming food prices serve no useful purpose.

So if property rights are subjective, then how can anybody be certain that they "own" an object enough to use it? In my view, the first line of defense is common sense, but that's true with or without anarcho-capitalism. However, for more complex and higher-stakes claims, I believe there would be companies computing some sort of "ownership index" over the property, similar to how stocks are priced. This conceivably could be DRO's themselves, or a pool of arbitrators trying to efficiently come to a consensus when conflicts arise.

Anonymous 03/06/18 (Tue) 05:29:54 No.78838

>>78820

>No matter what rationalizations are used or how many steps towards property rights are inserted, subjectivity is still there. And that should be expected, because property rights themselves exist _exclusively_ within the minds of conscious beings, not as an exact physical phenomenon.

Well, yeah. I don't think even Locke claimed that "mixing your labor" with property was a physically transformative phenomenon, it was ultimately a symbolic approach to determining what was claimed land what was not.

>For example, what exactly defines "transformative work"? What if others consider themselves to have put more work in the material than you? What if others consider the work you put into the material to have made it worse? How is the conversion ratio between different kinds of work calculated?

"Transformative work" is generally seen as a binary thing–either you've worked the land or you haven't, to what degree is usually irrelevant. Lockean theory would suggest that in the event of a conflict, whoever claimed the land first would be in the right.

>The issue with imagining an individual's property claim as objective is analogous to imagining the price a merchant sets for a good as objective. While you can objectively survey what people think a particular price should be and survey who they think should own an object, that does not make the claim itself any less subjective. (In fact, that would be the reason one falls-back to a survey in the first place.)

You are correct in that any formal definition of property is going to be subjective and somewhat arbitrary in its justifications. However, to continue your metaphor of prices, consider that for a given population/region/circumstance, while the exact "optimal" price is not always agreed upon, the range of prices subjectively deemed "optimal" fall within a pretty well-defined bracket of values. Property rights would work much the same way: there would be variations in the specifics of what constitutes private property, but the general idea would be agreed upon. This is because, like prices, the subjective notions of property are heavily influenced by many objective factors.

I think the most likely outcome would be that private property would be defined slightly differently on a per-insurance company basis, with that given definition being used by arbitrators to resolve disputes between company clients. By necessity, there would also develop a universal definition of property, that would be used whenever conflict arose between two individuals from different companies. I'm not a central planner so I can't tell you exactly what that standard would entail, but I think a close variation of Lockeian property rights would end up being the norm, because those seem the most sensible and expedient to me.