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So I guess in your vision of libertarianism the government would regulate such actions/transactions? Where would it procure the funds and power to do so?
I would think it would be through tariffs on imported goods. Let China and Mexico fund our government. That worked in the past before the IRS came into existence.
Private land private rules another product of right wing indoctrinationon display. If the wealthy control the crucial land they control the country. Thats not freedom.
And what do you call it when politicians use eminent domain to take people's property for government use?
It was under the Obama administration that corporations were allowed to forcibly take people's land for an oil pipeline.
And Kelo v New London in 2005...
and the Michigan Supreme Court and the 1981 Poletown decision (the REAL precedent that led to so many eminent domain abuses since)...
and and and...
You could spend all day reading about eminent domain abuses by city, state and federal agencies, and you'd still not scratch the surface of how badly politicians and bureaucrats screw their constituents daily on these money/land/power grab schemes.
But yeah, heaven forbid these governments hve less power and...OH NOEZ...private citizens actually retain their property rights!! OMFGWTF!!!
And if the government controls the "crucial land" via unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucracy, as they do now....what is that exactly? Is that freedom?
A single faceless, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat possesses a thing, and has a monopoly on force, violence and the law making/enforcement/adjudication machinery behind them to do whatever they want with that thing is somehow less scary to you than a private citizen simply owning that thing, with nothing other than private property rights and the NAP governing them?
It boggles the mind how people rationalize government having so much unaccountable power, while simultaneously fearing their neighbor having natural, individual rights under non-aggression and voluntary association principles.
Hmm, well for everyone to follow the NAP you are going to need enough concentrated force somewhere to ensure the people who do not want to follow the NAP follow the NAP; this I think is the crux of the problem.
The idea that in the presence of a power vacuum such as true anarchy that nothing would step in to fill this vacuum, history shows us this is reliably and consistently false. Look at any country ravaged by civil war or collapse of their existing government, power will rise to fill the void and at that point it is a complete crapshoot what you get. You could get the founding fathers and enlightenment ideas, you could get Stalin, or Hitler, or the ISIS "caliphate".
Currently, in America, the US government occupies this slot - and while it might not be the BEST thing ever to occupy that position, it is a far cry from the WORST thing ever to occupy that position. Given that history shows us that that position of the #1 dominating power in a society WILL be occupied, it is better to have it occupied by a government designed with checks and balances based on a relatively moral philosophy, than to recklessly leave a gaping power vacuum and have the chance of it being occupied by something more nefarious. That is where my instincts towards realism put my thoughts.
With all that said, I have already said earlier that I like a lot of the positions of libertarians regarding personal liberty, staying out of peoples buisness, etc... thing is because of my beliefs spelled out in this post I am unable to see it functional as a "pure" philosophy. What's more, I don't think anyone has come up with a "pure" philosophy that encompasses all the needs of a society:
Pure Capitalism; Nope
Pure Socialism; Nope
Pure Communism; Nope
Pure Fascism; Nope
Pure Theocracy; Nope
etc...
It takes some level of a blend of ideas for things to function IN PRACTICE.
Pure Capitalism; Nope
Pure Socialism; Nope
Pure Communism; Nope
Pure Fascism; Nope
Pure Theocracy; Nope
etc...
It takes some level of a blend of ideas for things to function IN PRACTICE.
Apples and oranges.
If a libertarian was elected president it would still be a representative republic. We would still have the same constitution. Just with a smaller less intrusive federal government. You are mixing up political parties and types of governments.
Actually libertarian ideas are blend of the left and the right. Not pure anything.
@zzzSnorlaxx - If you read any of my posts on libertarianism, you will see that in addition to the NAP, voluntary associations, etc...I always point to minimum government necessary to secure, protect and defend the natural individual rights of the citizen.
I understand that human nature will indeed produce bad actors who will violate the non-aggression principle and initiate force upon others. A basic framework must exist for said bad actors to be punished according to their voluntary violation of non-aggression, which essentially posits that they have forfeited their own natural individual rights by their own actions and of their own volition.
But that minimum amount of government does not need to be anywhere near how big the current one is. Nowhere in the same solar system really. I do advocate a much more purely libertarian, individualist society as the end point, but I accept that there is a long road between here and there. what we should be doing between here & there and now & then is getting rid of the unaccountable, the unnecessary, the redundant and the oppressive and doing so while asking the following questions:
Does this thing require harming an individual first in order to function?
Does this force an association or obligation on the individual in order to function?
Does this thing represent something that no individual has a natural, individual right to, thus no ability to delegate to a government?
Does this thing benefit some individuals more than others?
Does this thing violate the concept of property rights?
If the answer to any of those is Yes, then that thing should not be done as it is immoral and improper. Can we repeal/abolish everything in one fell swoop? Of course not. But we can begin by eliminating the most glaring, obvious and egregious examples, always with an eye on the singular goal of transferring power from the government to the people, and increasing our respect for and protection of individual sovereignty. That should always, forever and ever, be the direction things should progress.
I would think it would be through tariffs on imported goods. Let China and Mexico fund our government. That worked in the past before the IRS came into existence.
Except it doesnt work that way. Tariffs on imports will be paid for by the American consumers, just like any sales tax
I'd say we're already in far more danger than we would be in the OP's scenario given how much land and infrastructure is owned by a single organization right now - namely the government, which can if anything impose its rules on its land far easier than a private property owner can. The state has a monopoly on the provision of governance and has a vast coercive apparatus that would be legally impermissible to exercise in a libertarian society, all of which a private property owner in the OP's scenario would not have.
So in other words, if we were in any danger from such a scenario we'd be experiencing it already, since the chances of that happening are much greater in the current system than under a libertarian or anarchist system. It's also worth noting that many people talk as if the state restricts people from buying as much land as they want and setting rules on it for people to follow - this is not the case. The acquisition of real estate and imposition of private rules is for the most part unrestricted right now. If billionaires were interested in exercising power in this way wouldn't they already be doing so today? We see the state having comparable power today and we end up with "three felonies a day" - it's not credible in the least to suppose that a system where every individual is a sovereign state under international law would be worse in this regard than a system where there are only 200 sovereign entities in the world nearly all of which are monopolies in a given territory.
This also assumes that we live in some sort of feudal system where land is the primary factor of production and thus economic power, which is simply not the case in the modern economy. If you look at the list of the largest private landowners right now there isn't that much overlap with the most powerful private people, for just this reason. The only ones on the list that cross over are governments, because unlike private land owners they have the power to tax the most productive parts of the economy.
It's also worth noting that we're not starting out in a vacuum if we choose anarchy - if someone is buying up inordinate amounts of land for the purposes of exercising megalomaniacal power on his own property that everyone else disapproves of people could just stop selling him their land. If anyone was buying up a hundredth as much land as the OP suggests people would know about it. If the owner in question was doing it to enrich himself, as some have suggested, one could nullify that by refusing to do business with him unless he changed his rules or sold off most of his holdings to other people. One only becomes rich in a free society by producing well enough for others to buy your goods and services. There is no corporate welfare or bailouts available in a free society, nor is there any mandates for anyone to buy what you're selling or requirements for laborers to work for you. The latter of course opens up the opportunity for strike action to change his mind - even if he were interested in exercising huge power over a huge land he wouldn't have the personnel needed to do anything he wanted to do if everyone refused to work for him. This forces compromise and exchange for mutual benefit, which is the driving force of the free market system and also exerts a civilizing influence. The compulsion of the state exerts a barbarous influence.
All of these things we see the state doing would be absent in a free society, which would curtail the power of the rich compared to today where they have easy access and to a large extent control of the coercive apparatus - that's how we end up with things such as Obamacare and TARP, where they can force the people to give them money and power. In a free society the rich only have as much money and power as the common people choose to give them - they can't run to the government and have the state steal their money.
This, incidentally, is why you see few economic masters of the universe or big corporations supporting anarchy or even softer versions of libertarianism - because it simply isn't in the interest of their money and power, which is greatly assisted by having access to institutionalized violence in the form of the state, an institution which would not exist in a free society. In other words, the rich and powerful are as rich and powerful as they are because they can steal from the people through the state, and the state's regulatory apparatus encourages gigantism. without the state the market would be far more competitive with many more actors, and thus the size of the largest actors would be much reduced.
There are exceptions of course, but notice that companies with monopolistic market share in the most competitive markets (because they're not regulated into monopoly!) tend to offer the best service at the best price - Google, for instance, provides you with far better service than your local cable company despite similar market share. The difference is that if Google serves you poorly you just use one of their competitors, whereas if the cable company serves you poorly that's just too bad. Notice that the current system of monopolistic government works the same way as the latter - in a free society a dominant player in the market for governance would be like the former. And this is the worst-case scenario when it comes to the power of a private actor - more likely the competitive landscape would more resemble Chinese restaurants or private security firms.
In other words, the rich and powerful of the state system have profited immensely from it and don't want to let it go - abolishing it is in the interest of the common working man more than anyone else.
One thing I have neglected to mention so far is that in a practical sense the OP's scenario is idiotic - the total value of all real estate in the United States is 30 trillion dollars. The reason why I bring up corporate gigantism is that the very richest people are very unlikely to be all that much wealthier in a free society than they are now, and wealth now tops out at around 100 billion. Given historical precedent* (adjusted for inflation) and good rates of growth for the current younger rich people we could extend that to maybe 500 billion. How the OP proposes that someone worth even 500 billion is going to buy up 30 trillion dollars worth of land has never been explained.
Even if someone worth 500 billion cashed out everything he owned and bought land with it he'd still only own one sixtieth of the land in the United States by value**. It's also worth noting that such an action would likely crash the prices of whatever he owned (stock presumably) and drive up land prices where he was trying to buy it. Also, if someone miraculously gained control over half the land supply the existing owners of the rest of the land would be able to ask higher and higher prices for the remaining property, quickly outstripping anyone's ability to buy it. In short OP's billionaire would end up as an archetypal land rich cash poor wannabe-feudal-lord long before he had even 5% of the land supply, let alone 50%.
*Believe it or not inequality is limited - there's only so much wealth you can make by exchanges with the broader economy before the broader economy becomes richer at the same rate you are. If you look at people's historical wealth as a percentage of GDP even the richest people in history represented a tiny fraction of the GDP of the economies they were working in. Let's not forget that exchange with the broader economy is how wealth is created to begin with, and even taking resources by force and pillaging the populace (which is what the state does!) has its limits. This presents a further problem for the OP - if you can only ever gain a few percent of GDP worth of wealth in any conceivable market system how will you purchase a huge fraction of real estate which is almost always much greater than the entire GDP.
**I use value because it's easier to measure. Presumably by acquiring lower-value land he could extend his acreage but then again people in this thread are talking about "the most valuable lands" and such. If we just take acreage then some of the owners of cattle stations in the Australian outback (one of which is as large as England) are the most powerful people in that country, which obviously isn't the case.
So to conclude the upshot of all this is there are non-violent and non-coercive methods consistent with the non-aggression principle whereby acquisitions most people find undesirable can be curtailed (more effectively even than the current system whereby if the state wills it that's too bad for you - a free society is controlled by the people and thus is a democratic society), and the acquisition of such amounts of real estate by one wealthy man without access to any state is economically impossible anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volobjectitarian
And Kelo v New London in 2005...
and the Michigan Supreme Court and the 1981 Poletown decision (the REAL precedent that led to so many eminent domain abuses since)...
and and and...
You could spend all day reading about eminent domain abuses by city, state and federal agencies, and you'd still not scratch the surface of how badly politicians and bureaucrats screw their constituents daily on these money/land/power grab schemes.
But yeah, heaven forbid these governments hve less power and...OH NOEZ...private citizens actually retain their property rights!! OMFGWTF!!!
Indeed. The state right now, even in goody-goody America, already abuses people far more severely than the OP's imagining a private landowner would. And this is the anti-libertarians' worst-case scenario? A state of affairs somewhat better and more restrained than what we have to put up with today? Notice that he leaves unexplained what happens to the other half of the land in the country - presumably this other half is much more competitive and libertarian paradise exists there (or something).
Quote:
Originally Posted by lifeexplorer
Could it not be landlocked after I moved in?
No. Under the law now everyone has the right to enter and exit property and land they own, and that would not change under a libertarian system. Blockading is an initiation of force, since you're forcibly preventing someone else from accessing something that doesn't belong to you, and no one has the right to dictate who enters and exits land that is not theirs. Of course the state claims this very right today but that's okay to the anti-libertarians (for some reason).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volobjectitarian
This is the "if it cannot be done perfectly, then it cannot be done at all" counter to any proposal to modify, reform, change anything about the current system, which itself is so flawed, broken and costly that the "perfection seeking" fallacy makes even less sense.
For example - half of all healthcare spending is waste, as in does not involve revenue or cost related to actual providing of health care services. HALF. But propose a more individual-centric model where the individual has more direct control over their choices, as well as more responsibility and awareness of the true costs vs benefit, and to get anyone to listen, that proposed system must function perfectly!!! No, we cannot make any fixes to the 50% broken model because your proposed change is not guaranteed 100% perfect.
Another example - flawed human beings are given vast amounts of unaccountable power via electoral politics in the current system, including a monopoly on force, violence and the making of laws, and examples of them abusing said power happen every minute of every hour of every day all across America. But suggest a model where those unaccountable people have that power reduced and more power is given to the individual to govern their own affairs, and oh no, you cannot guarantee that exactly 100% of all individuals will properly employ this new level of individual sovereignty. Granted, in the latter model, the individual has exactly none of the coercive power, nor monopoly of force and violence like the unaccountable bureaucrat does, but somehow this is scarier?
None of it makes any sense. People fear their neighbor having more individual freedom to conduct their own life as they see fit, but trust completely in some random stranger having vast amounts of unaccountable, unrestrained power over millions, with a military and all the lawmaking to back them up. I'll never be able to comprehend why people trust government more than themselves.
I couldn't agree with you more. If perfection is our goal then we need to get rid of our entire current system immediately - the fact that our opponents here do not agree that the current system should be thrown out means they already do not believe perfection is a requirement for adoption of a given system. So the real question is under which system (among the infinite universe of such systems) is it likelier that adverse consequences to our peace, prosperity, and liberty will occur.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zzzSnorlax
As far as b**ching about hypotheticals, if that is your stance why are you even in this thread, the whole thing is a hypothetical. BTW pure libertarianism is also a hypothetical. When the base subject in question is already a hypothetical, it is a bit hard to have a conversation about it without using hypotheticals. I mean I guess we could discuss the real world impacts, effects, and function of actual pure libertarian societies if you would like to have a completely empty thread....
How about this hypothetical - if we get this state system you're proposing what if one day the state decides it will kill a quarter of the population in its territory in cold blood and actually do so within four years with but a whimper of opposition from abroad. Who will stop them then? Oh wait - that's not a hypothetical. It happened in real life in the 1970s under a regime called the Khmer Rouge. Given the other 200 million people who were murdered by their own states in only the past century, far more than any non-state actor has ever hoped to achieve, I'd say the burden of proof rests on the proponents of the concentration of political power in the hands of the state (most especially the interventionist-style state as opposed to a classical-liberal-style state) to prove that their system is better than the alternatives.
Along the same lines, how about a trial period of fifty years where all the states in the world will become night-watchman states, and then if none of these states slaughters masses of its own people in that time then maybe we can trust them with more powers. If the state can prove it can go multiple generations without even a 0.1% chance of turning into a regime of psychotic killers then people like me would be more cooperative. Imagine the trust in government such a successful era would instill. After all not being a mass murderer is a very minimal standard that well over 99.9% of individuals in the private sector can meet. I think everyone should be able to agree, no matter what their political views, that the fact that the modern state in a global context can't even clear that bar speaks volumes as to how far we still have to go to achieve reliable, good, and responsible government.
Last edited by Patricius Maximus; 10-26-2017 at 09:28 AM..
Hmm, well for everyone to follow the NAP you are going to need enough concentrated force somewhere to ensure the people who do not want to follow the NAP follow the NAP; this I think is the crux of the problem.
The idea that in the presence of a power vacuum such as true anarchy that nothing would step in to fill this vacuum, history shows us this is reliably and consistently false. Look at any country ravaged by civil war or collapse of their existing government, power will rise to fill the void and at that point it is a complete crapshoot what you get. You could get the founding fathers and enlightenment ideas, you could get Stalin, or Hitler, or the ISIS "caliphate".
I don't see the problem. People organizing by choice to defend against anyone who tries to attack them isn't a government/ruling class, and a power vacuum only exists when the population is looking for someone to put in power.
When a government collapses, people look to establish a new one because they think there needs to be one - they think there needs to be a central authority controlling society by force, so they establish one and treat it as if it's legitimate.
The goal is for enough people to reject any ruling group's legitimacy, and then the wannabe rulers have no power. The entire concept of a legitimate ruler is contradictory and illogical by its very nature, which is why I'm optimistic. You can actually disprove it logically.
Yea, it could, which was the scenario I proposed in the first place. They "changed" it in their response to what they wished it was.
As far as b**ching about hypotheticals, if that is your stance why are you even in this thread, the whole thing is a hypothetical. BTW pure libertarianism is also a hypothetical. When the base subject in question is already a hypothetical, it is a bit hard to have a conversation about it without using hypotheticals. I mean I guess we could discuss the real world impacts, effects, and function of actual pure libertarian societies if you would like to have a completely empty thread....
The only way to buy land that could not be potentially land locked would be to buy land that bordered on international waters if we are allowing people to own water space, and land on a water way if not.
Otherwise, you think it could not be land locked? Zoom out. Still can't be? Zoom out again. Keep repeating eventually it can be.
Which raises an interesting point. Say instead of just owning the land around your property, some organization... say Walmart, buys all the land in a 500 foot wide ring or grid surrounding a town or city: "These roads are for customers only". Could be a lucrative return to the sharecropping/company store model of economics.
Dear me.
You ever hear of "liens, easements and encumbrances" when you purchase property? The previous owner agreed to someone using all or part of their property for some use? Thus a buyer would need to be informed of such encumbrances prior to sale and be bound by those encumbrances. So a road crossing property (like I currently have) there's an easement of 50' from the road centerline that I can't use, nor can I obstruct the road. I knew this when I bought it, it was done with informed choice (because there is a net benefit).
Why would that change? The easement is contractually binding, just like if I sold timber rights, or other land use rights. On sale the contracts transfer to the new buyer with full disclosure during the sale. The only difference would be that an eminent domain order couldn't be issued to purchase your property for cents on the dollar to make a parking lot of your childhood home.
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