The Immortal Goon wrote:So it would initially start as a complete free-for-all? Who would enforce two people coming to the same bit of land at the same time? What would happen if two people claimed different property that overlapped? What if you claimed property with a river and your man upstream built a dam?
These are excellent questions that cannot be answered abstractly. In practice, countless pre-state societies found solutions to these problems.
Again, disputes will arise under any system. The key for keeping society functioning peacefully is not to avoid disputes, but rather to find peaceful means for resolving them. The libertarian answer is to apply to objective arbitrators (ideally by mutual agreement) to resolve such disputes.
The NAP isn't a magic formula that allows a computer to resolve every legal question. Rather, it is an over-arching guide to human arbitrators to base their decisions on.
In practice, btw, there is rarely a free-for-all grab. At any moment, society and the economy are near equilibrium. That means that most of the economically-viable natural resources have been claimed. As technology progresses, new resources become economically viable. That doesn't happen suddenly. Rather, they first become marginally-viable, of interest only to those willing to take the risk and invest the effort required. In early Colonial days, the American heartland was "free for all" (ignoring Native Americans for the moment). Yet you didn't see millions of people head West. Heading West was dangerous and difficult, and only a hand-full of people did so.
Today, the moon is free for all. But very few people go there - it is far too expensive and risky. One day (I hope), it will become economically viable to exploit the moon's resources. But that won't happen all at once. You won't see a scramble for the moon (even assuming the world's governments stay out).
So in twenty years into an-cap, it would still be impossible to hold land that you later hoped to build upon, say, while you were getting supplies someone could come over and take it from you? What level of homesteading matters? If children built a fort, does that make the land their own? If you chopped down a tree, do you own an acre? Five acres? Ten? What if two people were using the land for wood for their homes and someone else moved in and started to build a house? What if that was land someone nearby was using to graze upon but didn't technically modify himself? If someone mines in Alaska in the summer and rests elsewhere in the winter, is the land abandoned the day after he leaves? The week? The month? These are all disputes that happen every single day as it currently stands and will sometimes turn to violence even with a monopoly of violence only being sanctioned by the state. How would an-cap deal with these property disputes? Execution for whomever draws slowest?
No. An an-cap society would expect such disputes to be resolved peacefully, by an appeal to arbitrators who will be guided by the NAP and local community standards. As mentioned before, countless communities have developed mechanisms, rules and institutions to address precisely such questions.
The closest thing to a "free-for-all" rush outside government rules is the California Gold Rush. On this, Wikipedia:
Miners worked at a claim only long enough to determine its potential. If a claim was deemed as low-value—as most were—miners would abandon the site in search for a better one. In the case where a claim was abandoned or not worked upon, other miners would "claim-jump" the land. "Claim-jumping" meant that a miner began work on a previously claimed site. Disputes were sometimes handled personally and violently, and were sometimes addressed by groups of prospectors acting as arbitrators.
So rules were adopted and adjusted, and arbitrators consulted (though not invariably).
Finally, I have seen nothing to address the issue of people that choose to reject the premise of owning property in the first place. Traditionally un-regulated capitalism processes their women and children through rape and converts the entire population into piles of bodies. Is this still the punishment for refusing to acknowledge the premise of private property in an-cap, or is there another solution that will be tried?
I address the question of interaction between property-owning society and nomadic people who do not recognise ownership in land, specifically in the context of Colonial America.
Libertarians recognise the rights of nomadic people (I know of no agricultural society without the concept of private property in land) to use the land on which they dwell. The advantage of the formulation of the NAP that I am advocating is that it doesn't
assume property. Rather, property becomes a derivative or conclusion of the NAP under particular circumstances, circumstances that may not apply to land under nomadic use, for example.
lucky wrote:It doesn't matter who collects the taxes. Anybody can easily become a government agent. Government agents change from year to year. If IRS was a private contractor, it would make no difference whatsoever, nobody would particularly care.
But only government has the right to levy taxes, and authorise their collection. You cannot have a group of neighbours decide to "tax" their neighbours, regardless of how worthy their use of funds is. Sure - government can delegate its authority in any number of ways, but it is only under government authority that initiation of force is ever considered legitimate.
The rule of law.
The "rule of law" merely means that government has to go through a few (and fewer and fewer) rituals before enforcing its will on the people. IT has no substantive meaning whatsoever - it is a pure formality. And, in recent years, even that formality is often done away with (NSA, Obama's Recess Appointments, No-knock drug busts, etc.)
Substantively, rule by government means the precise opposite of the rule of law. The rule of law suggests that every member in society is subject to the same, stable law. But under government, government agents (including politicians, members of the armed forces, police, regulators, etc, etc.) do not obey the same law as the rest of us. They are privileged. Further, creating law through legislation means that the law is no longer stable and predictable. Especially when the real law comes not from legislators, so much as from regulators.
For example, if a government agent came over to a random person in an evening at a bus stop and said "give me your money and your cell phone or I will stab you with this knife", people would be just as upset as if he was not a government agent. Or probably, even more upset.
Of course. So government agents are ever-so-slightly more sophisticated. But Civil Seizures amount to almost the same thing. Let me make myself clear - not everything government agents do is considered legitimate, but (almost) everything they do that passes formal legal scrutiny, regardless of how harmful, stupid, corrupt or immoral, is considered legitimate (even if not wise).
Conversely, private individuals and groups may
never, under any circumstances, legitimately initiate force in our society. Never. So there is no discriminating consideration of circumstances. Rather, there is huge deference to government agents acting in accordance to certain formal rules, and (correctly) none to private people.
In your ridiculous cartoonish picture of the world they would presumably say "Is this guy a government agent? Yep cool, no problem, that's his job".
Almost. How often are police officers abusing their power? How many of them are punished? On the other hand, when people try to defend themselves against police brutality (even if they had no way of knowing that the brutality comes from a police officer), they are severely punished.
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.