StandardVC10 posted:

Libertarians ... sounds nice until you take even a cursory look at the historical record.

Halloween Jack posted:

Is it actually possible to establish a currency system that protects itself? The Roman emperors had no trouble I can remember when they deemed it necessary to mint debased coins.

paragon1 posted:

The Emperors actually had a whole bunch of huge fuckin' problems with currency that slowly built up over time, despite several reforms of the mint system and attempts to reverse debasement and what have you. Unfortunately no one had really figured out that monetary inflation is a thing yet so there was only so much they could do. Eventually one of the Eastern emperors, I forget which one, just said "gently caress it we'll start new coinage with gold now and never debase it." And that worked well for a while so long as you weren't poor. Though really you could say that about most of human history.

Vorpal Cat posted:

Lets not even get started on the fun time that accrue when you accidentally discover a whole new continent full of gold and silver and suddenly have your available currency increasing far far faster then your underling economy.

jrodefeld posted:

Note to mods: You know who I am. I'm a libertarian who is staring his own thread, which is acceptable according to the rules, I assume? There are two reasons I want to start a specific thread rather than retread over the "other" libertarian thread and just post comments there. In the first place, I want this discussion to be more narrow in scope. And I want to say something at the beginning that everyone will have a chance to read. On Caros's thread, he specifically poisoned the well from the very beginning by writing an OP describing libertarianism and its adherents in an unflattering and, from my perspective, misleading way. By the time I first posted on that thread, there had already been something like two hundred pages of people making GBS threads on libertarianism before I had a chance to defend it. And since the thread was almost entirely directed at me in particular (it would not exist without my having posted here in the past), you can understand how I'd like to have a bit more discretion about the framing of the debate when I am outnumbered 30 to 1.

If there is any problem with me posting my own topic, I will cease and you can remove it. But if I don't break any clearly stated rules, I hope you would welcome a libertarian voice here in the service of a full discussion rather than a self serving bias-reinforcing circle jerk, something that is far too common.


I have no doubt that whatever confines I initially set out to limit the scope of discussion, it will soon expand out on dozens of directions covering every element of libertarianism. But I'd like to describe libertarianism a bit differently from how you may have heard it described in the past. The central theme of this OP is property, what is it, what constitutes legitimate property rights and what is the origin and function of private property rights? The real distinction between libertarians and nearly everyone else is not their opposition to the State since there are anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists who also oppose the existence of States. It is not even our belief in the non-aggression principle. Rather, as you probably guessed, it is our understanding of private property that sets us apart. After all, how can you know what constitutes an act of aggression if you can't clearly articulate between what is mine versus what is yours?

It is often stated by misinformed left-Progressives that libertarians or other free market advocates have a fetish for private property rights; that we elevate property as a right above human rights, that our insistence on private ownership creates conflict between those who have more and those who have less and encourages human greed and alienation between different groups of people.

As to the first claim, this one is always amusing because it is so crystal clear to a libertarian that there is no meaningful distinction between property rights and human rights. But much more important is the fact that we recognize that a correct understanding of private property is essential to a flourishing, healthy society and that human progress is inexorably linked with a legal recognition of private property claims.

The reader should be disabused of the notion that libertarians have some obsession with private property or criticize public, or society-"owned" property based on any shallow ideological grounds. The reason we oppose socialism is that its core tenets are in conflict with observable reality. Were reality to be different than it is, libertarians would gladly abandon the concept of private property (outside of our physical bodies) as meaningless and of no use. For example, suppose we lived in a mythical "Garden of Eden", a paradise where everything that people desire was available in super-abundance. Everyone could satisfy all their needs an desires and no-ones use of any resource would in any way hinder anyone else's ability to use that resource. In such a theoretical world, property would cease to have any meaning in external objects outside of our physical bodies. Our bodies would remain scarce, and so we'd still need to have a property right in those (i.e. no assault, murder, rape).

The reason property rights are so incredibly essential is that we live in a world of scarcity. In such a world, the desires, wants and needs of humans will always exceed the available goods needed to fulfill all our desires simultaneously. Therefore situations inevitably arise where two or more people want to use the same scarce resource to achieve two completely incompatible desired ends. This inevitable human conflict that arises from the reality of scarcity necessitated the acceptance of norms, or rules for determining who had the right to exclusive control over what scarce resource. Without this developing and widespread recognition by early human civilizations of basic private property rights, the emergence of modern industrial society, of production, commerce, agriculture and all the trappings of civilization would never have been possible. Humans would have remained perpetually in conflict, as primitive hunter gatherers living at a subsistence level.

This should not be controversial. If we can agree on the vital necessity of the recognition of private property rights for human evolution and survival, then what rules ought to be in place for the attainment of legitimate property that should be legally enforced? The libertarian answer is that the first user to appropriate a resource out of its naturally environment and transform and improve it for the furtherance of his well-being has the best claim to ownership of that scarce resource. This, as you already know, has been referred to as the homestead principle. And it predated John Locke as a recognized norm in primitive civilizations millennia before he coined the phrase for the modern science of economics to make sense of an existed social phenomena.

Had any other principle of property ownership and use-rights been adopted, the human race would have died off. This is not hyperbole. Let's suppose not the first user of something has the right to exclusive control of a scarce resource, but rather that the fifth user was the one who had that right. How could we eat? If I'm the first person to claim ownership of a coconut tree, or a water spring, but I don't have any property right in that thing, then I wouldn't be able to justly use that scarce resource. I'd starve and die of thirst. We'd all have to wait around for the fifth user of everything. Naturally, humans desired above all else to survive and improve their condition. And it makes intuitive and logical sense to most people to give the earlier user precedence over a later user.

Once this recognition of property rights was recognized, not perfectly but to a large enough extent, great strides in living standards were made immediately available to the human race. Suddenly a division of labor was possible, free exchange was made possible and barter soon led to the development of the first currency. People could save in excess of their immediate consumption needs because they knew that they had the legally recognized and enforceable right to their property. Conflict was reduced and peaceful cooperation was encouraged.


Given the reality of scarcity, what humans need more than anything else are social rules and a legal system that facilitates ever greater material production such that people can attain more and more of their needs and desires. What we are essentially doing is moving towards less and less scarcity through greater and greater productive capacity in modern economies. This, of course, should be considered a great thing for human welfare all around.

Left-progressives frequently speak about the plight of the poor and the continuing social problems that exist throughout much of the world. However, the engine that drives the greatest and most robust increase in society-wide wealth for everyone is one in which property is private and the division of labor, capital accumulation, investment and a free price system are permitted to function unhampered.

I've asked for a better and more coherent method by which property should be acquired other than original appropriation and I have not heard an answer.


I'm going to throw in a curve-ball here and talk about another so-called "property" right that isn't actually property at all. That is what is called Intellectual Property. Libertarians oppose the existence of so-called "intellectual property" at all. But why would that be? The reason is that property is only a coherent and useful concept when it applies to things that are scarce. Copying a movie cannot be theft if you owned the original that you made a copy from. No one else was deprived of any physical possession whatsoever. Since copying can be done, theoretically infinitely, without depriving anyone of their copy, there is no scarcity and no theft. Patents on inventions present a similar case. Ideas are not scarce. If you freely share an idea and someone emulates or improves upon that idea, society is all the better off.

Society has been made incalculably poorer and many corporations unjustly wealthier than they ought to be because of this grotesque State-monopoly privilege known as intellectual "property".

Therefore things that are not scarce can indeed be held in the "commons", and in fact society is much better when we have socialism for ideas and computer data for example.

Left-progressives frequently rail about the need for a legally mandated "right" to a service like healthcare forgetting or never understanding in the first place how the services needed to supply the growing human need are most efficiently produced and allocated. You might have an abstract "right" to a heart surgery, but if the sort of economic system and the State regulations and mandates heaped upon it don't produce enough hospitals, doctors and medical equipment, you won't get the care you need despite what politicians might claim.

If you're concern is largely for the material well-being of society's most vulnerable, surely you'd want the economy to be as physically productive as possible? The problem facing the poor is not that they make $8.50 and not $15 an hour. The problem is that they don't have enough basic "stuff" to give them a reasonable standard of living. And why don't they? They economy is not physically productive enough to provide them with needed and desired goods or there are artificial impediments to employment and/or entrepreneurship that constrains their available options.

A problem with "democracy" and all forms of collective ownership either of the factory or of public spaces is that use for such resources is heavily constrained by the need for consensus to act. If all workers owned factories together, endless meetings and deliberations would be required to make any decisions about the use of capital and production. Furthermore, conflict is enhanced rather than reduced. Who would REALLY have the final say on the use of collectively owned property? Well, no one does. All this wasted energy determining the best use of scarce resources leads to a tortoises pace to decisions that otherwise would be made by individual owners of these resources rather rapidly. This leads to paralysis and loss of productive capacity. If everyone can determine the use of property they own and put it to productive use immediately or trade it to another in an exchange immediately, the economy is made wealthier and decisions are made quickly by individuals who bear the personal responsibility for risking their capital and ONLY their capital in the effort.

I've spoken about the Tragedy of the Commons in the past, but that is one more effect of property not being privately owned. When no one has a financial incentive to maintain the capital value of a piece of property, everyone has an incentive to overuse that property, even towards ecological destruction. This was the story of the American Buffalo which was hunted to the brink of extinction when it was a part of the "commons" yet made a major comeback once private entrepreneurs homesteaded the animals and judiciously decided which to kill for meat and which to breed to replenish the livestock for future generations and future profit opportunities.

If we lived in an alternate universe without scarcity, then collective ownership of everything would make sense. No libertarian would dogmatically demand we maintain the concept of private property and homesteading with legal arbitration services if all goods existed in superabundance. If scarcity ceased being a limiting factor, then property would similarly cease being an important concept. There is a reason we don't parcel out oxygen rights for the air we breath. Oxygen is not scarce in any practical sense as it applies to human needs. Every human can breath as much as they want without limiting the ability of anyone else to breath as much as they want.

As society becomes wealthier and more physically productive, people are more able to engage in charity and goods naturally become more "common" and shared freely. Scarcity and private property rights become much more important as concepts that closer people are to a subsistence level of existence. A person starving in Africa really loving needs you to recognize his property right in a loaf of bread he acquired and don't even think of asking him to share. But more prosperous societies have the luxury of freely sharing goods that are produced in such abundance that we feel less urgency about attaining what we need to live at a decent standard of living.

I'd like you to explain to me the problem with the libertarian understanding of private property. And how, in a world of scarcity, that socialism is a feasible or coherent system? How could the human race have survived without the first-user principle of property acquisition being at least tacitly acknowledged?

Left-Progressives always tout the "successes" of social democracies like Sweden or the social welfare State in the United States, but they always (as Scott Horton likes to say) "truncate and antecedents". You know what the best way to attain a small fortune? Start with a large fortune and squander some of your wealth. In example after example, left-progressives tout the relative wealth of modern-day Sweden or post FDR United States forgetting or never understanding that these countries that remain reasonably wealthy and can bear the burden of the socialistic demands on the economy have all, without any notable exceptions, had a lengthy history of laissez-faire free market fueled growth for decades and decades before their governments made a left turn and decided to implement a welfare State.

This is absolutely true of the United States from the Industrial Revolution until the Progressive Era of the early to mid 20th century and it is also true of Sweden which had an incredibly laissez-faire free market economy during much of the same period of time and, even after their nominal shift leftward during the mid-20th century, the bulk of the socialist program so loved by leftist commentators is barely forty years old.

Getting your cause and effect reasoning straight would do wonders to improve your understanding of these historical events.


I'll leave it here for now. I want to try, at least initially, to limit the discussion to property rights as understood by libertarians, and their need under conditions of scarcity. I'd like to hear competing theories of initial property acquisition that make more sense that the first-user principle if you reject that theory.

Vorpal Cat posted:

Lets not even get started on the fun time that accrue when you accidentally discover a whole new continent full of gold and silver and suddenly have your available currency increasing far far faster then your underling economy.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Or the fun time the king of a previously unknown country went on vacation and turned the Mediterranean economy into a smoldering crater just by souvenir shopping

YF19pilot posted:

You've piqued my interest. Who was this?

YF19pilot posted:

You've piqued my interest. Who was this?

ToxicSlurpee posted:

That or all the fun effects of mercantilism or my personal favorite; obscenely wealthy people hoarding gold to increase its value then using it to buy lots of land only to flood the market with gold to debase everybody else's wealth. Then hey gently caress you they own all the land you'll pay them to work on it or starve to death.

Klaus88 posted:

You've never heard of a the king who single handily wrecked a the economy of a fairly substantial area because he's black. And the whole Muslim thing probably isn't helping.

Nessus posted:

I believe this is considered a feature, not a bug.

One theory I heard about the whole purestrain thing is that when the US goes back on the Gold Standard, they'll just declare that all dollars presently extant are valued at the gold in Fort Knox or whatever, which would presumably increase the price of gold by about two orders of magnitude. This is probably very appealing when your largest assets are three one-ounce krugerrands.

Nessus posted:

I believe this is considered a feature, not a bug.

One theory I heard about the whole purestrain thing is that when the US goes back on the Gold Standard, they'll just declare that all dollars presently extant are valued at the gold in Fort Knox or whatever, which would presumably increase the price of gold by about two orders of magnitude. This is probably very appealing when your largest assets are three one-ounce krugerrands.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

The right wing of America knows that it's losing so it's cashing out. Right now it's a gigantic scam. It's a racket. Have you ever noticed how every Republican presidential candidate just happens to release a book around campaign time?

Nevvy Z posted:

I've been working on a theory. Money is just an agreement by society that it owes you, so we should just unilaterally cancel the debt society owes certain rich assholes.

Morkies posted:

Halloween Jack posted:

Doesn't every candidate from every party do that? What's a lot more telling is the campaign and convention industry built up around the Tea Party. At the moment I can't find the articles I read, about conservative campaign organizers and others of their ilk, living the high life on money donated by rank-and-file Tea Partiers, and doing it all with a nod and a wink to the fact that they know the movement is meaningless.

Halloween Jack posted:

An almost universal concept among OPCA movements is that there's a difference between a human being and their "legal person," a legal fiction created by the government, which is just a corporation anyway. The goal of their nonsense filings is to claim all their income, property, and the benefits of citizenship, but dump all their debts and obligations on their "legal person," which they then disavow. They don't just use this tactic to protest taxes and court-ordered debt like fines and child support, but also to try to nullify private debts like mortgages and car loans. Another cornerstone of their beliefs is that the government is really just a corporation, hence all the bizarre behaviour and nonsense filings to avoid what they think are hidden procedural "traps" that constitute consent to a contract. So in a Libertopian future, they'd still be practicing pseudolegal witchcraft, but targeted at their DRO instead of the state judicial system.

Halloween Jack posted:

Doesn't every candidate from every party do that? What's a lot more telling is the campaign and convention industry built up around the Tea Party. At the moment I can't find the articles I read, about conservative campaign organizers and others of their ilk, living the high life on money donated by rank-and-file Tea Partiers, and doing it all with a nod and a wink to the fact that they know the movement is meaningless.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

OP should start another thread with an even longer introduction

DarklyDreaming posted:

It's what he does. Give it another 2-3 months he'll be back with another glorified street-sermon and rant about how totally notracist his idols are.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

I can't wait

Nolanar posted:

He truly is the best worst poster. There are never signs of trolling or genuine mental illness to ruin the fun, just a bottomless fountain of pure stupidity from which we can drink as much as we please.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

This makes me happy

TLM3101 posted:

Keep in mind that it's now one month or so since his last couple of posts... And the obligatory reminder that in one of them he held up literal slave-states as something the US should aspire to, because those states were more 'economically free'. The depths of Jrode's stupidity may literally be infinite.

( Yes, I know I keep harping on that, but it's just so loving out there that how can I not? )

TLM3101 posted:

Keep in mind that it's now one month or so since his last couple of posts... And the obligatory reminder that in one of them he held up literal slave-states as something the US should aspire to, because those states were more 'economically free'. The depths of Jrode's stupidity may literally be infinite.

( Yes, I know I keep harping on that, but it's just so loving out there that how can I not? )

DarklyDreaming posted:

It's what he does. Give it another 2-3 months he'll be back with another glorified street-sermon and rant about how totally notracist his idols are.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Getting him to acknowledge he lauded literal slave states should be the next watermelon-test when he posts again/a new thread. Lord knows I'm not going to leave it alone either!

GunnerJ posted:

It isn't even just that it's out there and ridiculous because it's not an incidental detail or accident or whatever. His reckoning of "economic freedom" (or the one he accepted as authoritative) does not take into account whether a nation's economy employs slave labor. If this is what libertarian understandings of economic freedom can overlook, they are garbage. He has to account for that if he wants anyone to take "economic freedom" seriously.

TLM3101 posted:

There are, as far as I can see, two possibilities here, and both are equally vile and disturbing. Either, JRode's recokning of economic freedom follows what you've said here, and he simply doesn't care whether an economy incorporates slave labor, which is abhorrently cynical and callous.

OR - and even worse - since a slave-state allows fellow human beings to be bought, sold, and used as property, he considers these states to be more 'economically free' because there is another arena for economic activity. That just so happens to obliterate any human dignity or worth of the 'commoditity', that is to say the actual peoplebeing sold. Now, in the purest, most abstractly technical sense, that would make these states more economically free. It's just that this argument is also completely vile and indicative of a truly repugnant view of humanity and human rights in general, in addition to being cynical and callous.

So, yeah. I want to loving grill the bastard on this.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Well there is a third possibility: he just copy-pasted that list from mises.org without really reading it. Given his known history of plagiarizing things he's not entirely read, I'd not rule it out.

jrodefeld posted:

Cato puts out a yearly report where they rank the countries of the world according to their "economic freedom", i.e. correlation of policies with libertarian ideology. This year, the United States ranks 16th.

These are the top countries ranked by their adherence to policies that promote economic freedom:

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. New Zealand
4. Switzerland
5. United Arab Emirates
6. Mauritius
7. Jordan
8. Ireland
9. Canada
10. United Kingdom
11. Chile
12. Australia
13. Georgia
14. Qatar
15. Taiwan

All these nations are deemed to be more economically free and thus closer to libertarianism than the United States. Interestingly, both Canada and the United Kingdom are ranked higher than the United States. But Progressives frequently cite those countries as the sort of "socialist" nations the "free market" United States ought to emulate.

Let's focus our analysis on the top four most libertarian economies according to Cato. Do you suppose they have widespread starvation in Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand or Switzerland? Obviously not. If one looks at this list, it becomes clear that the more economically free nations have greater general prosperity which doesn't just accrue to the rich, but benefits everyone.

Here is the full report:

http://www.freetheworld.com/2015/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2015.pdf

What this should tell you is that we don't need to invalidate private property rights or embrace so-called "positive" rights (the right to healthcare, the right to a house) to create a prosperous society with a vibrant middle class and very few poor. If we embark down the path of fiat money, growing State debt and redistributive welfare, society will become much poorer in the long run. This is what the United States is teaching us, and Sweden as well. Both were vibrant and prosperous free market economies earlier in their history but later they became mired in repeating economic bubbles, increasing public debt and stagnating or declining growth. Then there is the insidious damage done by inflation which hurts the poorest while incentivising a parasitic class to mooch off the State rather than earn a living off honest, productive labor.