Propertarianism
Core concepts #3
Martin Štěpán is a senior fellow of the Natural Law Institute and specializes in integrating insights from the rest of the internet right into the Institute’s work.
Propertarianism is a term which used to refer to entirety of the work at the period we went by Propertarian Institute before deciding it’s no longer a good descriptor for the entire scope of what we cover but it may nonetheless be applied to that part of the work that actually deals with ethics, that is, with property. It is likely due to this term that we have been accused of being just another brand of libertarianism and indeed, there are still other users of the term that are libertarians and have nothing to do with us. Curt suggested that the term was laying around without much use and going to waste so he homesteaded it. Because libertarian theory of property is likely already understood by most readers, not necessarily due to being libertarians themselves but because significant portion of the right appears to have arrived at their position through libertarian pipeline, we will be contrasting this with our own theory and hopefully succeed in disproving the accusation.
Acquisitionism
To start with, we need to understand that humans, and indeed any animal with any consciousness whatsoever, is motivated to act by acquisition, which is to say, get greatest return in shortest time with least effort, greatest certainty and lowest risk. We have huge and expensive brains for no other reason than to do identify greatest return within much greater complexity than other animals are capable of. That is not to say there aren’t radical differences between individuals and groups in what is considered worthy of acquisition, figuring out how to go about it and capacity to successfully do so, only that the underlying mechanism is the same. We call what is sought out interests.
Acquisition is a term used in relation to other potential scenarios and as such may mean defense or maintenance of that which has already been acquired to prevent a loss. We are also dealing with competing time scales. We may sacrifice something in the present or near future for a long-term gain or, what’s far more common, the reverse.
Our emotions have no other purpose than to measure the changes in state of our interests and motivate us to act accordingly, though the types of interests each emotion measures differ widely.
Property
Libertarians start their theory from axioms of ownership of one’s body, of ownership of other things being produced by combining one’s labor with unowned (homesteading) or voluntary exchange with the previous owner, and violence being always illegitimate with the exception of self-defense.
The last one is where the most significant error lies. First, calling something illegitimate doesn’t have any effect on how the world works and it doesn’t do anything to disincentivize a behavior beyond a rare individual who gets convinced. We on the other hand say the first question of ethics is necessarily “Why shouldn’t I kill you and take your stuff?” and libertarian answers to this fail, providing moralizing instead of tangible benefits of not doing so. To this, a libertarian may respond that their system is best for everyone because of the prosperity (actually meaning luxury) it produces but, disregarding for now the question of whether luxury is even a desirable primary goal for society (it’s not) to have and whether the claim is even true over the long run (it’s also not), this is speaking about the aggregate rather than about any particular individual or group and thus at best proposing a prisoner’s dilemma where individuals and groups may be rewarded for defecting from NAP. Self-defense may sometimes (not always) stop an individual but it has no answer to organized violence. This means libertarianism is incapable of producing a stable system with an equilibrium of incentives.
We in contrast recognize violence as a resource and capacity for violence as capital. Furthermore, we recognize paying of opportunity costs as a form of investment. Any claim to ownership, no matter how well documented, is meaningless if not backed by violence as it can be freely ignored. Thus, the only possible answer to the first question of ethics is: “Because you’ll acquire greater return in shorter time with less effort, greater certainty and lower risk by not killing me and taking my stuff than you would by doing that.”
This means on one hand that when we want to ask a man to make an investment of opportunity cost by not killing and taking stuff when he would clearly benefit from doing so and to instead respect some property norm, he must have a reasonable expectation of return on that investment, and on the other hand, there must be punishment for or removal of those who defect by the men who perceive maintaining the given property norm as worthwhile. Equilibrium is reached when enough men benefit to keep enforcing the system of property norms instead of violating them, abandoning it to seek other opportunities or failing to defend it from outside introgressions. This is not to say there’s some explicit agreement occurring as claimed by “social contract” philosophists, this is simply the economics of what emerges organically out of natural necessity.
Because such an investment into the system of property norms, along with the territory to practice it on, is shared between many men, it is effectively their shared property (commons) and any other property norm, including private property, is predicated upon it, completely inverting the libertarian assumption that private property is the first principle. If there aren’t other men who agree with your claim of ownership and accordingly abstain from use and abuse and who contribute to defense of what you claim to own, you effectively own nothing. (And I’m not using men as a gender neutral-term, women typically aren’t inclined to respect and enforce property norms of their own accord.) From this follows the second question of ethics: “Why should we let you have control over anything on our territory?” with the answer once again: “Because you’ll receive greater return in shorter time with less effort, greater certainty and lower risk if you let me have it than not.”
Organically emergent property norms, contrary to libertarian “free market” also consist of various forms of commons which every ingroup member or select subgroups can use within specific limits but no one can dispose of as they wish. Even relative monopoly of control over something, i.e. land, can be conditioned on making productive use of it rather than letting it decay (profit motive isn’t always sufficient guarantee, especially where other outside incentives are at play, i.e. someone taking control of the land specifically to starve the local population). The premise of tragedy of the commons completely ignores altruistic punishment by which groups prevent abuse of the commons. We recognize privatizing commons on the false premise they’re unowned as a form of theft.
Libertarians in the next place impose the standard of intersubjective verifiability on property, we instead consider property anything that is defended. This isn’t limited to physical but may in fact get quite abstract, ranging from time and attention on an individual level to culture or norms on a collective level. Some of these are forms of capital, making their theft, pollution or destruction that much more criminal.
Notice that up to this point, everything has been descriptive and nowhere is it stated what any given group must defend, merely observed what they typically do defend. Different populations with different traits and in different circumstances will have different needs that will lead them to produce appropriate property norms. This is not to say that some property norms do not have much better results than others where flourishing of the people is concerned.
Beyond existential needs, people are only inclined to invest into what they can reasonably rely on being defended or otherwise insured and what they can reasonably expect to gain return on investment from. To that end, in our recommended system of rule of law, we recognize all interests demonstrated by investment (defense, improvement, maintenance), including commons, as valid forms of property by default unless they violate another’s property, and then give specific exceptions (i.e. letting private individuals own nukes).
Examples of interests
Time - an ultimate currency, every cost translates to time.
Energy - a potential to cause change.
Attention - a limited resource just like the former two. Paying attention to one thing means it’s not paid to other things that may be of more importance.
Body (health, physique) - a form of capital, in that healthy and strong body makes it easier to acquire other things, including acquiring relationship and reputation by being more aesthetically pleasing and/or imposing.
Knowledge, skills - likewise forms of capital, knowledge enables better modeling of the world, enabling better planning of acquisition in it, skills providing capacity of actually executing the plans.
Relationships - capital, assuming people in those relationship are any help in one’s goals.
Reputation - capital consisting of access to and discount on opportunity of forming and utilizing relationships.
Privacy - having space to do what doing in public would harm one’s reputation.
Opportunities - a potential for acquisition, whether individual or continuous. People defend these as interests in themselves.
Actual physical possessions - can be both consumable and capital goods. So-called conspicuous consumption, contrary to what the term suggests, is capitalizing as it’s used to symbolize status and group membership to obtain corresponding discounts.
And many kinds of common interests (commons) that deserve their own article due to political implications.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity has already been brought up in the last article as an example. To reiterate, the law of reciprocity describes a distinction between what is perceived as cooperation on one hand and what is perceived as an imposition and generates demand for restitution and punishment on the other.
Our recommended system of rule of law demands all exchanges between the citizens be reciprocal. (The exception being necessary responsibilities and duties towards the family, community and nation which are voluntary only in the sense that if you don’t like them, you’re free leave the country.)
Reciprocity can be reduced to the following criteria:
Voluntary - all interested parties consented to the exchange, in other words, they have not been coerced by a threat of imposition whether on body, physical property, relationships or reputation. This is one part libertarians will mostly agree with, though some will go out of their way to defend blackmail due to not recognizing abstract demonstrated interests (i.e. reputation) as property. They may also not agree about who the interested parties are. For instance, do only a man and woman need to consent to a marriage or should other family members get some say as interested parties in the future of their families?
Exhaustively informed - parties to the exchange informed the others of everything, especially the possible costs and risks, they need to know about. The implications include the obvious, such as not lying about what’s being exchanged or including manual for safe handling, but also poses questions that are not asked in today’s “free market”. Is selling a property that you expect to lose value without informing the buyer of this expectation not a fraud?
Warrantied - any loss resulting error or irresponsibility of the seller, such faulty manufacturing, must be compensated via restitution, repair or replacement. We recommend an explicit right to repair to disincentivize wasteful production and selling of products that break down after a needlessly short time whereas the current system rewards it.
This has further implications which we’ve sometimes added as additional, if redundant, criteria:
Productive - perceived interests of all parties to the exchange are increased. Given the exchange must be voluntary and exhaustively informed, it’s guaranteed no one would enter into an unproductive exchange.
No negative externality - no impositions on other parties covered by the given system of rule of law. This would constitute an involuntary and uninformed exchange with another party.
Free of hazards - no baiting people into something they’d regret if they were fully aware of the consequences of (not exhaustively informed, not warrantied). Good example is any addictive behavior, especially with surrogate activities (drugs, porn, video games).
Conclusion
Libertarian theory based on ignoring most implications of violence and on an entirely arbitrary definition of property not reflected by society at any time and place doesn’t pass scrutiny, nor does allowance of any voluntary exchange. This theory has in practice been used to justify capitalism which evidently involves global monopolies, mass movements of capital and migrants, privatizing commons and renting them back to the people, defrauding them with overvalued degrees and enrichment by exploitation of people’s lowest animal desires.
We on one hand observe this is neither tolerated when people have control over their own local property norms and on the other find this state of affairs unacceptable and one of our primary motives for producing reforms and seeking opportunities for bringing them into effect.