LIBERTARIANISM IS REDUCIBLE TO PROPERTY RIGHTS…OR ISNT IT?
Libertarianism Simplified: the Three Proper Powers of Government
Rule of Law (universal application, universal standing), Common Law (organic), Property en Toto (right to seek restitution for any imposition upon anything constructed by the bearing of costs: that which is obtained by productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, free of externality of the same criteria.
The challenge for libertarians has been the definition of private property: that which one can seek restitution for in court under rule of law.
Saying we defend it without defining it is an incomplete statement that allows the audience to assume his concept of private property is what the speaker refers to. This is a cute act of suggestion that inspires moral affiliation, but it is not sufficient for representation as the basis for law that provides non discretionary decidability in matters of conflict.
Rothbardians define property with the ethics of pastoralists and the ghetto: inter subjectively verifiable property. These are the low trust ethics of the steppe, levant, and medieval ghetto.
If we look at high trust societies instead, they assert property rights not only to physical property, but to all property that causes conflict and retaliation for the imposition of costs.
So humans demonstrate that they treat as their property all that they have expended resources to obtain with the expectation of a monopoly of control(private), fruits from(shareholder property), and prevention from consumption (commons).
We agree to enforce retaliation or restitution against impositions against all of those forms of property.
But why? Because the most scarce and rewarding good is cooperation.
We evolve moral intuitions, moral and ethical rules, manners, laws and traditions to preserve the value of cooperation.
Property rights then represent a warranty by the group members of those forms of property that one has acquired or invested in or refrained from the consumption of, in order to preserve the incentive to cooperate and the disproportionate rewards of cooperation, including the rewards from the production of commons- property rights being the first commons.
The origin of property preceded cooperation. The origin of morality followed cooperation. The origin of rights evolved from morality. Law evolved from the need for uniform application of restitution for impositions upon property.
Property rights did not evolve from the scarcity of goods but from the gradual atomization of the family in the increasingly individualistic division of labor.
So while libertarianism contains comforting memes, it is predicated on a number of half truths and falsehoods.
The problem we face is the preservation of the disproportionate rewards of cooperation. Property rights – insuring one another – are the means by which we do so.
As such, the scope of property necessary for an anarchic polity is that which preserves the will to cooperate.
And as far as we know, that is a high trust requirement.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
Libertarianism is reducible to rule of law under the total prohibition against the imposition of costs against that property necessary to preserve the incentives to cooperate.