Q&a: Justly Acquired Property

—“So I guess my real question is this: do you draw a distinction between justly acquired property and unjustly acquired property? If not, aren’t you just making a convoluted defense of the “might makes right” argument?”— NATHANIEL

I’m going to try to answer two questions.

(a) might-makes-right

(b) justly acquired property

(a) might does not make right, but one cannot make right without might. What makes right is voluntary cooperation. Voluntary cooperation requires non-imposition of costs against that which one has acquired without the imposition of costs.

(b) we impose no costs when we acquire property by discovery(homesteading), transformation, or productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, limited to externalities of the same constraint upon the imposition of costs.

(c) What separates high trust propertarianism from low trust libertarianism, is the scope of property is not artificial in Propertarianism. It’s what’s necessary for a voluntary polity to form and persist.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute