(important concept) (learning propertariansm)
The informational content of Property Rights is less than the informational content of the Prohibition on the Imposition of Costs Upon the Property-en-toto of Others.
Property Rights are not an epistemological or decidable absolute in Propertarianism, but the positive assertion of the negative prohibition of the imposition of costs.
One possesses rights to restitution for violations of property en toto not to the property itself, which one need no ‘right’ to – one need only acquire it without imposing costs upon others that both generate the demand to retaliate, and that violates the incentive to cooperate, and therefore is merely a moral consideration.
So:
– property exists prior to cooperation,
– morality preserves cooperation, by prohibitions and positive assertions (advice)
– law records both positive morality and negative on immorality
– law records positive property rights and methods of restitution (or punishment).
Property is not an absolute. The imposition of costs is. Property rights are constrained by the reality of temporal existence, and the prohibition on the imposition of costs upon others.
The model is that if your store of grain exists during an era of crisis, that you may not use the opportunity to either determine who lives or dies, or to profit from suffering of others. It means that one sells the grain to them at prices that prevent your loss (an imposition of costs upon you).
It means that in the example of the value of water in a desert, you will ensure that the sale of water to a dying man is not an imposition of costs, but not a means of increasing profits. It means that if he lacks the money to pay, that you must give him water now, as long as he commits to paying, and that you are due damages from him if you must collect.
Profit from suffering violates the principle of productive exchange and the avoidance of retaliation.
This fact amounts to a ‘shall-issue service to my kith and kin’, and that I shall seek profit only from mutually productive exchange, and not that I shall maximize profits in all circumstances.
It means that one does not take opportunistic profits from the suffering of others without alternative.
This fact separates the aristocracy of Propertarianism from the Libertinism of cosmopolitan libertarianism.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)