Author: Curt Doolittle

“QUESTION:” CURT: DO YOU HAVE A SIMPLE VERSION OF THIS TALK?”

Sure. Or, I’ll try hard. 😉

1) The “NAP” that only limits physical aggression leaves open “trickery and deceit’ as well as ‘free riding parasitism’ and ‘conspiracy’. And by leaving open these forms of aggression, the NAP cannot produce property rights, an anarchic polity, or a condition of liberty.

2) It is irrational for other than career criminals to prefer membership in a polity with the high transaction costs and high opportunity costs, and high risk due to trickery and conspiracy over one in which trickery, deceit, and conspiracy are permitted. And this is why no such economic polity exists.

3) But a definition of aggression that includes physical, trickery and deceit, free riding parasitism, and conspiracy can produce property rights, an anarchic polity, and a condition of liberty. Because it is rational to prefer an anarchic polity free of these forms of parasitism over one that has much higher costs.

4) So Rothbardian Non Aggression against ‘physical property’ can’t create a condition of liberty, while classical liberal Non Aggression against ‘demonstrated property’ can create a condition of liberty.

5) What is demonstrated property? Anything you have homesteaded or obtained through productive, fully informed, voluntary exchange, and without imposing costs upon the demonstrated property of others.

6) What do people demonstrate as their property? Life, Kin, Mate, Friends, Allies, physical property, territory, built capital, norms, and institutions.

7) What Exceptions are there? Communities produce opportunities by virtue of population density and cooperation in a division of labor while using property rights, and expect members to homestead those opportunities. We call this process of homesteading opportunities ‘competition’. This creating of common opportunities and homesteading them is what produces the virtuous cycle that makes cities (markets) so productive.

8) So how do we create liberty? We create liberty by reciprocal insurance of one another’s demonstrated property from transgression by others, thereby creating the first commons: property rights, or what we loosely call ‘cooperation’.

9) This argument kills the idea of individualism per se and instead states that all rights are possessed by individuals but rights can only be created by an organized polity willing to construct them by reciprocal insurance of one another’s demonstrated property from the imposition of costs.

The rest of the talk is largely a criticism of why the NAP failed, and why Rothbard came up with it for cultural reasons. And how the reason he didn’t complete the NAP or write it operationally was to circumvent the logical conclusion that with greater articulation his attempt to avoid payment for the commons would have been exposed.