Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

by Eli Harman via Brandon Hayes Libertarians have a theory of legitimate private property originating in original appropriation and subsequent exchange. This is sometimes called “Intersubjectively Verifiable Property” (IVP) which means “property people can agree who owns” and it basically limits the scope of “legitimate” property to personal, private, property. But people will intuit assaults on or theft of common and intangible property as a loss and they will retaliate against it. So if the purpose of property rights, norms, and regimes, is to minimize conflicts by codifying who owns what, and consequently, who may do what, where, and why, then libertarian IVP fails as a property regime and a property norm, because there are whole categories of conflict it does not address nor prevent because it does not codify property rights in things that people value (with good reason) and conflict over, but actually licenses parasitism, theft, destruction, and free-riding in these domains by prohibiting retaliation against it.

by Eli Harman via Brandon Hayes Libertarians have a theory of legitimate private property originating in original appropriation and subsequent exchange. This is sometimes called “Intersubjectively Verifiable Property” (IVP) which means “property people can agree who owns” and it basically limits the scope of “legitimate” property to personal, private, property. But people will intuit assaults on or theft of common and intangible property as a loss and they will retaliate against it. So if the purpose of property rights, norms, and regimes, is to minimize conflicts by codifying who owns what, and consequently, who may do what, where, and why, then libertarian IVP fails as a property regime and a property norm, because there are whole categories of conflict it does not address nor prevent because it does not codify property rights in things that people value (with good reason) and conflict over, but actually licenses parasitism, theft, destruction, and free-riding in these domains by prohibiting retaliation against it.

by Luke Weinhagen (better than I have said it) (brilliant) The way (my revelation) hit me was that libertarianism survives/exists by miscategorizing relations. Specifically libertarians interpret commons(cooperation) as commons(conflict) and use property rights(IVP) to attempt to resolve that conflict. In doing so they justify libertarianism’s parasitism of the commons(that can only be generated via cooperation) as defense and that justification requires it not suppress any parasitism of the commons(cooperation) as this would self destruct the ideology. Libertarianism self destructed for me once I recognized this categorization error. (CURT: Luke, this is, the … it’s, pricelessly stated. nice work.)