Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

CONTRA LESTER: HOPPE IS RIGHT. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO PROPERTY.

(worth promoting and repeating)

Lester’s central argument is that he has stated a pre-property and pre-moral argument. He has not. He has merely constructed a top down deduction of morality out of normative usage of the term liberty, and called it “interpersonal liberty”, rather than observed and empirically documented a bottom up definition of liberty using morality. In simple words, Lester has created a verbal distinction where none exists, and claimed the verbalism as an innovation. He uses elaborate justification and overloading to obscure his tautology. And so he creates a verbal innovation only, and one that strangely enough, depends upon a contradiction in terms.

That generations of Cosmopolitans have engaged in deception and justification, including Berlin, who have extended the technique of hermeneutic argument, derived from centuries of justifying Jewish Scripture and dual-ethical law, is precisely the behavior I have constructed propertarianism to defend against. The postmoderns, the Freudians, the pseudoscientists that intentionally took over Sociology, the marxists, the critical rationalists under Popper, the feminists, the libertine-libertarians, and even Hoppe’s german rationalism, all make use of this anti-rational, anti-modern, anti-empirical verbalism. The reason the twentieth century was plagued by every form of pseudoscience and psuedo-ratioanlism was this new verbal mysticism, constructed by cosmopolitans with the same intention that the Germans invented continental rationalism, and the french invented their continental mythos: to retain group traditions in the face of empirical innovations in science that threatened them.

Like I have said all along. I am returning libertarianism to a foundation in testimonial truth, operational definitions, and the scientific method, to expressly defend liberty against verbal error and deception that Lester is engaged in, along with all other pseudoscientists (Mises), pseudo-rationalists (Lester and Block), and outright ideologists (Rothbard) that engage in Verbalism rather than demonstrable action.

1) Humans must acquire and inventory, and evolved to intuit acquisitiveness.

2) That which humans act to obtain without imposition upon in-group members they intuit as their property.

3) The scope of those things they act or choose not to act upon constitute their demonstrated definition of property-en-toto.

4) Emotions reflect changes in state of property-en-toto.

5) Moral intuitions reflect prohibitions on free riding (imposed costs).

6) Moral intuitions vary to suit one’s reproductive strategy (compatibilism but conflict)

7) Moral rules reflect prohibitions on free riding given the structure of the family in relation to the necessary and available structure of production.

8) Property rights are the positive enumeration in contractual form, of those moral rules which any polity agrees to enforce with the promise of violence for the purpose of restitution or punishment.

9) Property rights are necessary as an instrumental representation of moral prohibitions because of the unobservability of changes in state. (we have no lie detectors). And as such we require an observable proxy for evidence of changes in state.

Lester is irrelevant. He is not harmful. He is just irrelevant.