Theme: Agency

[O]nly humans can act. 1) Any description of a political concept, that is not articulated as action, is an attempt to obscure those actions. THis is the meaning of praxeology. It makes the involuntary transfers visible. If you cannot describe rights in praxeological terms, it’s because you are either unable to articulate thema s action, and therefore fail to understand them, or you are engaging self deception in order to justify your thefts, or you are engaging in the deception of others in order to justify your thefts. 2) Describing property as that which we obtain through voluntary exchange and homesteading, is an epistemic statement: it tells us only how we can KNOW something adheres to the contract for the institution of property, and therefore we have exclusive (a monopoly) of control over its use. It’s an epistemic statement. It still requires the contract in order for others to respect the property of yours. Implicit in any claim for several (individual, private) property, is that the grant is reciprocal. The fact that you don’t articulate this reciprocity is an accident or a contrivance. But if it is reciprocal than it is an act of exchange. It must be.

[callout]Any attempt to state that rights are acquired other than by organized violence is an attempt to acquire them at a discount. In other words, it is an act of fraud. Any attempt at utilitarian justification then opens us to the utilitarianism of involuntary transfer, and undermines the entire libertarian argument that property rights are absolute.[/callout]

3) It is entirely possible to state that you are not engaging in a reciprocal contract (an agreement) but in fact,t hat you are stating demands that you will back by violence. And this is, in fact, how the institution of property was created in the west, and eventually extended through enfranchisement to the militia, and then through political and tax enfranchisement to the middle class, and finally through vote-enfranchisement to the proletariat. (Who were advanced to consumers because of industrialization and capitalism.) Unfortunately, thinking that your violence is meaningful as an individual is an absurd proposition, since there is no evidence that individual violence can achieve anything, property included, without allies to enforce egalitarian property ownership by violence. The source of property is violence. But it is organized violence for the purpose of egalitarian (enfranchised) individual ownership of property. 4) the natura, instinctual, and genetic order of man is tribal – the ethics of the extended family. The west invented private property for a sequence of reasons that resulted in the high trust society that made our western exceptionalism possible. But the rest of humanity still engages in racial, tribal and familialism. And the most primitive and sedentary cultures, on matrilineal familialism. It is instinctual. while alpha males desire to crate tribes, and strong tribes. Women instinctively desire both to constrain alphas in order to control mate selection, and desire to place responsibility for the feeding of their children on the tribe – not themselves. These are our competing genetic strategies and they play out in every aspect of life. With women enfranchised into the voting pool, and increasingly abandoning the artificial institution of the nuclear family, they are exercising their instincts to restore the primitive, pre-herding order of human society. This is what we see in western voting patterns. Not a change in the distribution of male philosophical predisposition toward political orders, but an increasing expression of the female reproductive strategy let loose from the agrarian constraint of the nuclear family. 5) Rothbard recreated the mystical jewish religion of the ghetto, ignoring in his example of both the ghetto and Crusoe’s island, that there is a walled fortress of soldiers around the ghetto, and the violence of the ocean around Crusoe’s island. These are convenient defices that obscure, like his property rights, that the source of property is not choice, not will, not a divine right, not a gift from a divinity, not an abstraction. The source of property is the application of organized violence to acquire and hold property rights, such that all who participate in the violence used to obtain and hold those rights, possess that right of sovereignty: property rights. Any attempt to state that rights are acquired other than by organized violence is an attempt to acquire them at a discount. In other words, it is an act of fraud. Any attempt at utilitarian justification then opens us to the utilitarianism of involuntary transfer, and undermines the entire libertarian argument that property rights are absolute. Rothbard did us a favor by inventing propertarianism. Even though it appears that he did not understand what he had done. But we must, absolutely must, free libertarianism from the ghetto, and return it to the aristocracy that created it. Property is not a belief. A moral code, a sentiment, or a feeling. It is an institution created by the organized application of violence. Because property CAN only be created by the organized application of violence. Hoppe has succeeded in creating the institutions necessary for a homogenous polity. But he did not succeed in creating institutions necessary for a heterogeneous polity. Hopefully I’ll succeed. Not quite sure yet. Time will tell.