Monday, February 10, 2014

"This isn't liberty. It's the exact opposite'!

Demo.org PolicyShop blogger Matt Bruenig on property rights...

"This isn’t liberty. It’s the exact opposite. Every little thing you grab up reduces my liberty, my ability to move about as I’d like. I don’t agree to it."

This isn't logical. This presupposes resources and goods aren't rivalrous or scarce, and such a theory could only exist in world of non-scarcity. Everyone can't both have a right to everything and no right to anything at all. This kind of thinking is fundamentally selfish, as it assumes you have a property right in everything that exists in the world and anyone else needs you to 'agree' to their acting at all.

"Every little thing you grab up reduces my liberty..."

If every person on the planet claimed this line of thinking, then everyone is claiming a right to use everything and denying anyone else the right to use anything at all. It's Absurd, resources and goods are rivalrous and scarce.

"Bob, has decided that he can take things that nobody owns and violently exclude everyone else from them..."

Your view is that everyone has a right to the use of both everything and to nothing at all, and with logic like that no resources could ever be used or employed as a means. Bob can't transform any resource because Jane is claiming the right to it's use and Jane can't transform any resource because Bob is claiming a right to it's use, it's absurd and illogical.

"Jane ignores Bob’s threats of violence and comes into the square of land to play frisbee with her friend."

Jane is doing the same thing as Bob here, claiming a right to the exclusive use and control of a rivalrous resource, land. Suppose Bob shows up after Jane is already using this land and wants to play soccer, what happens now? How is this dispute settled? Does one have the better claim to the use of the land? The Frisbee scenario, in my opinion, is too simplistic, what if Bob built a home there and had been living there for a year, what if Jane showed up and claims he had no right because he didn't ask her for permission to live there and she had a right to it previously! What happens? They both can't have a right to use and not have a right to use unowned rivalrous resources...it's illogical because resources are scarce and rivalrous by nature of their existence...

Further, how did Jane get the Frisbee to begin with? She would have had to claim a previously unowned resource to transform into a Frisbee. The right to exclusively use and transform a resource into a more desirable good (a Frisbee) exists for Jane without Bob's permission, but it does not exist for Bob without Jane's permission?

Self-contradictory.

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