Anything That's Peaceful: In Defense of a Voluntary Society

Resolution: Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argument for private property (which I will elaborate on below) is correct. My burden of proof is to defend the following argument, and Con’s is to show that it is wrong.Introduction: The function of property rights is to avoid conflicts over the use of goods. Some sort of rules of conduct regarding the use of resources is necessary because of scarcity—that is, because of the fact that there are fewer goods than there are things people could want to use them for. Without scarcity, no such rules would be necessary—everyone could just take as much of whatever they wanted, because it wouldn’t affect the availability of that thing for anyone else. But because scarcity does exist, there must be some sort of property rights in resources (rights to use those resources). I will be defending the private property ethic as the solution to this problem of resource distribution.Hoppe’s Argument: First, we must conclude that each person owns—that is, has the right to exclusively control—his own body. To argue against this, or to make any argument at all, one must use one’s body, exercising that right. So any argument against self-ownership would logically contradict itself, and be false.Second, it must be true that humans have the right to homestead resources (acquire property) from the natural world. This is true because to humans require this to survive. Anyone alive must, necessarily, exercise this right. So any argument against this would contradict itself, because the arguer would have to exercise this right to be able to try to deny it. So, people must have the right to homestead and use some resources from the natural world.Third, the way one justly acquires property must be through the first-use first-own principle (homesteading). That is, the first person to put a resource to use is its rightful owner. . If the right to take resources from the natural world exists because doing so is necessary for survival, then the just way to acquire property must be through the first-use first-own rule. This is true because the way resources help us survive is through our use of them. Claims regarding property, such as “because I need it” are invalid because they don’t establish a connection between a particular person and a particular piece of property. To say “I own a house” doesn’t mean that you own some house, it means that you own a specific house. To say that one owns—has the exclusive right to control—a vague, nonspecific resource is meaningless. Or, if the rule for appropriating scarce resources was, say, being the first to declare them yours, as Nozick suggests, then one could do this with other people’s bodies. Since this contradicts self-ownership, which is already established, it must be false. The first-use first-own rule does not run into this problem, as each person is the first person to use their own body.Fourth, once it is established that the right to acquire some property, we must conclude that any restrictions to this right, other than self-imposed ones, are invalid. For, if a resource that I have homesteaded from the natural world isn’t mine, then whose is it? If the only just way to acquire property is through homesteading, and I’m the one who homesteaded a particular piece of property, then it couldn’t rightly belong to anyone but me. But what if someone acquired so much property that another cannot survive? For one, wealth production is not a zero-sum game in a capitalist society—someone who acquires wealth by putting resources to use makes society as a whole richer through trade. But it is conceivable that someone putting resources to use now could cause a loss for late-comers, people who may have put those resources to use later if that original someone hadn’t. Locke himself included a provision for this—he said that homesteaders were required to leave “as much and as good in common to others.” Locke’s proviso is wrong. There are two possibilities—either late-comers do have a right to unowned resources, or they don’t. If they do, then everyone would simply die, as one would need the permission of the late-comers to acquire property, which no one could possibly get, as many of those late-comers haven’t been born yet. The same is true even if the late-comer’s rights were limited to the resources needed for survival. For if late-comers (those that haven’t appropriated a given resource) had a right to resources they might need for survival, then this would have to be true for all late-comers. And no one could possibly know what resources these late-comers might need, especially since ‘all late-comers’ must include people that haven’t been born yet, of which there are an unlimited amount of potential people that could need any potentially homesteaded resource. Limiting it further to say that late-comers that currently exist can have property rights in something they “need” runs into the problem mentioned earlier—that such a criterion for property rights doesn’t establish a link between a particular person and a particular piece of property. Saying that you have a property right—the right of exclusive use and control—of a vague, nonspecific piece of property is completely meaningless.