Source: https://radicalcapitalist.org/2017/09/02/what-libertarianism-is/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 10:31:08+00:00

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Libertarians tend to agree on a wide array of policies and principles. Nonetheless, it is not easy to find consensus on what libertarianism’s defining characteristic is, or on what distinguishes it from other political theories and systems.
The nonaggression principle is also dependent on property rights, since what aggression is depends on what our (property) rights are. If you hit me, it is aggression because I have a property right in my body. If I take from you the apple you possess, this is trespass — aggression — only because you own the apple. One cannot identify an act of aggression without implicitly assigning a corresponding property right to the victim.
So capitalism and the free market are too narrow, and justice, individual rights, and aggression all boil down to, or are defined in terms of, property rights. What of property rights, then? Is this what differentiates libertarianism from other political philosophies — that we favor property rights, and all others do not? Surely such a claim is untenable.
Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. What is distinctive about libertarianism is its particular property assignment rules: its view concerning who is the owner of each contestable resource, and how to determine this.
A system of property rights assigns a particular owner to every scarce resource. These resources obviously include natural resources such as land, fruits of trees, and so on. Objects found in nature are not the only scarce resources, however. Each human actor has, controls, and is identified and associated with a unique human body, which is also a scarce resource.7 Both human bodies and nonhuman, scarce resources are desired for use as means by actors in the pursuit of various goals.
Nonlibertarian political philosophies have a different view. Each person has some limited rights in his own body, but not complete or exclusive rights. Society — or the state, purporting to be society’s agent — has certain rights in each citizen’s body, too. This partial slavery is implicit in state actions and laws such as taxation, conscription, and drug prohibitions.
The libertarian says that each person is the full owner of his body: he has the right to control his body, to decide whether or not he ingests narcotics, joins an army, and so on. Those various nonlibertarians who endorse any such state prohibitions, however, necessarily maintain that the state, or society, is at least a partial owner of the body of those subject to such laws — or even a complete owner in the case of conscriptees or nonaggressor “criminals” incarcerated for life. Libertarians believe in self-ownership. Nonlibertarians — statists — of all stripes advocate some form of slavery.
Without property rights, there is always the possibility of conflict over contestable (scarce) resources. By assigning an owner to each resource, legal systems make possible conflict-free use of resources, by establishing visible boundaries that nonowners can avoid. Libertarianism does not endorse just any property assignment rule, however.13 It favors self-ownership over other-ownership (slavery).
The libertarian seeks property assignment rules because he values or accepts various grundnorms such as justice, peace, prosperity, cooperation, conflict-avoidance, and civilization.14 The libertarian view is that self-ownership is the only property assignment rule compatible with these grundorms; it is implied by them.
As Professor Hoppe has shown, the assignment of ownership to a given resource must not be random, arbitrary, particularistic, or biased, if it is actually to be a property norm that can serve the function of conflict-avoidance.15 Property title has to be assigned to one of competing claimants based on “the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner and the” resource claimed.16 In the case of one’s own body, it is the unique relationship between a person and his body — his direct and immediate control over his body, and the fact that, at least in some sense, a body is a given person and vice versa — that constitutes the objective link sufficient to give that person a claim to his body superior to typical third party claimants.
Libertarianism recognizes that only the self-ownership rule is universalizable and compatible with the goals of peace, cooperation, and conflict-avoidance. We recognize that each person is prima facie the owner of his own body because, by virtue of his unique link to and connection with his own body — his direct and immediate control over it — he has a better claim to it than anyone else.
Libertarians apply similar reasoning in the case of other scarce resources — namely, external objects in the world that, unlike bodies, were at one point unowned. In the case of bodies, the idea of aggression being impermissible immediately implies self-ownership. In the case of external objects, however, we must identify who the owner is before we can determine what constitutes aggression.
As in the case with bodies, humans need to be able to use external objects as means to achieve various ends. Because these things are scarce, there is also the potential for conflict. And, as in the case with bodies, libertarians favor assigning property rights so as to permit the peaceful, conflict-free, productive use of such resources. Thus, as in the case with bodies, property is assigned to the person with the best claim or link to a given scarce resource — with the “best claim” standard based on the goals of permitting peaceful, conflict-free human interaction and use of resources.
Unlike human bodies, however, external objects are not parts of one’s identity, are not directly controlled by one’s will, and — significantly — they are initially unowned.18 Here, the libertarian realizes that the relevant objective link is appropriation — the transformation or embordering of a previously unowned resource, Lockean homesteading, the first use or possession of the thing.19 Under this approach, the first (prior) user of a previously unowned thing has a prima facie better claim than a second (later) claimant, solely by virtue of his being earlier.
Why is appropriation the relevant link for determination of ownership? First, keep in mind that the question with respect to such scarce resources is: who is the resource’s owner? Recall that ownership is the right to control, use, or possess,20 while possession is actual control — “the factual authority that a person exercises over a corporeal thing.”21 The question is not who has physical possession; it is who has ownership.
Thus, asking who is the owner of a resource presupposes a distinction between ownership and possession — between the right to control, and actual control. And the answer has to take into account the nature of previously unowned things — namely, that they must at some point become owned by a first owner.
Instead of a might-makes-right approach, from the insights noted above it is obvious that ownership presupposes the prior-later distinction: whoever any given system specifies as the owner of a resource, he has a better claim than latecomers.24 If he does not, then he is not an owner, but merely the current user or possessor. If he is supposed an owner on the might-makes-right principle, in which there is no such thing as ownership, it contradicts the presuppositions of the inquiry itself. If the first owner does not have a better claim than latecomers, then he is not an owner, but merely a possessor, and there is no such thing as ownership.
Not only libertarians are civilized. Most people give some weight to some of the above considerations. In their eyes, a person is the owner of his own body — usually. A homesteader owns the resource he appropriates — unless the state takes it from him “by operation of law.”29 This is the principal distinction between libertarians and nonlibertarians: Libertarians are consistently opposed to aggression, defined in terms of invasion of property borders, where property rights are understood to be assigned on the basis of self-ownership in the case of bodies. And in the case of other things, rights are understood on the basis of prior possession or homesteading and contractual transfer of title.
This framework for rights is motivated by the libertarian’s consistent and principled valuing of peaceful interaction and cooperation — in short, of civilized behavior. A parallel to the Misesian view of human action may be illuminating here. According to Mises, human action is aimed at alleviating some felt uneasiness.30 Thus, means are employed, according to the actor’s understanding of causal laws, to achieve various ends — ultimately, the removal of uneasiness.
Civilized man may be defined as he who seeks justification for the use of interpersonal violence. When the inevitable need to engage in violence arises — for defense of life or property — civilized man seeks justification. Naturally, since this justification-seeking is done by people who are inclined to reason and peace (justification is after all a peaceful activity that necessarily takes place during discourse),33 what they seek are rules that are fair, potentially acceptable to all, grounded in the nature of things, and universalizable, and which permit conflict-free use of resources.
Libertarian property rights principles emerge as the only candidate that satisfies these criteria. Thus, if civilized man is he who seeks justification for the use of violence, the libertarian is he who is serious about this endeavor. He has a deep, principled, innate opposition to violence, and an equally deep commitment to peace and cooperation.
For the foregoing reasons, libertarianism may be said to be the political philosophy that consistently favors social rules aimed at promoting peace, prosperity, and cooperation.34 It recognizes that the only rules that satisfy the civilized grundnorms are the self-ownership principle and the Lockean homesteading principle, applied as consistently as possible.
 The term “private” property rights is sometimes used by libertarians, which I have always found odd, since property rights are necessarily public, not private, in the sense that the borders or boundaries of property must be publicly visible so that nonowners can avoid trespass. For more on this aspect of property borders, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 140–41; Stephan Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2003): n. 32 and accompanying text; idem, Against Intellectual Property (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), pp. 30–31, 49; also Randy E. Barnett, “A Consent Theory of Contract,” Columbia Law Review 86 (1986): 303.
2.Murray N. Rothbard, “‘Human Rights’ As Property Rights,” in The Ethics of Liberty (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998); idem, For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (rev. ed.; New York: Libertarian Review Foundation, 1985), pp. 42 et pass.
A.N. Yiannopoulos, Louisiana Civil Law Treatise, Property (West Group, 4th ed. 2001), §§ 1, 2 (first emphasis in original; remaining emphasis added). See also Louisiana Civil Code, Art. 477 (“Ownership is the right that confers on a person direct, immediate, and exclusive authority over a thing. The owner of a thing may use, enjoy, and dispose of it within the limits and under the conditions established by law”).
5.For a systematic analysis of various forms of socialism, from Socialism Russian-Style, Socialism Social-Democratic Style, the Socialism of Conservatism, the Socialism of Social Engineering, see Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, chapters 3–6. Recognizing the common elements of various forms of socialism and their distinction from libertarianism (capitalism), Hoppe incisively defines socialism as “an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims.” Ibid., p. 2. See also the quote from Hoppe in note 9, below.
8.Ayn Rand, “Galt’s Speech,” in For the New Intellectual, quoted in The Ayn Rand Lexicon, “Physical Force” entry. Ironically, Objectivists often excoriate libertarians for having a “context-less” concept of aggression — that is, that “aggression” or “rights” is meaningless unless these concepts are embedded in the larger philosophical framework of Objectivism — despite Galt’s straightforward definition of aggression as the initiation of physical force against others.
10.See Stephan Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 30 (1997): 607–45; idem, “Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 51–73.
11.The following terms and formulations may be considered as roughly synonymous, depending on context: aggression; initiation of force; trespass; invasion; unconsented to (or uninvited) change in the physical integrity (or use, control or possession) of another person’s body or property.
12.“Prima facie,” because some rights in one’s body are arguably forfeited or lost in certain circumstances, e.g., when one commits a crime, thus authorizing the victim to at least use defensive force against the body of the aggressor (implying the aggressor is to that extent not the owner of his body). For more on this see Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Contract,” pp. 11–37; idem, “Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith,” 14, no. 1 Journal of Libertarian Studies (Winter 1998–99): 79–93; and idem, “Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 2, no. 4 (Winter 1999): n. 32.
13.On the importance of the concept of scarcity and the possibility of conflict for the emergence of property rules, see Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 134; and the discussion thereof in Stephan Kinsella, “Thoughts on the Latecomer and Homesteading Ideas; or, Why the Very Idea of ‘Ownership’ Implies that only Libertarian Principles are Justifiable,” Mises Economics Blog (Aug. 15, 2007).
14.“Grundnorm” was legal philosopher Hans Kelsen’s term for the hypothetical basic norm or rule that serves as the basis or ultimate source for the legitimacy of a legal system. See Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, trans. Anders Wedberg (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949). I employ this term to refer to the fundamental norms presupposed by civilized people, e.g., in argumentative discourse, which in turn imply libertarian norms.
That the libertarian grundnorms are, in fact, necessarily presupposed by all civilized people to the extent they are civilized — during argumentative justification, that is — is shown by Hoppe in his argumentation-ethics defense of libertarian rights. On this, see Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, chapter 7; Stephan Kinsella, “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 313–26; idem, “Defending Argumentation Ethics,” Anti-state.com (Sept. 19, 2002).
16.Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 12.
19.On the nature of appropriation of unowned scarce resources, see Hoppe’s and de Jasay’s ideas quoted and discussed in Kinsella, “Thoughts on the Latecomer and Homesteading Ideas,” and note 24, below. In particular, see Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 13, 134–36, 142–44; and Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order (London & New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 158 et seq., 171 et seq., et pass. De Jasay is also discussed extensively in my “Book Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 1, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 85–93. De Jasay’s argument presupposes the value of justice, efficiency, and order. Given these goals, he argues for three principles of politics: (1) if in doubt, abstain from political action (pp. 147 et seq.); (2) the feasible is presumed free (pp. 158 et seq.); and (3) let exclusion stand (pp. 171 et seq.). In connection with principle (3), “let exclusion stand,” de Jasay offers insightful comments about the nature of homesteading or appropriation of unowned goods. De Jasay equates property with its owner’s “excluding” others from using it, for example by enclosing or fencing in immovable property (land) or finding or creating (and keeping) movable property (corporeal, tangible objects). He concludes that since an appropriated thing has no other owner, prima facie no one is entitled to object to the first possessor claiming ownership. Thus, the principle means “let ownership stand,” i.e., that claims to ownership of property appropriated from the state of nature or acquired ultimately through a chain of title tracing back to such an appropriation should be respected. This is consistent with Hoppe’s defense of the “natural” theory of property. Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism , pp. 10–14 and chapter 7. For further discussion of the nature of appropriation, see Jörg Guido Hülsmann, “The A Priori Foundations of Property Economics,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 51–57.
20.See note 4 and accompanying text, above.
22.See, in this connection, the quote from Adam Smith in note 6, above.
24.See Kinsella, “Thoughts on the Latecomer and Homesteading Ideas.
See also Louisiana Civil Code, Arts. 526, 531–32; Yiannopoulos, Property, §§ 255–79 and 347 et pass.
27.Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 12.
29.State laws and constitutional provisions often pay lip service to the existence of various personal and property rights, but then take it back by recognizing the right of the state to regulate or infringe the right so long as it is “by law” or “not arbitrary.” See, e.g., Constitution of Russia, Art. 25 (“The home shall be inviolable. No one shall have the right to get into a house against the will of those living there, except for the cases established by a federal law or by court decision”) and Art. 34 (“Everyone shall have the right to freely use his or her abilities and property for entrepreneurial or any other economic activity not prohibited by the law”); Constitution of Estonia, Art. 31 (“Estonian citizens shall have the right to engage in commercial activities and to form profit-making associations and leagues. The law may determine conditions and procedures for the exercise of this right”); Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 17 (“Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others… No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”); Art. 29(2) (“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society”).
30.Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 4th ed. (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), pp. 13–14, et pass.
31.For further discussion of the role of empathy in the adoption of libertarian grundnorms, see note 14, above.
32.Mises, Human Action, p. 14.
33.As Hoppe explains, “Justification — proof, conjecture, refutation — is argumentative justification.” Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, p. 384; also ibid, p. 413, and also Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 130 et pass.
34.For this reason Henry Hazlitt’s proposed name “cooperatism” for the freedom philosophy, has some appeal. See Henry Hazlitt, Foundations of Morality, p. xii.
35.See Stephan Kinsella, “What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist,” LewRockwell.com (Jan. 20, 2004); also Jan Narveson, “The Anarchist’s Case,” in Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

References: Art. 477
 Art. 25
 Art. 34
 Art. 31
 Art. 17
 Art. 29