In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Good article Gene. I might just add it to my Austrian II reading list. In particular I liked the thing about no experiment being able to prove the utility of conducting experiments. And the Lewis Carrol thing was good.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me, I once checked that book out full of excitement, but it was a disappointment. I thought it was more silly than incredibly deep. It's definitely deep in the 365-1 example you mention, but I thought that was more the exception. Should I give it another try?