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...
Woody, your remark has a good point - that markets can help to close externalities - but of course that doesn't really make them go completely away, because much of the land and most of the wildlife are "public" and thus ineffectively owned.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of something I've seen recently about the bushtailed possums that are wreaking havok in NZ (which has no native mammalian predators other than a few bats): http://www.perc.org/articles/article1066.php