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...
He probably relied on Samuelson's textbook.
ReplyDeleteI loved Asimov's Foundation series when I first read it (7th grade, I think) but realize now that his outlook, as opposed to that of Heinlein, Banks, most other authors that I've enjoyed, is, if not statist, quite thoroughly of the opinion that society needs to be run. By someone. I have always found this surprising, given his personal history.
ReplyDeleteLook at the entire premise of the Foundation series, and try to imagine the person who wrote it pondering anarchism. Look at his stories of UNIVAC, where all our problems were solved because we finally had a computer that could run the economy and the government efficiently.
He probably thought that the USSR would struggle on, because he couldn't see that something could be fundamentally wrong with trying to run an economy in a top-down manner.
Right-o, Andy, and consider a very different take on much the same subject: Heinlien's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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