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...
I'm not being sarcastic. I thought if a political body does this kind of thing, it's not mass murder, but war? I.e. you reject my classification of taxation as "theft," but are you OK with me calling war "mass murder"?
ReplyDeleteBob, no, war is not mass murder. For instance, if the Candadians were invading Brooklyn and I killed twenty of them, that would NOT be mass murder, but just killing in a war of defense. When, however, troops strike from the air, without offering any chance of surrender, at a bunch of travelers who they suspect might be the enemy, THAT's mass murder. (Probably third degree homicide, to be precise -- reckless.)
ReplyDeleteThis is, as I see it, a major problem with declaring "The State is Evil!": the government of Switzerland taking 20% of incomes for providing peaceful, very decent governance becomes no different than Mugabe slaughtering white Zimbabwean farmers and stealing their farms. Fighting a necessary war in a decent fashion becomes no different than fighting an unnecessary war in an indecent fashion.