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...
Somewhat irrelevant comment, but the people on Alternative Right have taken the strange stand of adopting their opponent's language.
ReplyDeleteThe word "right wing" really doesn't mean anything, but is widely used by certain groups to paint a broad brush stroke across their disparate, unrelated opponents, from religious traditionalists to pro-NAFTA wonks to supporters of interventionist wars.
If you were one or the other of those things, you wouldn't necessarilly relegate your views to that of people with entirely different agendas. A pro-NAFTA wonk would call himself pro-NAFTA, not necessarilly "right wing" in the same sense as Pat Buchanan.
In the French National Assembly, they only concocted the word "left wing" to refer to the Jacobins who sat at the left side of the house. Everybody, who was scared of them, sat a little further away. Being scared of Jacobins does not mean being of another monolithic agenda. It just means you are scared of the Jacobins! Given the craziness of Jacobins, that could mean just about anybody.
It's like entire generations have grown up hearing their far more nuanced views being reduced to a part of a broader group, and hence those people can now only think of things in terms of their opponent's categorizations.
I have been told that the web site on which this article appears has become something of a White Nationalist site. That's too bad. In any case, that is not the position of the article to which I linked nor of its author.
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