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...
In all honesty, in my travels I was often disappointed that too many of the things from home were present in foreign lands (I avoided those like the plague).
ReplyDeleteI was always the guy that went out to taste the regional cuisine in dodgy venues, I was the guy that paid my taxi driver a good buck to give me the inside-view tour (I would also keep a good driver on retainer), and I always recognized that I was a foreigner in their land.
I guess that there is quite a difference between a tourist and a traveler... a traveler treats each person and each day as it comes without presupposition or expectation, no matter where he is. He enjoys the possibility of experiencing something completely foreign and unknown to him. He relinquishes himself to the strange world that surrounds him rather than seek solace in the sameness of his own world.
I certainly have a great deal to learn from life, but life (in my opinion) is not to seek the seclusion of your own beliefs and culture, it is the "reckless abandon" to experience a life different from your own. Only then do you see the common threads that bind us all.
I am not talking about politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc; I am talking about just being an everyday, ordinary human. Surprisingly, many people find it difficult to do that.