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 haven't read your article, but Brad Birzer (a cool prof at Hillsdale) talked it up on Facebook, so it must be good...
ReplyDelete"We can still use his term 'Gnostic' while acknowledging, as he did, its questionable historical connection to ancient Gnosticism."
ReplyDeleteYeah, that seems fair. I would drop the capital G, though.
By the day, I love the play on words in the title.
"By the day, I love the play on words in the title."
ReplyDeleteBut by night he hates it! :-)
In any case, you must compliment my esteemed editor, Dan McCarthy, on the title. My titles generally suck.
"I haven't read your article..."
ReplyDeleteBob, you read it months before it was published!