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 think Walter Block is just a lost cause at this point. He has sailed beyond the event horizon of insanity.
ReplyDeleteBlock's own view doesn't fare much better than Rothbard's concerning the "right to abandon." What Block does (according to his 2004 paper) is merely narrow down the cases in which a parent can starve their child to death "justly" (in accordance with libertarianism). The parent would have to make known the fact they were giving up their ownership of the child and would not legitimately be able to use their property (such as the boundaries of their home) to block a path to reaching the child. However, if no adult was willing to take in the child, for whatever reason (lack of information, immoral character, impracticality, etc.), then we are still left with the absurd consequence of the child's death.
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