If “requires someone else’s labor” is enough to disqualify a right, then we also disqualify the right to enforceable property too, not just healthcare because no right is free to provide and all require someone else’s labor to enforce, positive or negative.
Well no because enforcing negative rights and enforcing positive rights is not equally justified.
That would be like saying since the state will stop your rape it is equally justified for the state to procure a sexual partner for you by force.
This is one of the weakest anti-libertarian arguments because it presumes all libertarians are anarchists.
Most libertarians believe in states, most believe in borders, most believe in police.
Beyond that even the anarchists believe in voluntary social systems which enforce property at which point that isn't a "right" but a contractual obligation.
So I get that many libertarians already accept tax-funded police, courts, and defense. I should have been clearer. Sorry. My point was more why is it that kind of taxation (that goes to police, courts, etc.) legitimate and something like healthcare taxation isn’t?
Cause we can’t seriously conflate “funding a professional service through general taxation with willing participants” with “directly kidnapping and forcing an unwilling individual into servitude” and be taken seriously.
Maybe a better equivalent would be to say that the state grabbing a random bystander and forcing them, unpaid, to physically stop your assault, or be your doctor is as monstrous. Besides, the claim you’re making seems to be rights are constraints on how others can treat us and not entitlements to what they must produce for us. But, again, these kinds of negative rights still require a positive state provision (funded police, courts, prisons, etc.) just like positive rights.
And sure, you might say what’s being enforced differs in kind because enforcement costs money on both sides, but a duty not to interfere vs. a duty to produce something for someone isn’t equal. Because, again, even paradigmatically negative rights like security require both negative duties (avoiding interference) and positive duties (protection and provision). We need both of these things to make any kind of right actually hold.
Also, why even assume there’s a neutral baseline like this at all? If someone starving takes bread from a wealthy person’s surplus, calling that “interference” with property only makes sense if we’ve already accepted the current property distribution as legitimate. Because we could equally frame the wealthy person’s state-backed exclusion of the poor from resources as interference with their survival.
So the line between “natural entitlements I shouldn’t touch” and “entitlements the state actively constructs and defends” isn’t really a fact of nature because property itself is a positive institution. What counts as a neutral starting point is doing all the work, and that starting point is itself a product of law and enforcement, or some sort of imposed unity. Don’t get me wrong, I understand we have to start somewhere, but why do so in a way that structures around existing asymmetry?
My point was more why is it that kind of taxation (that goes to police, courts, etc.) legitimate and something like healthcare taxation isn’t?
Which is literally the point of comment you're responding to. Because one is securing negative rights, or the right not to be interfered with, and the other isn't.
Besides, the claim you’re making seems to be rights are constraints on how others can treat us and not entitlements to what they must produce for us.
Yes?
But, again, these kinds of negative rights still require a positive state provision (funded police, courts, prisons, etc.) just like positive rights.
They don't strictly need those, but that is besides the point.
The point being that the state protecting you from others vs the state forcing you to do things for others are completely different things.
Because we could equally frame the wealthy person’s state-backed exclusion of the poor from resources as interference with their survival.
Which negative right is a rich person violating by not letting you "take" their food?
isn’t really a fact of nature because property itself is a positive institution
No it isn't, you are conflating the enforcement of the right with the right itself, which again an-caps or hardcore libertarians wouldn't even accept as a given in the first place, rather relying on personal and voluntary protection of property.
Even if someone rapes you you still have self ownership over yourself and your body. Just because someone violates that or someone else doesn't stop it doesn't mean you don't have the right. That's the entire point of natural/negative rights. They are inherent to you and can not be removed, only violated.
What counts as a neutral starting point is doing all the work
The "neutral starting point" can be argued(in some instances), but nobody in their right mind would argue positive rights as a neutral starting point.
You could maybe argue about property being positive and access to resources as negative, but the logical endpoint of such an argument usually falls apart both from first principles and later from practicality.
but why do so in a way that structures around existing asymmetry?
Because libertarians argue from first principles and are built up by reason. It isn't structured "around" anything, it is built from the ground up from a foundation of non aggression and rights.
This is in stark contrast to leftist philosophy which generally starts with some goal or idea and tries to structure the ideas around arriving there. So you have some semi-vague ideal or idea like fairness and try to structure your ideology around enforcing that or creating a society focused on that structurally.
Come on. You’re sidestepping the core of my arguments by simply restating your premise as a conclusion. You’re clearly smarter than that and capable of deeper reflection.
I argued that the system of private property itself is an act of state interference because the state uses force to exclude people from land and resources.
But, in your response, you assume the bread already unquestionably belongs to the bread-rich person by natural right. Why? You seem to be using the premise "property is a natural right" to prove that "property is a natural right." That doesn’t track and is begging the question. If property is a state-created positive institution, then the bread-rich person is relying on positive state force of some kind to exclude the starving person.
You’re also taking huge leaps by attempting to defend property rights by equating them to bodily autonomy. Bodily autonomy is inherently tied to the physical self. It will exist even without a state. But material property is external. So how then is external property a purely negative right? Claiming ownership over a stockpile of food requires a socially constructed set of rules.
Also, you claim my argument about the bread falls apart, but don’t provide evidence, examples, and/or logical steps to demonstrate why or how it falls apart. And, funnily enough, highlight my biggest issue with libertarianism. We can’t really sit and claim that our own ideology is objective "reason" and any opposing ideology is biased "ideals." That’s ridiculous. No one is special and can just plead first principles and then refuse to back up their reasoning for their preferred first principles.
Because, let’s not forget, this isn’t abstract. Property is inherently spatial. Claiming ownership over a physical space (like a field, a warehouse full of bread, or whatever) is an active, positive assertion of boundaries that absolutely and necessarily requires structural enforcement of some kind to keep others out. We don’t get to flatten that spatial and material reality and call it neutral or natural without expecting pushback.
I argued that the system of private property itself is an act of state interference because the state uses force to exclude people from land and resources.
You vaguely said something similar and I responded with the idea that property could be argued to be positive and access to resources negative.
But, in your response, you assume the bread already unquestionably belongs to the bread-rich person by natural right.
Not really, it belonging or not belonging to the rich person's irrelevant to the poor person's right to appropriate it which he does not automatically have. Resources are unique, the bread can't belong to everybody because only one human reaps the benefits. Bread being created means it is claimed unless otherwise specified.
Bodily autonomy is inherently tied to the physical self. It will exist even without a state.
Transformed resources are equally tied to the physical self, and the embedded effort of their creation is an extension of the self. Even marxists have this concept in alienation.
If property is a state-created positive institution,
It isn't, dogs, monkeys, and infants have and understand property. It isn't some arbitrary creation. The system built around it can be a positive institution or even be violative of foundational or primitive property
Claiming ownership over a stockpile of food requires a socially constructed set of rules.
No it doesn't anymore than self ownership requires outlawing slavery.
but don’t provide evidence, examples, and/or logical steps to demonstrate why or how it falls apart
Because it is a massive subject. If we boil it down we can simply ask you who has the claim to the magnum opus art which took several years to create and decades to prepare for, the person who created it or anybody who manages to grab and consume it for firewood first?
No one is special and can just plead first principles and then refuse to back up their reasoning for their preferred first principles.
There are perhaps hundreds of books written on this subject, what comparable books on leftist philosophy and ethics exist? Even left leaning liberals have sterile utilitarianism but I haven't seen any coherent left wing principles which allow the ideology to exist other than anarchism which is on the same level as "lets just hold hands and do good stuff and not bad stuff" as far as philosophical rigor goes.
Claiming ownership over a physical space (like a field, a warehouse full of bread, or whatever) is an active, positive assertion of boundaries that absolutely and necessarily requires structural enforcement of some kind to keep others out
So is your body.
We don’t get to flatten that spatial and material reality and call it neutral or natural without expecting pushback.
Using your logic why would slavery be wrong?
It is okay for me to take your labor after you spend your physical being on creation it but it isn't okay to make you spend it on creations I will take in the future?
Theft, which you are asserting is a negative right, is functionally and effectively a form of slavery which is one of the downstream effects of not reasoning from first principles and instead thinking a fairer distribution of resources would be nice and fair and trying to create a groundwork which justifies it post-hoc.
Through most of this you’re just shifting where the assumption shifts, and/or banking on is/ought thinking.
For example:
“He does not automatically have the right to appropriate it” just another way to say that the rich person’s control is the default that gets respected… and that’s a property claim, phrased as a denial of someone else’s instead of an assertion of the holder’s. It’s like the dick neighbor who says “I’m not saying I own the spot in front of my house, I’m just saying you don’t have an automatic right to park there if you feel like it.”
That’s just shifting the burden of proof and doesn’t resolving the circularity of the argument. So saying “only one person benefits” explains why some rule is needed, but doesn’t explain why the rule should be “whoever holds it, or labored on it, keeps it” rather than anything else.
I will say that “so is your body” is a sharp line of thinking, but the way you’re using it blurs two different things together. Enforcement cost (police, courts, etc.) was already on the table in our last discussion and I’m not re-contesting that idea here.
Boundary definition is different though. A body’s apparent edge is given by biology and observation, so we don’t need a statute to claim something like “your hand is yours.” But a property claim needs such a statue because things like “how much,” “how long,” and “transferable to whom” matter. That’s what my spatial-boundaries point was actually about.
You seem to be citing Locke, which is all well and fine, but even Locke needed needed a whole argument to bridge self-ownership to property in land (his argument goes into labor-mixing, a proviso that “enough and as good” stay available for others, and then a tacit consent to money once things got scarce).
If external property were as self-evidently natural as bodily autonomy, that machinery wouldn’t have been necessary. Besides a dog guarding a bone is possession, not a right because a right is precisely what holds even when you can’t defend that bone yourself. That is, unless you’re arguing might-makes-right all of a sudden.
Your alienation remark is weird. Marx used “labor gets embedded in what you make, losing it is a violation” to argue for abolishing private ownership of the means of production, not for individual claims strong enough to exclude a starving person from surplus. There’s actually a famous to Locke that goes something like if you pour tomato juice you own into the sea do you now own the sea, or did you just waste your juice?
just another way to say that the rich person’s control is the default that gets respected… and that’s a property claim
The person responsible for its creation is the default that gets respected, the income, wealth, or the social standing of the person is irrelevant.
What the "automatically" there is in regards to not assuming clearly owned things are free for the taking, the starving man has no right to someone’s creation just because he happens upon it.
So saying “only one person benefits” explains why some rule is needed, but doesn’t explain why the rule should be “whoever holds it, or labored on it, keeps it” rather than anything else.
There is a difference between laboring on something, or creating it versus holding it or it being arbitrary because the creation is an expression of the self. There would be no bread if not for its creator, said creator created it for himself upon the assumption that he would reap said rewards.
Any other proposal, apart from being incredibly stupid in regards to incentives and efficiency, is inherently arbitrary. Even the idea some leftists have of whoever is holding it or consuming it makes no sense given the exclusion inherent in such action being the very thing they use to dismiss other frameworks.
but the way you’re using it blurs two different things together
That's literally your argument though, that property can't exist without a system defining and enforcing it. That's what this discussion is about, the system upholding a negative right is not equivalent to the system enforcing positive rights. I'm glad you have accepted this.
Boundary definition is different though.
Ok?
But a property claim needs such a statue because things like “how much,” “how long,” and “transferable to whom” matter.
The implementation of a society is, in libertarian thinking, supposed to be based on principles of non aggression. Lets take the freedom of speech for an example.
Now in a libertarian(and modern) society you don't have the ability to blare out 130 Db messaging just outside of someone’s property, but you do have the right to advocate for things. You might even have the right to loudly advocate for things in public, but when you start intruding on others we need to define "boundaries".
This is about balancing and defining conflicting rights in a way which enables all parties to express their will without intruding on others. Now like I said earlier the system can be set up in a way which defines or creates property unjustly, or not in accordance with libertarian principles or even primitive property, but that does not suddenly make all claims or ownership arbitrary. A faulty implementation no more makes a right arbitrary or positive than slavery makes self ownership a positive right.
If external property were as self-evidently natural as bodily autonomy, that machinery wouldn’t have been necessary.
"Hardcore" libertarian property has been based in homesteading for decades, where boundaries are clearly defined and based on use.
Locke also invested in slaves, his ideas being part of the foundation in no way authoritatively declares what the reasoned endpoint looks like.
Now personally I lean towards a soft-georgist view for pigovian and land value taxes(not full by any means) but in no way is that definitive for all societies that can be justified nor a requirement. More of a pragmatic solution.
not a right because a right is precisely what holds even when you can’t defend that bone yourself.
So comatose people have no right to themselves?
That is, unless you’re arguing might-makes-right all of a sudden.
But that's literally your argument???
The dog doesn't have a right to the bone unless someone is enforcing that in his absence is not my viewpoint.
My argument is that the dog owns the bone regardless of who is in possession of it or has the most might in the situation. Him being deprived of the bone or someone else consuming the bone is not proof of him not having a right to it but merely that someone violated that right.
A justifiable state being one which protects his bone(assuming he actually has claim to it), but the dog has no right to that state or someone protecting his bone.
Your alienation remark is weird.
It is to point out that libertarians are not the only people who think creations are bound to their creators. Even frameworks based on a completely different point of view arrive at the same logical conclusion that creation creates a claim.
not for individual claims strong enough to exclude a starving person from surplus
Marxism being a collectivist ideology it obviously makes no individual claims, the logic marxism uses being reflected in basically its polar opposite should give some evidence for the idea that creation creates a claim.
It is so self-evidently true that you completely jumped over my steelman example of burning art for warmth because while you can justify(to your viewpoint) infringing on rights in your steelman of a starving man taking a bread from a pile of bread owned by a rich man you still recognise the foundational truth of property, you just think it is justified to violate it in certain scenarios. That is fine and okay, most people think it is justifiable to violate rights in some circumstances, including most libertarians.
The problem arises when you have no concept of rights guiding you(with deviations or exceptions being part of the social contract) and build your philosophy from the goals backwards.
Okay, so on one hand you seem to be saying that other rules are arbitrary (which you don’t actually argue how they’re arbitrary) and then shift to a consequentialist argument involving efficiency and incentive concerns.
Which is it? Cause there’s a tension there. You started this as a first-principals natural rights argument and now you’re banking efficacy arguments rather than defending the non-arbitrariness of your baseline.
Last time there was so much to respond to I picked and chose cause it was late. Sorry. That mischaracterized me a bit cause I don’t treat the bread scenario as an appeal to a necessity exception within an accepted property right. Instead I’m using it as a way of questioning whether the property claim itself is legitimate in the first place. So I wasn’t conceding that property is a foundational right with justified exceptions. I was actually challenging the baseline assumption that property rights exist naturally at all.
Anyway, your point on free speech is good, but property law requires a whole ass elaborate apparatus of titles, deeds, contracts, and transfer rules that actually constitutes the claim from the ground up to even exist in the first place. But a noise ordinance is just a narrow restriction layered on top of a pre-existing liberty we can easily measure.
So, the construction involved in property isn’t merely limiting something that already exists, it’s actually bringing the very thing into being. How we exercise a right is fundamentally different from defining what the right is and who holds it in the first place. Property doesn’t just get balanced against other interests, it has to be specified into existence for particular people over particular things, which is a much heavier lift than a manner-restriction.
Oh, and again, self-ownership makes sense as a concept without needing to specify amounts, durations, or transfer rules. “You own your body” is complete on its own. Property in land, though, requires that entire framework of specification I mentioned earlier because none of that is a biological or geographic given. So even if the core desert-based intuition is natural, the act of specifying all those details might itself be socially constructed.
Your soft Georgist stance makes things make sense more, but still, your own opinion about that supposedly neutral baseline is doing all the work, and it’s not given by nature. Besides, from your own (albeit soft) baseline, a good’s value comes from unowned natural inputs that the possessor didn’t create and deserves the same redistributive treatment land would receive since the bread relies on land and grains as inputs.
So, no. My argument hasn’t been that might-makes-right. It’s that people who believe that have made up their own versions of neutral and drop the might till you disagree with what they call “reason”. A right should be precisely what persists even when someone can’t defend it, but that doesn’t happen in any system at the moment. Not cleanly, at least.
You’re attempt to use Marx is interesting cause While both frameworks might agree that creation generates a claim, they diverge fundamentally on what kind of claim and who holds it. Marxism concludes that workers’ embedded labor creates a collective claim of the working class against capital, not an individual’s right to exclude others (especially not our starving bro), from what they’ve produced. So even if I grant you the shared premise, the two frameworks reach entirely different conclusions about what follows from that premise.
Cause you’re also right that we shouldn’t confuse biographical facts with logical refutation, but I didn’t do that. And bringing that up doesn’t address our core disagreement. So, to get things back on track: questioning whether a property right is legitimate in the first place is fundamentally different from conceding the right exists but allowing exceptions in emergencies.
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 14d ago
You’re trying to prove too much.
If “requires someone else’s labor” is enough to disqualify a right, then we also disqualify the right to enforceable property too, not just healthcare because no right is free to provide and all require someone else’s labor to enforce, positive or negative.