Related
- Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)
- 20: Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, p. 543 n.36; p. 547
- Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, p. 410
- Michael Makovi, “The ‘Self-Defeating Morality’ of the Lockean Proviso,” Homo Oeconomicus 32, no. 2 (2015): 235–74
- 22: The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism, p. 591, n.10
- The Blockean Proviso (Sep. 11, 2007)
- Libertarian Answer Man: What if all the land is already homesteaded?
- 20: Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, p. 543 n.36; p. 547
Michael Makovi, “The ‘Self-Defeating Morality’ of the Lockean Proviso,” Homo Oeconomicus 32(2) (2015): 235–74:
Locke’s theory of appropriation includes the “Lockean Proviso,” that one may appropriate ownerless resources only if one leaves enough for others. The Proviso is normative and obviously may be rejected on normative grounds. But it is less obvious that it may have to be rejected for positive reasons. According to Hoppe, private property is a means for minimizing social conflict under conditions of scarcity. But the Lockean Proviso would actually exacerbate social conflict. According to Demsetz, property emerges precisely when scarcity arises and there is not enough left for everyone. Accordingly, the Lockean Proviso may be logically incompatible with the very purposes of the establishment of property. Or the Proviso may constitute what Derek Parfit calls “self-defeating morality.” Several adaptations of the Proviso – including Nozick’s – are rejected as well, based on the impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility and the problem of economic calculation.]
See also these insights from philosopher David Schmidtz, 1 as summarized in Andrew P. Morriss, “The Economics of Property Rights,” FEE (March 1, 2007):
This critical feature of property rights—that they permit trade and so permit the creation of wealth—is central to the economic case for them. It provides the solution to some thorny philosophical issues as well. Philosopher David Schmidtz suggests that the solution to the problem of the Lockean Proviso—the requirement that “enough and as good” be left for others in a just system that includes original appropriation—is that allowing the original appropriation produces more for those who come after by permitting trade to take place. In his essay “The Institution of Property,” Schmidtz points out that “Philosophers are taught to say, in effect, that original appropriators got the good stuff for free. We have to pay for ugly leftovers. But in truth, original appropriation benefits latecomers far more than it benefits original appropriators. Original appropriation is a cornucopia of wealth, but mainly for latecomers. The people who got here first never dreamt of things we latecomers take for granted.” 2
Re Schmitz: I like how even though he is a mainstreamer, he recognizes that you don’t violate when you take unowned property—there is no owner, so no one to complain, a point emphasized, I think, by Hoppe, maybe de Jasay. And that it’s not unfair that earlier people homestead all the land, leaving none for future generations—those in the future benefit from past homesteading activity.
Re the former point: see On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library:
For someone to object to my ownership of a plot of land is for them to assert a property right in the land. For only an owner of the resource has a ground for objecting to my use of it. But if they claim to own it, they have to have a basis. Yet per assumption, I was the first owner or user, not them. So I have a better claim to the land. This is the essential flaw in the state ownership of national forests and other undeveloped resources: state agents have not used or appropriated the resource, they have not done anything to establish a legitimate claim to the land (and I would argue no state ever can, since by its nature it is criminal, so that any property rights it ever acquires, either by contract, expropriation, or even homesteading, are owed as restitution to the state’s victims), yet they prevent others from homesteading the resource. They are acting as the owner even though they are not a legitimate owner. (Legal Foundations of a Free Society, ch. 23, text at note 31.)
From Mises blog:
Down with the Lockean Proviso
March 13, 2009 2:35 PM by Stephan Kinsella | Other posts by Stephan Kinsella | Comments (7)
My attention was recently called to Tibor Machan’s paper “Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso” (working paper version), which will be in his book The Promise of Liberty (Lexington, 2009). As noted in the Abstract, the paper argues as follows:
Locke’s defense of private property rights includes what is called a proviso—”the Lockean proviso”—and some have argued that in terms of it the right to private property can have various exceptions and it may not even be unjust to redistribute wealth that is privately owned. I argue that this cannot be right because it would imply that one’s right to life could also have various exceptions, so anyone’s life (and labor) could be subject to conscription if some would need it badly enough. Since this could amount to enslavement and involuntary servitude, it would be morally and legally unacceptable.
Other libertarian criticisms of the Lockean Proviso include Rothbard, ch. 29 of The Ethics of Liberty; Hoppe, p. 410 et pass. of The Economics and Ethics of Private Property; and de Jasay, p. 188 and 195 of Against Politics (also discussed on p. 91 in my review thereof).
See also my own critique of what I call Walter Block’s “Blockean Proviso“. As I note there, the Lockean Proviso says that you may homestead an unowned good but only if “enough and as good” is left for others—that is, if you don’t harm them by your homesteading action by making it more difficult for them to have a similar opportunity to homestead some goods of that type. Both Block and I would reject this. But the Blockean Proviso would say that you can only homestead property that is a potential means of access to other unowned resource so long as enough and as good access to the unowned resource remains available!
Comments (7)
- See also The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism (Jason Brennan, David Schmidtz & Bas van der Vossen, eds., 2017). [↩]
- Quoting David Schmidtz, “The Institution of Property,” Social Philosophy and Policy 11(02) (June 1994): 42–62; revised version included in The Common Law and the Environment: Rethinking the Statutory Basis for Modern Environment Law, Roger E. Meiners and Andrew P. Morriss, eds. (1999). [↩]
Published: March 13, 2009 4:15 PM
Published: March 13, 2009 10:28 PM
“might makes right” – which tends to minimize human action.”you mean it tends to minimize productive, rather than re-distributive human action? or human action in general?
Published: March 13, 2009 11:28 PM
Published: March 14, 2009 12:22 AM
*unless you’re stealing of course
Published: March 14, 2009 9:31 AM
Actually, Nozick doesn’t mean it just to apply in the state of nature. In a footnote to page 55 of ASU he suggests that the proviso may apply to prohibiting acquiring property so as to trap somebody in their home (by acquiring the property around the person’s house). The implication of those, though, is that the proviso is not simply about “the principles of justice in acquisition,” but also about “the principles of justice in transfer,” since it would allow a third party to impose conditions upon the terms by which one person sell’s their land to another. In the end, though, it means that, by allowing the proviso, Nozick’s theory of justicie ceases to be a historical one and beomes a patterned theory. It also seems not conform to a “will” or “choice theory of rights,” making it open to incompossibilities of rights or duties.
Published: March 16, 2009 12:02 PM
Published: March 16, 2009 1:04 PM