Background: Van Dun on Freedom versus Property and Hostile Encirclement.
From a twitter post:
The right way to look at it, IMO, is that people do and should want “freedom” and that is why they should want property rights–as the only means to achieve the end of genuine freedom. Just as Rand almost defined happiness as the emotion that comes from successful living, freedom is whatever you are able to enjoy when your property rights are respected. Property and justice must be more fundamental and freedom dependent and based on property rights and defined in terms of property rights.
Some libertarians think sometimes you have to choose between freedom and property and in that case you should sacrifice property for freedom. That is a confusion. Thus some libertarians are willing to limit rights (say, of corporations) by state regulation if those corporations are seen as limiting people’s “freedom”–e.g. you have libertarians calling for tech companies to lose their defamation immunity under the Communications Decency Act if they are “publishers” or interfere too much with “free speech”–on the grounds that they are “part of the state” and thus, I guess, it’s fair that the state should regulate them-even with threats of unjust defamation law. 1 In their hatred of “woke” corporations some libertarians are willing to throw out their principles and support the state regulating private companies! Plus most of them do not understand why defamation law is unjust and the state grant of immunity is not a privilege, it is the way the law ought to be in the first place 2 (just like limited liability for corporate shareholders is also not a privilege since they should not be liable for employee torts in the first place. 3
As more explicit example of someone siding with freedom over property, it it comes to that, see e.g. Frank van Dun’s chapter “Freedom and Property: Where They Conflict” in my book Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. I and others have criticized this. 4
The brilliant libertarian legal theorist @RandyEBarnett, if I am not misaken, seems to inching toward something somewhat like a version of Van Dun’s view, in his latest (and superb) book—one of my favorites in a long time 5, if I read him correctly. In the Afterword, in “What’s Next for Libertarianism?,” he writes:
If we are to be libertarians and not propertarians, however, libertarians need also to be concerned about threats to individual liberty now posed by privately owned companies. … when private companies become big enough and few enough, they may become as big a threat to individual liberty as the government itself. … Do the rights justly afforded to owners of private property apply in the same way when nongovernmental, privately owned providers of some essential services become so few and so pervasive as to resemble government institutions? … For example, what happens to individual liberty when most all our political speech takes place on nongovernment-owned “platforms”? … libertarian theory must take more seriously how liberty needs to be protected in the real world, from threats both governmental and nongovernmental, domestic and foreign.
- See KOL354 | CDA §230, Being “Part of the State,” Co-ownership, Causation, Defamation, with Nick Sinard and various posts on net neutrality here. [↩]
- Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property. [↩]
- Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, and Double Taxation. [↩]
- Van Dun on Freedom versus Property and Hostile Encirclement; Block, Van Dun on Freedom and Property: A Critique. [↩]
- A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. [↩]
