From X:
Esteemed mister Kinsella,
I regard you as an expert in libertarian legal theory and I gladly follow your work as it has helped me get a better understanding of liberty.
This document is an attempt at refuting the Non-aggression principle that was sent in a forum I am a part of. This is not my writing, so I don’t claim any grammatical errors. I have read it and I think it doesn’t really hold up, but I would be very thankful for your insights. If you would be so kind as to review it and give me your thoughts on it, it would help me examine if my thought process of thinking was correct.
Thank you in advance and kindest regards.
In liberty,
I append the document below.
I can only reply in brief. My first response is: how does he think socialism stops aliens from stealing the sun? This is like lifeboat scenarios which reject libertarianism because you can have lifeboat scenarios, e.g. where there are three people on a lifeboat and only enough food for two to survive. This is trotted out as some kind of proof that libertarianism is flawed because it can’t solve all these problems. But if the guys in the boat are socialists does this make food appear? Libertarianism says that property rights are way people can live in cooperation and peace and without conflict but this presupposes that peace is possible.
Think of it this way. The claim of libertarians is: you cannot argumentatively justify aggression (which is implied in by proposals to adopt socialism in any form) since peace is a necessary normative presupposition of all argumentative discourse. (Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide.)
This dude’s “rebuttal” appears to be: socialism (the aggression against private property claims) is justified because some space aliens might steal the sun some day. How does this justify socialism or aggression? This is not an argument that aggression/socialism is justified. And he just assumes (asserts) the sun is not owned. But the common law recognized downstream water rights from rivers etc. that prevented upstream users from excessive pollution etc. that impaired the usage rights of those downstream who had in effect homesteaded a partial usage or easement right. 1
We live in a world of scarcity. Conflict is possible. For people who want to life in peace, they adopt property rights to provide normative social support for the ability to possess and use scarce resources. 2 These property rights must be natural and just to be seen as just and accepted as fair if they can possibly do their job of helping to reduce conflict. This means that these norms must bolster and be compatible with natural usage and possession, i.e. with the obvious fact that human actors need to use resources, which means they need to first use or acquire—homestead—a previously unused (and unowned) resources. Once someone owns such a resource by original appropriation or occupation, he may get rid of it by abandoning it or by giving or selling it to someone else by contractual title transfer. 3
This is all actually very simple. If you want peace and prosperity people need to be able to use resources, including acquiring them. They need others to refrain from taking these resources from them, that is, to respect their property rights rooted in original appropriation and contractual title transfer. All this is implied by the nature of the world and scarcity, the nature of human action, the value for peace and prosperity and conflict avoidance on the part of most normal (non-sociopath) humans and also the values necessarily and implicitly presuppose by anyone ever engaged in peaceful, civilized, argumentative discourse about norms and political ethics. In other words, as suggested by the very title of my review essay of a Hoppe book, “The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism,” in my Legal Foundations of a Free Society, the morality of capitalism—that is, the non-aggression principle; that is, property rights rooted in original appropriation and contractual title transfer—is literally undeniable. That is, just as socialist calculation is impossible, 4 so is a normative, argumentative justification of socialism or aggression. No one can justify socialism, not even your gadfly friend.
Document from Socialist
–When Aliens steal the Sun cause it’s not Homesteaded – An Absurdity within the NAP–
Imagine aliens with advanced technology come to Earth’s solar system and take the sun away. Earth stops receiving sunlight and thus freezes to death.
This is not a violation of the NAP, because humanity does not own the sun. The sun is not homesteaded, until the aliens homestead it. Humanity owns the sunlight as it reaches the Earth, but owning the sunlight that reaches our planet does not mean we own it’s source.
–The Bird Cage Analogy–
Imagine there is an unowned cage. You place a light-bulb above the cage and turn it on. The light-bulb is your property.
Later, someone random third party brings their pet bird and puts it in the cage, and walks off. The bird is their property.
You come back and decide to turn your light-bulb off. You do.
The bird goes to sleep, gets cold, and dies in it’s sleep.
Did you violate the third party’s property rights over their pet bird? No, because withholding support is not the same as physical violation.
From this we can derive that if the sun was owned by aliens previously, they would have a right to turn the sun off.
Now imagine the aliens simply homestead the unowned sun. Does that actually change the situation at all? What if the light-bulb on the cage is unowned to begin with, and you simply homestead it by changing the bulb, and then later turn it off? Does that suddenly become aggression?
What if the bird owner abandoned the bird, and we assume aggression against animals is itself wrong? Does that turn this into a violation of the NAP? No?
The answer to all of this is no under the NAP. Dependency does not and can not grant entitlement. It isn’t your fault the bird is in the cage, if you homestead the light-bulb it’s yours, end of story.
–But stopping Sunlight from reaching Earth causes Destruction of Property–
Causal links between an action and a destructive outcome are only valid if you are directly causing a destructive outcome, in an invasive way. Trespass, not mere withholding of resources in transit.
For example, polluting a river next to a village is argued to be aggression because you’re sending pollutants into the village without their consent.
With trying to stop sunlight from reaching Earth, only messing with sunlight before it’s reached Earth, you aren’t aggressing because no foreign matter trespasses property borders, there is no invasion. This is a mere withholding of a Natural Input.
This does not constitute invasion, same as slowly draining a large unowned body of water. If others like using it from time to time but nobody claims ownership, you can’t argue aggression. Nobody is entitled to an unowned body of water. The same applies to the sun.
Imagine Alice likes going to an unowned forest once a week and eating berries from it. Now imagine Gerald homesteads and cuts down the forest. Now Alice can no longer get her berries. Aggression? No.
Now imagine Alice also used the berries she collected to power a machine that made her garden grow, and without the berries her factory will stop functioning and her garden will die.
Does this suddenly make it aggression since now her property’s integrity is linked to the berries? Of course not. She has no entitlement to the berries.
–Entitlement through a Right to Easement, a Pattern of Use–
Perhaps humans own the sunlight and have a right to easement of the sun, they don’t own the sun but they have partial homesteading of the sun due to continuous use of the sunlight from it.
By this logic, the hobo’s continuous, visible harvesting of fallen berries constitutes homesteading of the recurring yield itself as a pattern of use. Not the bushes themselves, but the recurring yield.
This is a very vague assertion though, and feels kind of like Squatter’s Rights being implicitly snuck in, continuous use of a house doesn’t necessitate a right over the house in and of itself, right?
Imagine Alice again, she likes going to an unowned forest once a week and eating berries from it. Gerald homesteads and cuts down the forest. Is this aggression or not? Surely not, yet Alice has a pattern of use in connection to the forest, therefore Squatter’s Rig- I mean uh, a right to the continued pattern of use of the forest?
–But the Natural State of Humanity is to have access to Sunlight–
Imagine a hobo who lives on an island. The hobo builds a house, the house is his property as he homesteaded it. He lives off of berries from berry bushes, but he never interacts with the bushes, he merely picks up berries off the ground that fall off the bushes.
The berry bushes should thus be unowned, dependency does not create entitlement. If Johnny comes to the island and starts homesteading and uprooting the bushes, this should not qualify as aggression because the bushes are unowned and the hobo has no entitlement to them.
Hobo relies on berries fallen off bush,
Humanity relies on sunlight from sun randomly reaching their planet,
There is no valid difference here. The only difference is that humans are born into relying on the sun, the “natural conditions”. This doesn’t hold up because you can argue the hobo has the natural condition of having access to the berries, as he was born on the island. What defines natural?
Dependency should not grant entitlement, that contradicts the NAP.
- See, e.g., John Baden and Richard Stroup, “Saving the Wilderness: A Radical Proposal,” Reason (July 1981); also Murray N. Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” in Economic Controversies (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Of Common, Public, and Private Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,” Part III, in The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline, 2d. ed (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2021) (discussing the acquisition or homesteading of group usage easements); Hope Babcock Elizabeth Brubaker David Schoenbrod Bruce Yandle Michael Krauss, Moderator, “The Common Law Approach to Pollution Prevention: A Roundtable Discussion“; Ronald Bailey, “Does the Colorado River Have Rights?,” Reason (9.22.2017); Terry L. Anderson, “Mismanaging the Commons,” Reason (September 1982). AI points me to these too, but no time to verify or look for links: Walter Block, “Pollution and Property Rights,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies (1977), and “Environmentalism and Economic Freedom,” Journal of Business Ethics (1990); Roy Cordato, “Pollution, Property Rights, and Liability” Cato Journal (1992) and “Market-Based Environmentalism and the Limits of Government Regulation”; and Terry Anderson & Donald Leal, Free Market Environmentalism (Pacific Research Institute, 1991). [↩]
- On Property Rights in Superabundant Bananas and Property Rights as Normative Support for Possession. [↩]
- “The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract. [↩]
- The Great Mises-Hayek Dehomogenization/Economic Calculation Debate. [↩]
