The ability of the state to separate us from lawfully gained property violates inalienable rights. Further, it destabilizes the capitalist system because we have no assurance that our investment will not be confiscated by the majority.

But, then, I suspect certain political factions work daily toward destabilization of the capitalist system in order to further their own agenda.

The ability of the state to separate us from lawfully gained property violates inalienable rights. Further, it destabilizes the capitalist system because we have no assurance that our investment will not be confiscated by the majority.

But, then, I suspect certain political factions work daily toward destabilization of the capitalist system in order to further their own agenda.

Yet if you then inquire as to whether you have the right to remove your own kidney and sell it, they will say no – arguing that your choice to sell the kidney to someone privately is “playing God” and denies both justice (in which the “person who need it most” should have it) and respect to God (since your sale of the kidney will probably determine whether someone lives or dies, a function that should be relegated to God).

This is one of those areas where to engage with the real world and its objections to things, you have to realize . . .well, you know, the link. But you know, sometimes in America ya gotta wrestle with that religious belief Tocqueville described so well.

If we replace 'property rights' with 'X' we get a generically true statement about political philosophy. A political philosophy emphasizing 'X' has no distinctive libertarian context absent an account of the context of X. Indeed, it has no context at all!

So what is going on here beyond a definitional disagreement? If I may employ a barbarous lit-crit neologism, I fear that Will is trying to selectively 'problematize' bright line concepts. I'm sure there's some philosophy (let's call it Q-ism) out there that contents that a military draft doesn't meaningfully diminish personal liberty because the amount of liberty that can be rightly considered 'personal' is the function of the political process. I don't even find this that implausible. Yet most of us operating in the anglophone liberal tradition would instead say that Q-ism doesn't always privilege personal liberty. We can push the disagreement one step back if we want, but we should do so only if we *really think* that the meaning or justification of personal liberty is ambiguous in this way.

Thus the real question is: what does Will think the rights to property (including self-ownership?) are and how are they justified? I feel like Will is always on the verge of endorsing something like a purely consequentialist account of property rights, and then pulling away. But it seems in this case his justification of liberty may also be purely consequentialist.

Will, how am I doing so far?

It's true that property rights function much less as a *premise* in such theories; but they're not simply conclusions, either; they do work at a middle level, too, allowing even egalitarian liberals to coherently criticize theft, arbitrary and uncompensated expropriation, &c. Leftists don't usually use the language of property rights because they don't find it a particularly illuminating framework, but that doesn't mean that their claims can't be cashed out in those terms.

I think TGGP's point about exit is an important one (I'm influenced a great deal by Kukathas); I'll post on this later.

And theft doesn't violate property rights either, because in the thief's mind, the stuff should be his anyway.

These people don't have an interesting or alternate view of property rights. They have a silly, absurd, or even self-contradictory view of property rights. You're conceding to them a term that they have no business using, just as an astrologer has no business calling himself a scientist.