Comments on: Jurisdiculous

By: Gil

Gil — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:15:51 +0000

On the other hand, what if invaders B invade and totally eliminate people A such that people A are outright extinct and the ownership lineage is severed? The Bs ought not to have any right to claim ownership but do people C have a right either? The people C might try to argue “well we didn't cause the loss of people A but since the Bs can't have the land either and since the land is now unowned so we get the land by default”?

By: Who dat?

Who dat? — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:02:39 +0000

"Given that personal property rights are all parasitic on the laws of states"

Personal property rights, in the form of owning one's own body, owning the food which one gathered, owning tools, owning a dwelling, owning a cornfield, owning a fishing weir or hunting stand, etc., existed for millenia before any state existed. It is the state which lives parasitically off of personal property rights, not the other way around.

Mind you, those who live in the belly of the state will tell you with a straight face that you owe everything them. It is not good for the business of being a parasite, to let one's true occupation be known.

By: Gil

Gil — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:15:51 +0000

By: Who dat?

Who dat? — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:02:39 +0000

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:26:13 +0000

I agree with you. It does strike me that the key phrase of the decision, “Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny,” is optional–I can imagine a court that did deny such a title. And it might even happen some day. But I don't think anything in the deep past will ever be revisited that way.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:55:38 +0000

You mean like the border between Iowa and Minnesota?

That's cool. We need bounded administrative jurisdictions. My argument is that the border between the U.S. and Mexico ought to be more like the border between Iowa and Minnesota. Different jurisdictions, different governments, different laws, but no one is keeping Iowans from moving to St. Paul.

By: AnotherBen

AnotherBen — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:49:47 +0000

By borders, I take it you mean immigration restrictions adhering to borders, and not borders that serve to delineate the physical space of a legal or administrative jurisdiction.

By: Matt C

Matt C — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:44:48 +0000

What about state borders?

By: RonCo

RonCo — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:42:32 +0000

An interesting if now-forgotten writer in this vein is Henry George, who wrote one of the most widely-read radical books of the late 19th C., Progress and Poverty (1879). George argued that land could not be legitimately considered private property (because property rights originate in labor and land is not the product of labor) and so insisted that all real property claims derive from, as Will puts it, “war, theft, and purchase from theives.” George was otherwise as laissez-faire as you could ask and wanted to abolish all forms of taxation except a confiscatory tax on land values (“the single tax”). There's a long tradition of this kind of thinking; Herbert Spencer flirted with it early in his career, and the French Physiocrats had similar ideas. George heavily influenced early libertarianism, mainly via Albert Jay Nock, as well as many of the early progressives. There's still a small Georgist movement.

George also theorized that depressions are mainly caused by speculative bubbles on land values. I'm surprised his work hasn't been resurrected a bit in the current crisis.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:26:58 +0000

MK, I I reject the Nozick- or Rothbard-type view, so this is no problem for me, though I think it would make sense for people with that kind of view to endorse your reason. I don't happen to think national territories are like property at all. That's what I was criticizing. To my mind, a system of property is justified by its generally beneficial effects. David Schmidtz's paper “The Institution of Property” makes the argument correctly. The system of borders has no such justification, and in fact it is generally pernicious. On consequentialist grounds, there's no reason to not loosen immigration restrictions. But even those with strong property-rights views should be able to see that borders have a morally questionable status.

By: mk

mk — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:12:54 +0000

Will, if
(1) the murkiness of tracing a group's moral claim to land ownership means that
(2) we should “redistribute” access to the land by erring on the side of an open immigration policy,
is it also true that
(1a) the murkiness of tracing an individual's moral claim to property ownership means that
(2a) we should “redistribute” access to the property by erring on the side of a vigorous redistributive welfare state?

By: Michael Drake

Michael Drake — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:34:58 +0000

No illegal immigration without illegal annexation!

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:17:33 +0000

To clarify, I'm not one of those who thinks you can't have legitimate title unless you can trace it back through a chain of voluntary transfers to a just original acquisition. I think that view is completely hopeless. My view is much more pragmatic.

By: Gil

Gil — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:03:00 +0000

The argument – your property isn't your property because it has a history of theft behind it therefore no one can own property – sounds as dodgy as a $9 note. If there was any truth that style of argument then theft couldn't be defined since there's no ownership ability anyway.

By: GU

GU — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:35:42 +0000

I would guess that many of the "natives" that had their land stolen by Europeans & Americans also took their land by immoral means. Let's not make the Noble Savage mistake and assume that the native Americans were peaceful, natural-rights-respecting innocents before the arrival of Europeans.

Is it OK to take land via immoral means from someone else (who also stole the land, or whose ancestors stole the land) if you then set up a mostly just state that for the most part prevents future land thefts (Kelo notwithstanding)?

Disclosure: I'm not a natural-rights libertarian and I don't mean to make a point about immigration policy with this comment. It's just that I think the "your ancestors stole this land ergo you have no claim to it" argument doesn't work because it is impossible to figure out who really deserves what.