Should I be taking this as a threat? — Virgo Avalytikh

No. I’m trying to help you.

Furthermore, perhaps I grant you that the resources of the rich are merely of higher quality. Why do you think you are entitled to more property and higher quality? — Noah Te Stroete

You haven't understood the point I was making. My point is that the source of (at least this particular kind of) inequality is the State itself. 'Downtroddenness' is not owing to free exchange and enterprise, but the coercion which the State implements.

No. I’m trying to help you. — Noah Te Stroete

How, exactly?

You haven't understood the point I was making. My point is that the source of (at least this particular kind of) inequality is the State itself. 'Downtroddenness' is not owing to free exchange and enterprise, but the coercion which the State implements. — Virgo Avalytikh

Property would have to be redistributed equitably before ancap would succeed. Perhaps I grant you that the State is the cause of inequality. But how do we start over?

How, exactly? — Virgo Avalytikh

To get you to think about what I said above.

Property would have to be redistributed equitably before ancap would succeed. Perhaps I grant you that the State is the cause of inequality. But how do we start over? — Noah Te Stroete

There is no need to 'start over'. When you successfully repel a thief from your home, or incapacitate a mugger, you needn't step back and ask yourself 'How now shall we organise society?' 'Society' is what happens when we don't aggress against one another and invade one another's property. The State will not be abolished through an overnight coup, from which we will have to wait for the dust to settle so that we can then rebuild civilisation. In some ways the State has grown, and in other ways the State has been totally out-manoeuvred by free enterprise, and shown to be the lumbering, ineffectual brute that it is (technology and the internet, especially, have contributed to this). If there is an end to the State, it will be through successive out-maneouverings by more competent service-providers, and in this sense the trajectory is good. We need not have a structural vision in our heads to anticipate the occurrence of such.

If it it simply natural evolution, then what is the need for convincing us through argument? You’ll have to excuse me if I find your motives suspect. Also, you don’t understand people.

Society is not the State. States, as coercive institutions, are precisely anti-social in their working. The fact is, those whom you identify as 'downtrodden' are downtrodden on the State's watch. But I am sure, in your mind, it will be be laissez faire which receives the blame. — Virgo Avalytikh

It would be hard to say that free markets exist when the state has always been involved, no? You're positing "markets" as some imaginary arrangement which has never existed:

If people are free from coercive invasion, both in their persons and their property, then their interactions will be confined to those that are peaceful and voluntary. 'Market' is just a description of what this would look like, — Virgo Avalytikh

If the books you have referenced are consistent with your use of market; as an economic structure free from coercion; they are talking about an economic system which has never existed. I repeat, you are talking about something which has never existed.

"The free market" is an imagining that has long echoed through the rooms of ivory towers, and prophets whisper to this day that it shall come and save us from ourselves. It is a God, a perfect ideal entity, and all that humans do is found wanting in the light of its reflected glory, cast from the gold adorning its invisible hand.

We have fallen from the light of this perfection, like the prophet Friedman wrote, all our ills are rooted in our deviation from the perfect form of The Free Market. Each of us stands like Eve, tempted from the garden of economic freedom by the devil of social organisation and democratic legislative bodies; that which we call the State. The Free Market punished humanity, as the apple was not Eve's to take, the first violence done unto humanity was the violation of the first property right.

Why do we suffer? For we have sinned. Exercising the sacred faculty of our inviolable wills to take that which is not ours. All human pains are rooted in that which separated us from The Free Market.

The prophet Friedman, always the rebel, would give the devil precisely his due. The irony of the human condition was that to see the face of God and live together in accordance with her Holy form, we must entrust only what is necessary for God to manifest in our reality to the bureaucratic authority of the Devil. Humanity is a bridge tethered between light and darkness, Free Market and State, and we twist precariously in the wind.

The heathen investors believe it to be the breath of animal spirits, that the wind too is a whisper of God, but we know it to be the exercise of individual Will, that the essence of the Free Market is within us as our soul.

A load of horseshit really. It's just theology, "explaining" what happens to us with with reference to the edicts of gods which never existed.

It's not inevitable. Nuclear States might eliminate the human race before it happens. It is 'natural', in the sense that there is a tendency for poorer and less efficient service-providers to be out-performed by superior and more efficient service-providers. Violence, which is the State's modus operandi, is also very inefficient and expensive. The world's monetary systems and the Welfare State, for instance, cannot endure in perpetuity. But that is only one avenue of the road away from serfdom. Another important avenue is education. Changing minds and outlooks is an equally important ingredient. Students of economics tend, for instance, to be more economically liberal (in the good sense) than your average person, which shows the benefits of education in changing minds. If every voter were required to pass a course in economics before they were allowed to vote, there would be a tendency towards libertarianism (not that this is a proposal of mine).

:brow:

I simply find your premises to be flat out false. Thus, I cannot arrive at your conclusion. See what @fdrake wrote above.

Furthermore, there is more than enough food to feed the world, and healthcare is not a non-renewable resource. Why should profits be involved in them?

'Society' is what happens when we don't aggress against one another and invade one another's property. — Virgo Avalytikh

And lo, the prophet spake: "Let it be known that the human will, of sovereign import and power, seeks accord with its other as they are alike in essence, flowing from the ownership of our bodies and of things, the State will impose themselves upon you and the property which flows from your essence, and rob you of the power of violence which is your own. The statist will tell you that commercial private property is a social arrangement that arose contingently in the history of economic development after merchants leveraged their wealth to obtain other forms of power, but more truly it is the expression of the inviolable sanctity of our wills!"

In other words, why not make food production and healthcare not-for-profit? Farmers and doctors could still be paid well through State subsidies, and the costs to the consumer would go down because the corporations (factory farm corporations and health insurance companies) wouldn’t be getting bloated with profits.

And lo, the prophet spake: "Let it be known that the human will, of sovereign import and power, seeks accord with its other as they are alike in essence, flowing from the ownership of our bodies and of things, the State will impose themselves upon you and the property which flows from your essence, and rob you of the power of violence which is your own. The statist will tell you that commercial private property is a social arrangement that arose contingently in the history of economic development after merchants leveraged their wealth to obtain other forms of power, but more truly it is the expression of the inviolable sanctity of our wills!" — fdrake

:100:

We just burned all the books that talk about how private property became a thing. How it violates a previous state of unrestricted (or far less restricted) access and must have its ownership strongly enforced. This is the real history of private property; it was imposed on the unwilling to turn a profit on what was once theirs. Commercial private property arises as part of a victory against those who it dispossesses, and only after became embodied in legal codes in a more polite form; only those who had private property or benefitted from its acquisition had a hand in setting up how it worked. As a social process, it has always been rigged, a means of attaching value to land that was acquired by force, and owning that which comes from it.

Should I take it that we're not using arguments anymore? Is that what this is?

We just burned all the books that talk about how private property became a thing. How it violates a previous state of unrestricted (or far less restricted) access and must have its ownership strongly enforced. This is the real history of private property; it was imposed on the unwilling to turn a profit on what was once theirs. Commercial private property arises as part of a victory against those who it dispossesses, and only after became embodied in legal codes in a more polite form; only those who had private property or benefitted from its acquisition had a hand in setting up how it worked. As a social process, it has always been rigged, a means of attaching value to land that was acquired by force, and owning that which comes from it. — fdrake

It seems obvious to us with thinking brains. I think Virgo has an axe to grind. Either that or she is delusional.

Should I take it that we're not using arguments anymore? Is that what this is? — Virgo Avalytikh

Are you daft? He’s tearing apart your premises.

Well, it's a shame. I thought we were having a good discussion.

Deleted the post since I wanted to explain why I wrote the parable, I thought it would be clear.



It's the evening and I decided to write down a parable rather than writing another essay.

I could've made the post more along the lines of:

(1) If a free market is only a stipulated idea, it has never existed.
(2) Therefore it has no causal powers.
(3) Therefore deviation from it is impossible.
(4) Therefore attributing blame to the state for the consequences of deviating from it is impossible.

"If only we didn't deviate from the Free Market by having a State (with such and such properties, then..."

Then pointed out the analogy:

(1) If God is only a stipulated idea, it has never existed.
(2) Therefore it has no causal powers.
(3) Therefore it can make no edicts.
(4) Therefore deviation from its will is impossible.
(5) Therefore attributing blame to people for the consequences of deviating from it is impossible.

"If only we didn't split ourselves from God by having free will (and doing such and such), then..."

And then pointed out that this is the reverse of a religious doctrine:

(1) God existed in our stipulated form.
(2) Therefore God made edicts.
(3) Therefore deviating from those edicts is possible.
(4) Therefore we can attribute blame to people for deviating from those edicts.

It was therefore easy to construe your position in terms of the religious doctrine. The parallels do not end there.

Going from (3) to (4) often involves "free will", which is "agency" in our discussion. An ideal system having "compossible rights" articulated in terms of "private property" and a "non-aggression principle" comes down to "in an ideal social system we cannot violate another's agency" and "violating another's agency only makes sense in terms of violating commercial property rights". These stipulations together give "the only way we can violate another's agency is by violating their property rights" - so Eve was punished for taking an apple which wasn't hers. This makes coercion attributable to some devil like The State which comes into the picture against humanity because private property rights are stipulated as intimately tied to agency. The ultimate situation of freedom is stipulated in your world as The Free Market, which is entirely non-coercive, and coercion becomes attributed solely to the State.

In that regard, in your view, humans are tied between two abstractions, a force of coercion called The State and a force of freedom called The Free Market, neither of which has ever existed (as aggregates or as individuals, as I'm sure you'll agree), but humanity feels the effects of deviating from freedom through the always illegitimate actions of the State. We feel these effects apparently as inefficiencies and needless poverty, prices far above the (always allegedly cheap) "true competitive rate", monopolies etc...



This is exactly the same as deviating from the edicts of God, which has never existed, but still blaming our sufferings on deviating from the edicts. People however are tempted to use the witchcraft of The State, as in regulatory capture or the collective bargaining of unions, to do things which they otherwise wouldn't and (by definition) violate people's agency, through taxes, redistributive measures etc.

But it's a far more effective rhetorical strategy to portray it as a parable. Considering your model of The State and your model of The Free Market have never existed, the comparison is pretty strong.

It must explain convincingly how it is that the State’s power is restrained, so as to prevent a tendency towards totalitarianism. — Virgo Avalytikh

The power of the State rests much less on its monopoly on the use of force than on its ability to manipulate its citizens into believing in the legitimacy of its action. Therefore, its stronghold on media and schools is actually much more important than its police force or its army.

In other words, the State's power rests on the fact that people actually believe what its representatives say. Restricting the State's power requires making people disbelieve the official State narrative and any of its claims to legitimacy.

The more that people are suspicious of the State's narrative, the freer that they will become. It starts by assuming that everything that the State or any of its representatives says, is a lie. All that remains to be done, time permitting, is to figure out why it is a lie.

For example, the concept of "law-abiding, tax-paying citizen". It is a manipulative lie. You should do exactly the opposite. Whenever you can, do not abide their self-invented laws, and do not pay their taxes. Why? You will discover the reason for that later on, time permitting. Start by rejecting the very concept already.

Now that we have evolved from a "television State" to an "internet State" the question becomes whether people in the "internet State" have finally become less gullible and manipulable than before?

I am not sure about that. In the end, it is largely the same people, and they largely still believe to their own detriment in the very same lies.

I feel like I butt heads with you too much. That is my shortcoming, not yours. I just have strong feelings about such things, but I shouldn’t get so emotional, especially in a philosophy forum.

(1) If a free market is only a stipulated idea, it has never existed.
(2) Therefore it has no causal powers.
(3) Therefore deviation from it is impossible.
(4) Therefore attributing blame to the state for the consequences of deviating from it is impossible.

"If only we didn't deviate from the Free Market by having a State (with such and such properties, then..." — fdrake

The main problem is that you are hypostatising or reifying the free market, as though it were presented as a kind of subsistent ‘thing’. But it does not have subsistence. It is only an abstraction, just as ‘the State’ is an abstraction: there is really no such entity as a ‘State’, only persons who act coercively, and whom we identify as ‘governmental’. To set up the discussion as one of ‘free market versus State’ is really a red herring, and does not get to the heart of the issue. The relevant distinction is between the kind of human activity which is peaceful, which does not invade another’s person or property, and the kind of human activity which is aggressive, which initiates force against persons and invades their property.

When we speak of the ‘free market’, all that is intended is the aggregation of exchanges between persons, where this process is not invaded by an aggressor. There is nothing esoteric or abstruse about this, as you suggest in speaking of ivory towers. Your argument seems to amount to this: because such a state of affairs has never obtained, it is senseless to speak of departing from it, and therefore we cannot blame the departure from it on anything in particular, including the State. But this really does not amount to much, philosophically.

The free market and the State are not two ‘things’ to be compared. To say that markets have never been unaccompanied by the State is merely to say that the free associations between persons have always been invaded by aggressors. So what? Does this mean that aggression is not objectionable? Does it mean that peaceful activity must always be accompanied by coercive invasion? Of course not: none of this is implied, logically. States do not exist for the good of ‘us’. Their perdurance is not owing to their practical indispensability, their inevitability, or because of the good which they produce. They are agencies of monopolised coercion, which have an interest in their own self-preservation.

These stipulations together give "the only way we can violate another's agency is by violating their property rights" - so Eve was punished for taking an apple which wasn't hers. This makes coercion attributable to some devil like The State which comes into the picture against humanity because private property rights are stipulated as intimately tied to agency. The ultimate situation of freedom is stipulated in your world as The Free Market, which is entirely non-coercive, and coercion becomes attributed solely to the State. — fdrake

Just as with the free market, there is nothing esoteric or abstruse about the State. The State, and all its subsidiary instruments, is composed of persons, and these persons engage in activities which we would identify as clearly criminal if any other persons were to act similarly. You are quite mistaken if you think that the libertarian considers the State to be the sole author of aggression. I am not sure where you have got this idea. The non-aggression principle opposes the initiation of force and the invasion of private property, and so all of the activities which involve such behavior are implicated. The reason why the State receives such attention is because the State has successfully persuaded the vast majority of persons of its necessity, its inevitability, its nobility, and so on. In some cases, it has even convinced people that it really is them! A perverse notion.

J.R.R. Tolkien put it best, in a letter to his son who was about to be sent his death by his government:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning
abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would
arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England
and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of
recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it
would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an [sic.] and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to
clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.

I much prefer the kind of direct, philosophical engagement you were producing before. Little is gained from analogising my arguments to religious dogma, or translating my arguments into vocabulary of which I have not made use (like ‘free will’). My arguments are what they are. You can either engage with them, as you were before, or play around with them, as you are doing now.

Workers' rights had to be established because too many 'employers' treated workers horribly. You are suggesting that we go back to that, or at the very least, you're advocating the same situation which led up to the requirement for workers' rights.

I much prefer the kind of direct, philosophical engagement you were producing before. Little is gained from analogising my arguments to religious dogma, or translating my arguments into vocabulary of which I have not made use (like ‘free will’). My arguments are what they are. You can either engage with them, as you were before, or play around with them, as you are doing now. — Virgo Avalytikh

Awww ok then. I was hoping that we might have a parable off.

I'm going to assume that you see tax as coercive. Coercive because a government takes stuff off people. Let's formulate that as an argument. Let's also brush aside the issue of a government having its own sense of agency, since you seem to be able to understand it as a shorthand.

(A1) If an agent A deprives an agent B of access to what they own, the depriving action is coercive.
(A2) Governments deprive agents of a portion of their profits or earnings through tax.
(A3) That action is coercive.

The argument as it stands is invalid, it needs an additional premise.

(A2a) An agent owns the portion of their profits or earnings which a government takes.

Unfortunately, that premise is false. The reason governments (at least the UK, I would assume it's the same for most countries with a tax system) can collect on tax is because they already own that portion of earnings or profits. How do they own it? They are legally stipulated to, in the laws that define who owns what. So in order for (2a) to be true and make the argument go through (assuming the other premises), people would have to own the taxed portion of earnings or profits in some other sense. An interesting implication of that argument is:

(B1) If an agent A deprives an agent B of access to what they own, the depriving action is coercive.
(B2) An agent deprives their government of a portion of their profits or earnings by not paying tax.
(B2a) Governments own that taxed portion of earnings.
(B3) That action is coercive.

While (A2a) is false, (B2a) is true. The validity of the first argument entails the validity of the second, so not paying tax is coercive. To make a convincing argument, there needs to be a sense of ownership distinct from the "mere" legal one that makes (A2a) true but (B2a) false.

If we add in the non-aggression principle, "we ought not do that which is coercive", we can conclude that "we ought to pay our tax". (this is because not(pay tax) is coercive, if we ought not (not pay tax), we ought pay tax).

Given that ownership (who owns what and on what basis) is necessarily determined by social codes, IE that ownership is determined by the (more or less codified) rules of ownership in a society, forcing (A2a) to be true and (B2a) to be false looks to require a standard of ownership which is not based upon adhering to social customs.

We're left with the conclusion that tax is not coercive, and that refusing to pay tax is. Unless you give an account of ownership rights that hold independently of social custom.

The main thrust here is to get you to say where property rights come from, and to address the contingent character of coercion within a social form based on the rules of ownership it follows.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Now let's return to the argument about individuals and states; that individuals exist but states merely subsist.

The free market and the State are not two ‘things’ to be compared. To say that markets have never been unaccompanied by the State is merely to say that the free associations between persons have always been invaded by aggressors. So what? Does this mean that aggression is not objectionable? Does it mean that peaceful activity must always be accompanied by coercive invasion? Of course not: none of this is implied, logically. States do not exist for the good of ‘us’. Their perdurance is not owing to their practical indispensability, their inevitability, or because of the good which they produce. They are agencies of monopolised coercion, which have an interest in their own self-preservation. — Virgo Avalytikh

If neither free markets nor the state have existed in the sense you describe them, they are useless as analytic categories - "the State is lumbering and inefficient" becomes a statement about an inexistent entity's behaviour. But let's put that aside for now, and focus on the principles that allow you to claim that persons exist but states merely subsist.

Collective action designates the reality that individuals may act in concert with one another, towards some common end. It does not mean that there is a subsistent entity, such as you and I are, called a ‘collective’, which acts by the power of its own agency. That is poetry only. — Virgo Avalytikh

(C1) If individual entities compose an aggregate, we can infer that the aggregate does not exist.
(C2) Human cells are individual entities.
(C3) Humans are aggregations of human cells.
(C4) Humans do not exist.

But clearly you believe humans exist. What principle of metaphysics allows you to claim that humans exist but not states?

I would suggest that you believe humans exist because we are agents, that we have distinct causal powers irreducible to the properties of the cells which composes us. Cells do not want or desire, only humans do.

Applying this principle consistently yields the existence of aggregates like states. and firms. Individual humans do not produce laws, social customs or economies, only aggregates do. Laws, economies and social customs would be impossible if only individuals existed, in the same sense that want, desire and agency would be impossible if only cells did.

The main thrust here is to challenge the ontological principles you are using in your arguments to deny causal powers to aggregates.

There is no need to 'start over'. When you successfully repel a thief from your home, or incapacitate a mugger, you needn't step back and ask yourself 'How now shall we organise society?' 'Society' is what happens when we don't aggress against one another and invade one another's property. The State will not be abolished through an overnight coup, from which we will have to wait for the dust to settle so that we can then rebuild civilisation. In some ways the State has grown, and in other ways the State has been totally out-manoeuvred by free enterprise, and shown to be the lumbering, ineffectual brute that it is (technology and the internet, especially, have contributed to this). If there is an end to the State, it will be through successive out-maneouverings by more competent service-providers, and in this sense the trajectory is good. We need not have a structural vision in our heads to anticipate the occurrence of such.

Engels made the argument that in a socialist society the institutions of the state would just whither away and coercion would no longer be necessary for a society to function. The state is replaced by “the administration of things”, which seems to me a distinction without a difference save for that it would be administered voluntarily. In practice, however, the state only became more entrenched or collapsed under their own weight in those societies.

Since the state operates in many ways as a monopoly (Crown corporation in the commonwealth, for example), could the free enterprise route to a the withering of the state risk trading one monopoly for another, one state for another?

There is no need to 'start over'. When you successfully repel a thief from your home, or incapacitate a mugger, you needn't step back and ask yourself 'How now shall we organise society?' 'Society' is what happens when we don't aggress against one another and invade one another's property. The State will not be abolished through an overnight coup, from which we will have to wait for the dust to settle so that we can then rebuild civilisation. In some ways the State has grown, and in other ways the State has been totally out-manoeuvred by free enterprise, and shown to be the lumbering, ineffectual brute that it is (technology and the internet, especially, have contributed to this). If there is an end to the State, it will be through successive out-maneouverings by more competent service-providers, and in this sense the trajectory is good. We need not have a structural vision in our heads to anticipate the occurrence of such.

I like what you have to say here, and I do this issue of free enterprise trying to outmaneuver the state is extremely pertinent to our times and is going to play out over the next few decades. We're seeing it right now with the rise of digital currencies which threaten to unhinge the state's control of surveillance and put it back in the hands of the public. The government is closely monitoring this, and other governments around the world are in the process of developing their own cryptocurrencies which would effectively just act as enhanced surveillance tools. Banks and intelligence agencies have been in bed together for a while, at least here in the US.

Make no mistake about it though, the state will not go without a fight. The state can offer pretty good salaries to programmers and a number of other benefits. They are well aware of the threat that they are facing coming from tech. I also think there's another dog in this fight and that force is big tech (example would be facebook's libra currency.) In sum, what we have is the public vs. corporations vs. the state.

EDIT: In china this battle is effectively lost. The state has won. To the best of my knowledge the programmers there are nationalistic and the chinese government has really mastered the art of using tech to further control their population. they were able to arrest hundreds of hong kong protesters using their subway card information to know that they were attending protests via their personal data linked to those cards.

what we have is the public vs. corporations vs. the state. — BitconnectCarlos

I can get behind this in general if you grant that the corporations (at least the biggest ones) essentially control state policy. I have just as much distrust of the private sector as I do the government.

I'm going to assume that you see tax as coercive. Coercive because a government takes stuff off people. — fdrake

On the understanding that that which is expropriated by taxation is the rightful property of her who is taxed, taxation would indeed be coercive, for precisely the same reason as theft and extortion are coercive. Indeed, if we take Tolkien’s advice and view the activity of the State as the actions of ‘King George, Winston and their gang’ (or equivalent), then taxation becomes praxeologically indistinguishable from a mafioso protection racket.

Your strategy, then, is to deny the assumption that the taxed money truly is the rightful property of the victim (if that is not too prejudicial) of the tax. If the money really belongs to the State, then they may expropriate just as much of it as they please. You justify this move as follows:

How do they own it? They are legally stipulated to, in the laws that define who owns what. — fdrake

But this takes a good deal for granted. Your assumption seems to be that, if the State declares itself, by means of the law that the State itself produces, to own object x, then the State rightfully owns object x. Moreover, you seem to imply on one or two occasions that all ownership rights in general are what they are because the State declares them to be so. Perhaps you would want to refine this further, but since you haven’t, I am going to tease out some problems with this view.

One problem with this view is that it gives rise to in-compossible property claims. If, as currently obtains, there is more than one State in the world, then they may both lay claim to one and the same object (a landmass, for instance), which would show the above principle to be deficient in establishing a rightful property claim. To counteract this, we may limit the State’s ‘expropriation powers’ only to a certain territory. This seems like a plausible move, since this is already how we think of States as being distinguished from one another.

But this also needs justification. What we are calling a ‘State’ is just an association of persons. To say that the State may pass a law which gives itself license to expropriate any object within a certain territory gives rise to the following two questions: ‘Why may these persons, in distinction from all other persons, do so?’ and ‘Why may they do so over this landmass, in distinction from all other landmasses?’ This is nothing other than the question of political legitimacy; what makes the State a legitimate State. What is more, since the adherent of this view believes that the State may afford itself the legal right to expropriate anything within the territory, this implies that, in an ultimate sense, the State really owns the whole territory and everything within it, since the only way in which any person other than the State may come to own something is if the State graciously chooses not to expropriate it for itself. If the State wishes to expropriate an object from me and I wish for it not to, the State asserts its right to get its way, and this is just another way of saying that the State considers the object to be its own rightful property.

Unfortunately for the Statist, it is difficult to give a non-question-begging account of why these persons in particular come to own this territory in particular. One move available is to say that the State owns the territory because the law states that it does. But the circularity of this should be obvious. After all, I may write on a piece of paper that I own the same territory. Why does this not have the same authority? ‘Simple,’ says the Statist, ‘because you are not a legitimate State.’ In other words, the State’s statutes are successful in affording the State rightful claims because the State is legitimate. But this is no good as an argument, since the question of the State’s legitimacy is the very thing which we are trying to justify.

Quite simply: the State’s actions are ostensibly coercive, and so the natural move is to insist that they are not coercive because the State is doing nothing more than exercising its own rightful property claims. To justify the rightfulness of those very property claims, you must appeal to that which the State declares about its own property claims in the laws it passes. When the question is asked, ‘Why do the pieces of paper on which the State writes – rather than the pieces of paper on which I write – afford it such rights?’, the only recourse is to insist that the State’s piece of paper is authoritative because, unlike little old me, the State really is legitimate. But this is just to take us back to asserting the very thing that is in question. I hope the circle is clear.

But perhaps I am exaggerating your position. Perhaps you are saying nothing more than that the fiat currencies of our acquaintance – GBP, USD, Won – are just products, for which we have the State to thank. We may choose to use them or not to use them, but if we do, we consent to the State’s terms and conditions, which include the State’s right to expropriate. This story would be convincing, were it not for legal tender laws. Suppose that I raise the following defence: ‘I recognise the State’s right to produce its own currency and to set limits on its use by its customers. But I choose not to use this currency, thank you very much. I shall trade in gold/bitcoin/seashells.’ Would this make me exempt from paying taxes? Of course not. The State’s power to declare by legal fiat what does or does not constitute ‘money’ is the final nail in the coffin of a free monetary system. We are then forced back onto the question of why I should be subject to such a law, which in turns forces us back onto the question of the State’s legitimacy, which, as I have argued, is rather difficult to justify non-circularly.

The main thrust here is to get you to say where property rights come from, and to address the contingent character of coercion within a social form based on the rules of ownership it follows. — fdrake

The contingent character of coercion – or, as I would rather put it, the fact that the NAP is philosophically dependent upon a system of property rights – is an observation I have made enthusiastically elsewhere. I resist strongly the identification of the law which the State produces with ‘social norms’. This should not be surprising, given how anti-social I believe the State to be in its essence. If you really do wish to make this identification, then the consequence would seem to be that the State can never be a coercive institution, by definition: any ostensibly coercive act in which the State engages may be legitimised as the State doing as it wishes its own property, on the understanding that its property is what it is because the State has declared it to be so.

An account of how rightful property claims are generated in the first instance is yet another rabbit-trail which would take up too much space in this post, but which may enjoy more attention at a later point. The three most prominent philosophical traditions here would be the right-libertarian tradition, which has its roots in John Locke, the left-libertarian tradition, which has its roots in Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the Marxist tradition, which has its roots in some guy called Carl, but which has been defended more convincingly by analytic Marxists like G. A. Cohen.

Very briefly, the right-lib and left-lib view is that each individual is a self-owner; i.e. each person’s body is her own private property. They part ways on the question of the ownership of external resources. The left-lib understands the world’s resources to be jointly co-owned by all persons, such that the individual comes into the world with an equal, quotal share in everything. The right-lib understands the world’s resources as being originally unowned, and come to be owned through productive acts of transformation (or ‘homesteading’). Thereafter, rightful property claims are transferred by bequeathal or exchange. Cohen, who may or may not be archetypical of the Marxist view, agrees with the left-lib as regards co-ownership of worldly resources, but also extends this egalitarian view to persons, which leads him to deny self-ownership.

Unsurprisingly, I agree with the right-libertarian view, inspired by Locke. I will not provide a philosophical justification for this here. Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, however, are I think the best apologists for this view.

The main thrust here is to challenge the ontological principles you are using in your arguments to deny causal powers to aggregates. — fdrake

I don’t believe I have denied aggregative causal powers. And I have agreed that compositional aggregates can exist, and that there are certain things which are rightly predicated of a whole which are not rightly predicated of the parts. What I have denied is that aggregations of agents of purposeful action – persons – may be counted as ‘extra’ agents of purposeful action, above and beyond the members. I will not rehearse all of the illustrations I have provided for this ontological commitment. But it seems to me obvious that my scrabble club is not a person, it has no purposes or intentions to speak of; or, if it may be spoken of as having such, then this is a merely linguistic, merely poetic, abstraction from the purposes and intents of the individual members.

What would it take for me to be wrong about this? It would take my scrabble club’s having a ‘mind of its own’. When I and my co-scrabblers sit, the four of us, around our square table, what exactly do you think ‘emerges’? Have we now been joined by a ‘someone’, a 'who', that is not identifiable with any one of the four of us? It sounds like a séance to me. Forgive the facetiousness.

Property ownership is a legal fiction granted by the state, especially land ownership, the biggest mistake of our warring empire cultures in history. It is not a natural right. It’s a tool to oppress those without large land property holdings (or the contemporary capital equivalent). Property is oppression.