Daily Archives: 25 May 2014

Curt: THE FALLACY OF STARTING WITH THE ASSUMPTION YOU HAVE PROPERTY RIGHTS RATHER THAN NEEDING TO CONSTRUCT THEM

THE FALLACY OF STARTING WITH THE ASSUMPTION YOU HAVE PROPERTY RIGHTS RATHER THAN NEEDING TO CONSTRUCT THEM

If you have no property rights, but only permission from the state, to use its property in certain fashion, then the state cannot aggress against your property – nor can anyone else, except to the extent determined by the state.

To defend against this argument you must counter that natural rights exist like a soul, or are merely an allegory to contract rights, envisioned out of necessity for flourishing – or some other magical concept. Despite the fact that, contradictory to universal claims, nowhere on earth do private property rights exist. They are profoundly unnatural.

All that is necessary for cooperation is the institution of property. The scope of property is not defined by the means of transgression against property. We can only possibly hold a right that we have obtained in contract. The contract for property rights in the absence of a state can only be constructed by individuals exchanging the promise of defense in response to transgression, and the means of aggressively constructing those rights . The only means of preventing the universally extant violations of those rights obtained in such a contract, and reciprocally insured via that contract, is the organized application of violence against the state.

So it is an erroneous assumption, and a convenient one, that you start from a position of liberty, rather than start from a position of needing to construct liberty.

Intersubjectively verifiable property is a fallacy. Aggression is a fallacy. Natural rights are a fallacy. Crusoe’s Island is a fallacy. Man evolved from consanguineous bands by suppressing free riding, thereby pressing all into participation in production. Property is the natural result of suppressing free riding. At all points and at all times property is constructed by resisting free riding. Property results from the suppression of free riding. The origin of private property as we understand it occurred when Indo European cattle raiders were able to concentrate extraordinary wealth under pastoralism, by way of organized violence and they kept what they obtained in those raids. This is the origin of property: the organized application of violence against free riding.

People who are unwilling to enter the contract for organized violence in order to construct property rights both in contract and in daily practice (as a norm), are merely free riders (thieves) from those who are willing to act to construct property rights in contract and in daily practice (as a norm).

In other words, by claiming you have ‘natural rights’ you’re not only demonstrably wrong, but just trying to obtain property rights at a discount by free riding on the efforts of those who do construct property rights.

So, you’re not only wrong, but a dishonest, free riding thief, like statists you condemn are.

As far as I know this argument is bulletproof.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
Kiev Ukraine