[Technology]

You have basically described what government does today. The government makes claims to huge tracts of land and prevents others from obtaining it. Much of this land is unused. Where politically convenient this land is unfairly given to special interests to mine etc.

This is true, but private interests can create similar tyrannies, if not as extensive. There's nothing substantial preventing this. Property rights are about control and exclusion whether "public" or private.

Right-libertarians and anarchists are insufficiently wary of private power getting into positions in which it can start to act like a government, through monopolization (which crushes choice/minimizes opportunity). You can't just brush this off by saying "vote with your money/feet" anymore than it is reasonable to tell you to get out of your home nation if you want anarchy. Poor people don't have an equal vote, and they will do what they can to equalize their vote. This doesn't have to (and I think shouldn't if it wants to be reasonably "without rulers") involve universalist communist solutions, where far-left terminators hunt people down who engage in free-enterprise, but there's going to have to be some concession to the communities you opt to buy property in, and what you do with that property.

Arguing otherwise is really arguing that other conceptions don't appreciably exist, and you only have to take note of the concept of differing ideology to note that they do.

There are actually no limits to how much land an individual can own. So what the hell are you talking about? The stupid example you made up about purchasing surrounding land and cutting someone off would obviously be a violation of their rights and illegal state or no state.

So are there limits to where people can build? I don't have to be actually on your property to harm your use of property in some way - that's the nature of externalities - and I could also buy up so many resources that there is little left for the local community.

I don't have to break the NAP to do it. Say, I'm a very rich guy, and I buy the river in your small town. Being now my property, I have rights of exclusion from it. I can basically hold the town ransom to river use if I so desired. I can pay enforcers to do so. That's how property works. If I didn't have rights of exclusion, use, and trade, it wouldn't be my property. If you declare this illegal, then you are (rightly in this case) limiting my use of property.

Of course, rights don't drop from the sky, so this is assuming I stick to this conception of rights which is merely what we might think is most effective for a decent society.

This is why there should be a combination of commons and free for private use even in an anarchy. To be as close to anarchy as possible, everything should get as local as possible, so there's no use declaring your conception of what counts as illegal on specific property issues, because as we know... your mileage may vary.

There are things which could be considered "common law", such as nearly everyone on the planet agreeing that a citizen initiating aggression is wrong in some basic sense. The problem comes when you get into the narrower zones of what counts as aggression. Going up to someone and randomly hitting them in the head with a hatchet might be considered wrong everywhere, but very specific legalistic arbitration of property will not be.

The further you get away from basic emotions and empathy and into applying very specific rules everywhere, the less you have a decentralized state of affairs you could reasonably call an anarchy.

This is why local communities will vary and this is why local communities will make conditions on property rights. You needn't worry that you'll need to see a "council of the wise" to dig clay 10 km out of town, however, as the vast majority of people aren't far leftists and are not expected to become so anytime soon. Given conditions that allow for decentralism (likely technological means for more independance...), any anarchy will consist of normal people all over the place on property issues. Anarchy will not be a magical nation of right-anarchists or left-anarchists if it is at all feasible.

I somewhat echo this article addressing this issue.

[Eran]

Property currently has limits because of government.

Even in 19th century America, before anti-trust laws, no significance monopolization of land was ever observed.

If it didn't, and we lived in right-anarchy, someone could, for example, purchase the property around other properties until they could control water access and other things to those properties and make them pay. Someone could also build up resources through capitalism until they can control stupidly large land areas in general, and this would become a tyranny due to their exclusion rights and the ability to box people in, and monopolize resources.

That's not how capitalism ever did or could work. For one thing, people generally have access rights to their property. Encircling them is legally impossible. (It's different when a new community is set up on "virgin land", but applies to pre-existing title structures).

But the very existence of people willing to argue for different property conceptions, in the form of left-anarchists, and the larger existence of left-statists who hold similar property designs just in a more centralized form, means that if we evolve towards anarchy, the left portion of the populace is significant enough to carry forward a competing property definition into the anarchist world.

The existence of royalists in pre-Constitutional US didn't prevent the Constitution, once formally adopted, to be accepted by a virtual consensus of the population. A stable anarchy would require a similar near-consensus, not over detailed rules for property definition, let alone specific property allocations, but over the legitimate mechanism for peacefully resolving such disputes, should they arise.

Still, my point is that even voluntary acquisition of resources carries externalities that may upset the community, and the nature of things like homesteading unused land requires that people accept your claim. I don't see rigid right-anarchism as viable either.

And that's what tends to happen. California gold-diggers, for example, adopted rules (without a central decision-maker) over what constitutes legitimate claims to land. A local community would have much to say about, say, claims regarding access to a local lake. They couldn't, on the other hand, impose their will on a lone homesteader living 100 miles away.

There shouldn't be a formalized system everywhere that says "everything belongs to the people", but there should be acceptance of the fact that your ability to have private property depends on; A: other people's acceptance of your claim, and B: your ability to physically defend it.

As long as by "other people" you mean the organic, local communities, exerting their influence to a reasonably-relevant radius and to forms of homesteading that can reasonably be viewed as impacting their pre-existing use-rights and property rights, I agree.

That same principle cannot, however, be extended to cover the level of sovereign control claimed by modern states.

Property rights don't come out of the air from God. Property rights are inherently socialized in some broad sense because they depend on your relation to others. They may not be in the more rigid and specific sense that left-anarchists seem to want, but there is some dependance on community acceptance. Perhaps more in the sense of not pissing off your community, or declaring unused land in the countryside for miles to be yours, rather than having to ask specific permission (from who?) for every trade, or homesteading effort anywhere in the world.

I don't think we disagree. You cannot, under my system, declare unused land to be yours, either as an individual, as a community, or as a government.

This is true, but private interests can create similar tyrannies, if not as extensive. There's nothing substantial preventing this. Property rights are about control and exclusion whether "public" or private.

No, they cannot. A comprehensive monopolization of a resource is virtually impossible for private parties. As they try to monopolize it, the value of the remaining stores of resource become more and more expensive. "Cornering the market" is very difficult even with highly liquid assets such as traded commodities. With land, it is impossible without the imposition of force, i.e. without government or criminal action.

You can't just brush this off by saying "vote with your money/feet" anymore than it is reasonable to tell you to get out of your home nation if you want anarchy.

You don't need to "vote with your feet", but you can certainly vote with your money. If you don't like Walmart, shop with the competition. The only reason Walmart displaces smaller competitors is that the vast majority of people like them better. Even so, Target and various supermarket chains haven't been eliminated. And even where competition may not be present, it is always lurking "under the surface", waiting to show up if the "monopolist" slips in terms of providing consumers with an excellent deal.

Again, this whole "private monopoly" myth must be exposed for what it is. There have never been, and could never be examples of consumer-harming private monopoly without the aid of government power. If you disagree, please provide examples to the contrary. Otherwise, drop this particular objection.

And, as mum noted, anybody who is worried about the power of monopoly should definitely be an anarchist, given the inherent monopoly of government, first (and by definition) in the area of the use of force and, almost invariably, by extension, in many other parts of the economy.

Arguing otherwise is really arguing that other conceptions don't appreciably exist, and you only have to take note of the concept of differing ideology to note that they do.

People with different ideologies are welcome to set up their own communities. Elsewhere I gave the example of Amish communities and Israeli Kibbutzim as communities that both engage in highly specialised (and radically different) forms of organisation and lifestyle, even while trading with the rest of society.

If you think about today's US you will realise that while a very wide range of opinions exist on almost any topic, there is a virtual consensus over what constitutions a legitimate way of resolving disputes (ultimately, appeals to the US Supreme Court).

Similarly, a libertarian/anarchist society could accommodate a wide range of ethical conceptions, priorities, lifestyles, and forms of societal organisations. All that is required for it to stably exist as a peaceful society is a (virtual) consensus over legitimate ways of resolving disputes (namely peaceful appeals to credible arbitration organisations following, broadly, the principles of the NAP).

I don't have to be actually on your property to harm your use of property in some way - that's the nature of externalities - and I could also buy up so many resources that there is little left for the local community.

No, you can't. At least not in ways that prevent others from offering alternatives. A close relative of property rights is the (often ignored) use-right (aka easement). In particular, most pre-existing titles to land include easement over access to the property, thus preventing encirclement.

I don't have to break the NAP to do it. Say, I'm a very rich guy, and I buy the river in your small town. Being now my property, I have rights of exclusion from it. I can basically hold the town ransom to river use if I so desired. I can pay enforcers to do so. That's how property works. If I didn't have rights of exclusion, use, and trade, it wouldn't be my property. If you declare this illegal, then you are (rightly in this case) limiting my use of property.

That assumes that (1) the river was owned by one person, and (2) that that ownership didn't include limitations associated with prior use-rights by the community. If the river was as essential to the life of the community as you suggest, neither assumption is likely, especially not the second one.

And again, if you are worried about such scenarios, consider how much more likely they are in the context of a government-ruled society. What if you are a governor of a state, and decide to prohibit all motor vehicle movement in and out of a local community? What if you are the President of the United States, and decide to force all members of a given ethnic community into concentration camps? What if you are a major of a town, and decide to erase a whole neighbourhood to make room for a development project of your buddies?

These aren't theoretical possibilities - these are things that happen all the time.

This is why there should be a combination of commons and free for private use even in an anarchy. To be as close to anarchy as possible, everything should get as local as possible, so there's no use declaring your conception of what counts as illegal on specific property issues, because as we know... your mileage may vary.

The vision I presented (following Nozick's "utopia") has ample room for local variation and solutions without either (1) a central coordinating or coercive authority, and (2) allowing for local abuses.

The further you get away from basic emotions and empathy and into applying very specific rules everywhere, the less you have a decentralized state of affairs you could reasonably call an anarchy.

Again, I agree. The NAP provides only a very broad outline of permissibility of the use of force. No thoughtful libertarian believes it contains within it a detailed recipe for the legal rules of ordering society. Within its broad scope there will be much room for local variation.

I somewhat echo this article addressing this issue.

Interesting. Here are some of my comments:

But if “Trespassers Will Be Shot On Sight” is a valid assertion of property rights by the owner, then it is clear that self-ownership has become alienable and inferior to property rights.

Anarcho-capitalists do not distinguish between self-ownership and property rights. Yourself, your body is your first and almost most important property. However, your right to property (whether your own body or external to it) doesn't extend to using that property to violate the rights of others. You own your own body, but that doesn't give you a right to use your hands to strike another person.

Similarly, your ownership of your own body (your self-ownership) doesn't give you a right to trespass the (legitimate) property of another person. Whether "shooting on sight" is ever a legitimate response to trespassing is a different question. I know of no anarcho-capitalist who would make that claim under normal circumstances.

Again and again you will find that anarcho-capitalists call for proportionate response to property right violations. Shooting trespassers is (normally) not proportionate.

Proprietary communities are another extraordinary application of extreme propertarianism. Defenders of these sometimes assert that ANY rules can be set and enforced, so long as the property was legitimately homesteaded or transferred. Again, anybody who believes that self-ownership is unalienable needs to explain why they are so casual in permitting its alienation. I can say for certain they’ve never had to deal with the management of a co-op or condo association.

There is really no conflict. In proprietary communities, people choose to live (as either tenants or subordinate owners) knowing that they would thereby become subject to community rules. That "subjugation" is voluntary and revocable at any moment. Thus you are (or ought to be) always free to leave the community, paying, at most, a property penalty as pre-agreed.

And it is all because we look at property improperly, trying to derive a single set of rules for all situations from first principles, when property is, in fact, a problem solver that self-owners adopt for the purpose of living in peace and harmony with each other.

Very true. Critics of anarcho-capitalism confuse the absolute right of property owners against government (or other criminal) violations, and the scope of property rights being absolute.

I have tried to show that property rights (as well as easements) can be derived from a prior principle of what I called "the project formulation of the NAP", namely that it is wrong to initiate force against a (peaceful) project of another person. Property rights and easements are merely the convenient formalization of that principle, rather than fundamental themselves.

We can look at my homesteading property for growing food, another might use the same property for hiking, another as a travel route to the other side, and as long as the later uses don’t interfere with the earlier ones, each has homesteaded a right to the same property. Granted, homesteading a location for a personal residence should provide more of a right to exclude others. Still, reason must prevail.

These are excellent examples, and entirely consistent with my formulation. If your "project" is growing crops, that project may reasonably require that, say, cattle herds are kept out, but not that, say, well-behaved hikers do.

So let’s not go around claiming the anarcho-communists are spewing pure drivel when they talk of possession rather than property.

They are spewing pure drivel when they claim that possession can be a substitute for permanent, non-possession-requiring property rights in the modern world. "Possession" might make some sense on the context of land-ownership in an agricultural economy. But what does it mean when we are talking about investments, bank accounts, the hospitality industry, or wide organizations (whether syndicates or otherwise) owning productive property?

Furthermore, even to the extent property rights are legitimate, dispute resolution over property cannot be territorially based, because that means begging the very question.

This, of course, is true with respect to disputes over the boundaries of land ownership. However, most disputes in a modern society aren't of that nature. For most disputes, then, a territorially-based dispute resolution is much more sensible than suggested.

In both Iceland and Ireland, voluntary law and private property prevailed for centuries, but the acceptance of Christianity and, more importantly, of the tithing of money to the church, led to increasing concentrations of wealth in the hands of those overseeing church operations, and what was voluntary became coercive once that concentrated wealth was used to project violent power.

That's an interesting statement. I was under the impression that both Iceland and Ireland have ceased being anarchic largely due to external pressures and/or occupation, not concentration of property in the hands of the Church.

At present, enormous amounts of land are closed off to homesteading, even within cities, and both licensing and regulation are used to destroy countless opportunities for self-employment. Intellectual property laws are used to prevent people from using their own tangible property based on their own knowledge, and the only people who can afford to enforce these laws are the wealthiest because of a monopoly legal system that is outrageously costly to use. Get rid of these restrictions and the imbalances of power blamed on capitalism become immensely smaller.

Yes!

there is no reason that a person born in the year 2100 should have fewer rights than a person born in the year 2000, but if all the world becomes private property, and property owners can establish all the rules for their property, then every person born after that date will be born a slave, and self-ownership will become a joke

That is very much a strawman. While less of the world is free for homesteading, people born in later periods benefit from the huge improvements (not to mention knowledge acquired by) prior generations. As long as land isn't monopolised (and there is no reason to expect it will, under any form of anarchy), it is just another resource which can be purchased, and the owners of which would compete. You self-ownership is more rather than less valuable in 2100 relative to 2000 in just the same way that unskilled workers command much higher wages in the United States of today than in India. Not because they are allowed to homestead undeveloped parts of the country, but because economic development allows them to leverage their self-ownership property to be much more productive.

I somewhat echo this article addressing this issue.

Thank you for drawing my attention. It is, despite my few comments above, an excellent article with whom I generally agree. To the extent that you find yourself agreeing with its spirit, it isn't surprising we find many common points as well.

[Technology]

It seems like we disagree less than I thought on certain points. I do think though that whenever we talk about property rights we're talking about law, and law is inherently social, so fearful communities may abridge property rights more than you would like, so as to protect their communal interests. I feel this is inevitable.

This is why I often self-describe as a libertarian or decentralist, rather than an anarchist, and on the anarchist issue, I tend to see a position moderated away from extreme right positions (there are ancaps who take a shoot on sight approach to property rights) as both more morally sensitive, and also pragmatically warranted given that most people existing do not hold right-anarchist morals, and I think anarchy if possible, will depend on technical means growing out of the current liberal social democratic paradigm, and enabling people to become independent, rather than actually getting a significant majority to get on board with anarchist ethics and specific conceptions of property.

I tend to approach balanced property rights from the point of view that you owe people's relation to their current property and their prospects for future property with good respect. This doesn't mean you are subservient to them, but it does mean that you can't rely solely on finder's keepers and "I have a gun, so I can shoot you in non-NAP breaking self-defense, if you abridge what I have declared to be my property by putting a fence around it!" without something going drastically wrong at some point. If you put property external to your body as higher than other people's lives, then while you are in an understandable position, and I understand that self-defense can't begin the moment someone puts a knife in you, or sets fire to your house, these positions are exactly the positions where all the rights get muddled up and there's no consistent principle universally adopted to solve them. Therefore, if you live through something like that, whether you got it right or wrong, must depend on your community somewhat.

I will say that class anarchy seems the inferior system over all. It professes to attack hierarchy, while fostering the perfect conditions for it. It relies on the idea of a decentralized kind of authority held in unity only by a "religious" belief in left-anarchist property concepts as being a universal thing, and therefore must constantly root out and destroy any heresy, less it disrupt the unity of thought required for universalist conceptions to operate. Fortunately, this is why it will never work; not enough adherents can be reprogrammed for it to gain traction, and their minority of the "class conscious" acting against the larger group of society will be forced to create centralized controlling power structures and act out a Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat", undoing their anarchy into Marxism as surely as that orthodoxy was undone into Marxist-Leninism and its numerous imitators. It's either that or to imagine that everyone will magically adopt the same conceptions as them some day.

If you respect that anarchy requires localism and not absolute unity of thought, then we can agree on anarchist issues. The capitalist question feels a little academic for me, as I consider anarchy, or that which is close enough to count, to be something that will arise in a far future, post-capitalist, post-scarcity environment, not through pulling social levers and getting people to simply drop the current paradigm.

I suppose even in a world in which we all have decentralized energy and food production, and each man and woman might own a means of production through the technological miniaturization and achievement of replication (a new tendency of the neglected distributist philosophy; a techno-distributism), or replicable robots able to gather resources for their owners, it may not be the case that trade of resources and the use of a highly liquid fungible commodity as money will cease once all self-willed needs are met. Capitalism finds a way?

[Eran]

I do think though that whenever we talk about property rights we're talking about law, and law is inherently social, so fearful communities may abridge property rights more than you would like, so as to protect their communal interests. I feel this is inevitable.

Possibly. There would be two mitigating factors against such drift.

First, while there is much local scope for variation on the nature and character of protected property rights, that local scope is not unlimited. At some point, violations will be considered "criminal" by the rest of society, and outside help will be brought to bear.

Second, as long as those variations are local, a natural competition would cause society to gradually move towards more successful implementations. People will "vote with their feet" if local rules are too onerous.

Therefore, if you live through something like that, whether you got it right or wrong, must depend on your community somewhat.

Indeed. And more so in an anarchy vs. under government, which tends to instil uniform rules, often in conflict with local sentiments.

As to the "property rights vs. life" issue, I (and every anarcho-capitalist thinker I ever read) stress proportionality. The steps you take towards protecting your property rights (as well as, subsequent to their violations, recovering them) must be reasonable and proportional. Both attributes necessarily require judgement, with local standards playing an important role.

I will say that class anarchy seems the inferior system over all.

I agree. I had long debates with left-anarchists, but could never understand how they think a system could work. If workers naturally prefer controlling their own productive enterprises, no left- principles are required - the workers can achieve their goals within the context of property-respecting, "right-" anarchy.

If, on the other hand, most workers aren't so bothered, and would be tempted by offers of employment of capitalists, you either (1) violently impose rules against such behaviour, thereby ceasing to be a peaceful anarchy, or (2) start drifting towards a right-anarchy.

The capitalist question feels a little academic for me, as I consider anarchy, or that which is close enough to count, to be something that will arise in a far future, post-capitalist, post-scarcity environment, not through pulling social levers and getting people to simply drop the current paradigm.

Perhaps. I don't believe we will ever live in a post-capitalist, post-scarcity environment. I can easily see (1) a radically different version of capitalism, just as today's hi-tech startups are radically different from 19th century textile sweatshops, and (2) a society in which most of the consumption goods of today are cheaply available to virtually everybody.

But within each society, you will still see innovation and entrepreneurship, privately-owned enterprises and a distinction between common-place (and generally-available) and luxury (and scarce) goods.