Re: POLITICS - Property rights: absolute or relative?

[Guest guest]

>I'm not quite sure what your intent here is. If your intent is to show that

>inviolable property rights are not a fundamental, axiomatic good, then this

>is a valid thought experiment, and I agree with your conclusion. Property

>rights are a means to an end, and I think any honest person would agree

>that in certain situations, some net good can come of violating them.

That was actually my intent, though I'd phrase it slightly

differently. Some people might define absolute property rights as a

fundamental, axiomatic good, in which case " good " is maintaining absolute

property rights and " bad " is abridging them. So I'd say that my intent was

to illustrate that if you propose a system in which property uber alles is

not itself an axiomatic absolute good, then you most likely must admit,

depending on your other axioms, that property uber alles will have some

unfortunate effects.

>But--and I apologize if I'm misinterpreting--you seem to be overreaching and

>suggesting that this is a situation which is actually likely to occur in a

>world in which property rights are inviolable, which strikes me as absurd.

Well... yes, I do think situations analogous to my hypothetical are not

merely likely but virtually certain to occur in a property uber alles

world, but I don't expect you to concede the fact. Most propertarians (to

borrow your most welcomely forthright term) at least pretend to a certain

degree of utopianism, asserting that the world would be either somewhat

better or much better for most people if their will were done.

>And as I said before, Utopia is not an option.

I quite agree. Utopianism is disastrous. But pragmatism in service of

improvement is sometimes unfairly branded as utopianism.

>When a

>government has the power to violate property rights, it will use that power

>with imperfect wisdom at best,

This is practically true by definition, since nobody has perfect wisdom --

and if someone somewhere does, it's still a reasonable rule of thumb that

nobody does.

>and probably also corruptly and/or with

>breathtaking economic ignorance.

Perhaps, but this strikes me as being situation-dependent. Economic

science has at least some foundation in reality and thus can presumably be

advanced.

>Ultimately, the cost of improper uses of

>that power will vastly outweigh the benefits of legitimate uses.

Either you have a detailed justification for that view, or it's an

axiomatic belief. I suspect the latter.

>Incidentally, I disagree with you in the case of illegal search and seizure.

>Letting a criminal go free because valid evidence was obtained illegally

>does little to nothing to protect citizens from unjust arrest, and imposes

>on society the very real cost of having a criminal run free. If evidence is

>obtained illegally but its validity is not in dispute, I'd argue that it

>would be better to let the conviction stand and punish those responsible

>for the illegal search. If the punishment is strong enough, this serves the

>purpose of deterring illegal searches while still avoiding the unnecessary

>cost of allowing criminals to go free.

That's a legitimate viewpoint, and I respect it, but I suspect that the

outcome would not be as you expect. Such a system would exert much greater

pressure than mine on the police (and other searchers) to conceal the

illegitimacy of searches and to frustrate challenges.

I think there's also a legitimate slippery-slope argument: accepting poison

fruit will have a corrosive effect on integrity.

>1. There is probably no afterlife, so...

>2. I want to live a long and enjoyable life on Earth.

Same here.

>3. My life will be longer and more enjoyable in a prosperous,

>technologically-sophisticated society.

This strikes me as incomplete. First, you seem to be assuming that

prosperity and technological sophistication correspond with liberty, unless

you don't care about liberty, which I doubt is true. Religious

fundamentalists, for example, can easily attain technological

sophistication in certain domains -- enough to create a prosperous and

technologically sophisticated society. And second, I question your

definition of prosperity and technological sophistication. You might say

our society is technologically sophisticated, and in a sense it is, but

ignorance is rampant and breathtaking -- and though there are variations

from country to country, I'm certainly not limiting that criticism to the

US and holding up Europe as some sort of paragon of education and

wisdom. Far from it. And you might say our society is prosperous, but its

wealth is distributed extremely unevenly.

>4. Economic theory tells me that any *realistic* deviation from respect for

>property rights will result in a net reduction in the rate at which a

>society becomes more prosperous and technologically sophisticated.

Which economic theory? Propertarian theory? A detailed economic debate is

beyond the scope of this list, but I'd argue that all extant economic

theories are grossly incomplete.

>5. Ergo, respect for property rights must be a foundational tenet of my

>political philosophy.

See my objection to #4..

>Note that 4 is *not* a matter of faith, as you're so fond of insinuating.

>It's just that the reasoning involved is far too complex to explain here.

So point me to some extant explanation. I don't *know* that it's a matter

of faith -- you could merely be mistaken.

>If the

>universe were configured such that property rights were destructive to my

>fundamental goal of living a long and enjoyable life, I probably wouldn't

>see them as an ethical imperative.

But other people be damned?

>Now you're definitely overreaching. There are a number of problems with that

>analogy:

Not at all. There's a difference between objecting to particular

real-world situations and objecting to theoretical constructs which don't

actually resemble them. An example would be many people's insistence that

the failure of the USSR proved that communism can't work, when the USSR

wasn't a communist country in any sense of the word resembling its original

definitions. (Don't take this as a defence of communism, either; my

assertion would be that communism can't work because it's fundamentally

incompatible with human nature. But then I think property uber alles is

similarly impossible. It wouldn't last.)

>-Presumably the hypothetical man is sick through no fault of his own. That

>this is the case with real instances of relative poverty in semi-liberal

>societies is far from incontrovertible.

Does it actually matter? Obviously there are limits to any conceivable

obligation to help the willfully self-destructive, but those limits are

only approached in, I suspect, a very small minority of situations. Many

people are sick today because they followed in good faith the dietary

advice of their doctors and other seeming experts.

>-Only a tiny fraction, if any, of my tax bill goes to save people who would

>actually die if less money was stolen from me. True poverty--the deadly

>kind--has been eradicated in the industrialized world due to rising

>productivity.

True poverty certainly hasn't been eradicated, but while it is true that

not all taxes are spent on saving lives, that's not relevant to my

hypothetical. I'm not arguing that all possible uses of taxation are just.

>-Those who pay high taxes and are not made perceptibly worse off by it are

>very few and far between.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by perceptible harm, but it's

certainly worth weighing the marginal harm to someone who can't upgrade his

private jet to the marginal harm to someone forced to eat harmful foods due

to poverty.

>-There is (and I realize that you won't accept this) a tremendous social

>benefit from allowing people with high incomes to maintain ownership of

>them, because they tend to save more and consume less.

This is at least arguable, if your point is that savings can be put to

social use, though you'd have to explain why that social use is certain to

be better and more productive than the social use the money would be put to

as taxes, but you do realize that this isn't compatible with your previous

point, don't you? If someone is saving, he's not making use of his money

himself, and therefore any perceptible harm to him is lesser, not greater.

>You're also overreaching with the bit about the highways. You're essentially

>claiming that since the Federal government managed to do at least one good

>thing with a small percentage of the money it stole in the past, it's

>justified in continuing the theft in perpetuity.

No, I'm arguing that net good can be done via abridging property rights,

not that because some good can be done all possible abridgements are justified.

>The anthropomorphization of Atlanta is also iffy. Obviously some people

>(those who owned land in Atlanta before the highway project) benefitted

>much more from the highways than others (people who moved to Atlanta last

>year), but this has no bearing on the taxes they pay individually.

True, the benefit wasn't uniform or universal, but you're far from correct

in your suggestion that only directly affected property owners

benefited. Business dramatically increased and prosperity extended widely.

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