“And it’s this term ‘absolute’ that really screws everybody up. You see, you don’t have an absolute right to control your property.”
If it had not been a live stream I would have paused the podcast. I resolved a few days ago before New Year’s to write a post on Medium everyday, and at the moment Jason Stapleton said this I knew what I had to write about today.
Despite what Jason said, private property rights are absolute. Let’s first define what property is. Kinsella pens:
Property is the right to use or control a scarce resource.
Hoppe reinforces this definition of property when he discusses what is the purpose of property:
It is the function of property rights to avoid such possible clashes over the use of scarce resources by assigning rights of exclusive ownership.
There is no reason to believe in limited property rights and not absolute property rights since property is the right to exclusive control over scarce resources. If it were not absolute, then it would not be exclusive.
Be careful though and do not mistake absolute property rights for the right to kill somebody if they are simply crossing your lawn. A victim only has the right to punish an aggressor in a way that is proportionate to the act of aggression. Kinsella writes more about this and justifies punishment inPunishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach:
Punishment is for, or in response to, some action, inaction, feature, or status of the person punished; otherwise, it is simply random violence, which is not usually considered to be punishment…In short, we may punish one who has initiated force, in a manner proportionate to his initiation of force and to the consequences thereof, exactly because he cannot coherently object to such punishment. It makes no sense for him to object to punishment, because this requires that he maintain that the infliction of force is wrong, which is contradictory because he intentionally initiated force himself.
Following from a libertarian ethic comes the non-aggression principle. Chase Rachels properly defines what the non-aggression principle is in his bookSpontaneous Order:
…the Non- Aggression Principle (NAP)…states that no one may justifiably initiate uninvited physical force against another person’s body or property, or make threats thereof.
Jason went on to say, “The non-aggression principle, as I said, is nothing more than a means of helping us understand how to evaluate the law.” He misunderstands the nature of the NAP. The NAP is a logical necessity of private property rights if private property rights are justifiable, and it is a normative statement, i.e. an ethical statement.
The NAP simply says what cannot be justified when dealing with the control of scarce resources. It is not some suggestion, but rather a result of the private property ethic.
He also talked about Rothbard and the proper amount of evidence needed to convict somebody of aggression in a court of law. Jason went on to talk about Rothbard saying there needs to be evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, and he is correct but I believe he left out an important part of Rothbard’s analysis (possibly for the sake of time). Rothbard also claimed that the plaintiff must prove a strict causal relationship between the defendant and the act of aggression beyond a reasonable doubt. Strict causal connection between the defendant and the aggressive act is a valuable detail when talking about pollution and aggression.
Austin Petersen has claimed many times that driving a car is an act of aggression according to the NAP.
He fails to understand Rothbard’s contribution to libertarian philosophy in his essay Law, Property Rights, and Pollution. Rothbard explains why invisible particles (or waves) from others crossing our physical borders is not aggression:
The distinction between visible and invisible, however, is not completely swept away by modern scientific detection methods. Let us take two opposite situations. First, a direct trespass: A rolls his car onto B’s lawn or places a heavy object on B’s grounds. Why is this an invasion and illegal per se? Partly because, in the words of an old English case, “the law infers some damage; if nothing more, the treading down of grass or herbage.”60 But it is not just treading down; a tangible invasion of B’s property interferes with his exclusive use of the property, if only by taking up tangible square feet (or cubic feet). If A walks on or puts an object on B’s land, then B cannot use the space A or his object has taken up. An invasion by a tangible mass is a per se interference with someone else’s property and therefore illegal.
In contrast, consider the case of radio waves, which is a crossing of other people’s boundaries that is invisible and insensible in every way to the property owner. We are all bombarded by radio waves that cross our properties without our knowledge or consent. Are they invasive and should they therefore be illegal, now that we have scientific devices to detect such waves? Are we then to outlaw all radio transmission? And if not, why not?
The reason why not is that these boundary crossings do not interfere with anyone’s exclusive possession, use or enjoyment of their property. They are invisible, cannot be detected by man’s senses, and do no harm. They are therefore not really invasions of property, for we must refine our concept of invasion to mean not just boundary crossing, but boundary crossings that in some way interfere with the owner’s use or enjoyment of this property. What counts is whether the senses of the property owner are interfered with.
It might be true that some car pollution or kicked up dust harms another person, but the supposed victim would have to prove a strict causal connection between the driver or kicker and the aggression beyond a reasonable doubt. The courts of law might otherwise wrongly punish an innocent individual if this standard is not upheld.
Moreover, it is not clear that when a person drives a car it MUST harm somebody, thus force used against them to prevent them from driving is not justifiable in most cases. Of course, if an asthmatic is close enough to the car to be affected by the exhaust, then they would be justified in stopping them from turning on the car.
We must not confuse our absolute rights in our property with our lack of right to aggression. A person doing so will conclude that our property rights are limited, a mistaken conclusion; however, one must not be like Petersen either who believes property rights must be absolute and therefore nearly everything, even breathing, is aggression.
A proper understanding of property rights helps with more than theory; it helps us know what is ethical and what is not so that we may more accurately act in justifiable ways.
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