Re: [A-List] New Economy Bull

["Annewilliamson" <Annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

Hmmm, guess I better dig up that Hoppe piece I mentioned to Macdonald.
Yes, I do believe property is a spontaneous creation of the natural
order.

Actually, the situation with your mortgaged residence is a bit different
than what you lay out.  When you have retired the mortgage (now the bank
actually owns the property you inhabit), you still will not own it....try
refusing to pay the tax (in protest, possibly?) and you'll discover who is
the actual owner.

Retiring the mortgage alas, only means you have created clean collateral for
the IRS,
an agency of the federal government incorporated in Puerto Rico (why is
that,
you think?)  So I actually agree with you on this, property today is defined
by the state, but I would add "in contradiction to the natural order."

As far as Ayn Rand goes, I carry no brief for her - she was a lousy author
(actually stole the plot for Atlas Shrugged from an earlier conservative
writer), a headstrong, willful woman whose ideas spawned not libertarianism,
but Objectivism.  And you are right in stating that her ideas have ensnared
many, impressionable (and comfortable) young people.  (The same could be
said
for the ideas of Marx, BTW.)  And I further agree that that is very
unfortunate,
and that some of these young people who admire her and consider themselves
libertarians are
misguided - at least in referencing themselves as "libertarians" while
holding
aloft Ayn's flickering flame.  I wonder now if it isn't some of these kids
who have described themselves as "libertarians" who misled Mine as to what
libertarianism is.

Regards,

Anne

----- Original Message -----
From: "bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>
To: <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2002 5:20 PM
Subject: Re: [A-List] New Economy Bull


> > Since you are concerned about "the conquest and plunder" of the NA
> > indigineous population by colonizing Europeans, don't you then consider
> NA
> > to have been the property of the indigineous peoples?  What's
ahistorical
> > about that?
>
>
> Indigenous people anywhere only have "property" when it is defined as such
> by a state.  When I finish paying my mortgage to the bank (I'll be
> 70-something), I will "own" a tiny piece of land with a house on it.  The
> boundaries of that land, and the inventoried value of that house, etc etc,
> only exist by virtue of legal documents of entitlement backed up by the
> coercive force of the state.  Peoples who live in times and places where
> there is no state do not have property, as such.  They may negotiate the
> use of land, but there is no formal property.  It would be absurd.
>
> My point about the American Revolution, which Libertarians ALWAYS miss (or
> evade), is not a moral one.  It is an historical one.  How do really
> existing property relations and really existing property come to be?  What
> makes this piece of property I write from "mine?"  Or the bank's, for now?
> Who had it before me, and how did it make the transformation from shared
> land of another people, to my personal residence?  You talk as if
> "property" is some natural phenomenon, that an unnatural state comes along
> and expropriates.  But the record shows, at ever stage without a single
> exception, that the state came into existence and perpetuated itself with
> the central mission of defining, codifying, and protecting a given set of
> property relations.  One cannot exist without the other.  The only way to
> deny this is to abstract the whole issue, which is precisely what
> libertarians do.  That and continually shift premises.
>
> For those who want a relatively short explication of libertarian
> philosophy - which will help address some of the confusion of
> non-libertarians - pick up a copy of Ayn Rand's goofy opus, "Atlas
> Shrugged," bypass the tedious story of the cardboard captialist
characters,
> and go straight to character John Galt's 64-page speech... a thinnly
> disguised treatise where Rand combines Stirner, Mill, Smith, Neitzsche,
and
> others without giving an ounce of credit to them for her grotesque
> bastardization.  Unfortunately, it is a philosophy that lots and lots of
> comfortable Americans and naive young folks take seriously.  It has a kind
> of strange tautalogic that seems to cast a strong spell.
>
>
>