An interesting exchange from The Libertarian Alliance’s website on libertarianism and scarcity, with Kevin Carson responding to Paul Marks’ critique of his work:
[Marks]
“Neither land nor capital are [sic] “artificially scarce” – they are just scarce (period). There are billions of people and only a certain amount of land and machinery? .[T]he idea that land and capital are only scarce [emphasis mine] compared to the billions of people on Earth because of either wicked governments or wicked employers (or both) is false.”
[Carson]
First, simply to get the second part of Mr Marks’ statement out of the way, I nowhere asserted that all scarcity of land and capital is artificial. I argued only that they were more scarce, as a result of state-enforced privilege, than they would otherwise be, and that returns on land and capital were therefore higher than their free market values. In any case, as Franz Oppenheimer observed, most of the scarcity of arable land comes not from natural appropriation, but from political appropriation. And the natural scarcity of capital, a good which is in elastic supply and which can be produced by applying human labor to the land, results entirely from the need for human labor for its creation; there is no fixed limit to the amount available.
But getting to his main point, that land and capital are not artificially scarce, I’m not sure Mr Marks is even aware of his sheer audacity. In making this assertion, he flies in the face of a remarkable amount of received libertarian wisdom, from eminences as great as Mises and Rothbard. As a contrarian myself, I take my hat off to him.
Still, I wonder if he ever made the effort to grasp the libertarian arguments, made by Rothbard et al, that he so blithely dismisses. Is he even aware of the logical difficulties entailed in repudiating them? Does he deny that state enforcement of titles to land that is both vacant and unimproved reduces the amount available for homesteading? Does he deny that the reduced availability of something relative to demand is the very definition of “scarcity,” or that the reduction of supply relative to demand leads to increased price? Or is his argument rather with Rothbard’s moral premises themselves, rather than the logical process by which he makes deductions from them? I.e., does he deny that property in unimproved and vacant land is an invalid grant of privilege by the state, and thereby repudiate Locke’s principle of just acquisition?
It seems unlikely, on the face of things, that Mr Marks would expressly repudiate Mises and Rothbard on these points. After all, elsewhere in his critique he cites Human Action and Man, Economy and State as authorities. Perhaps he just blanked out on the portions of their work that weren’t useful for his apologetic purposes.
In any case, if he does not repudiate either Rothbard’s premises or his reasoning, Mr Marks has dug himself into a deep hole. For by Rothbard’s Lockean premises, not only the state’s own property in land, but “private” titles to vacant and unimproved land, are illegitimate. Likewise, titles derived from state grants are illegitimate when they enable the spurious “owner” to collect rent from the rightful owner – the person who first mixed his labor with the land, his heirs and assigns. And the artificial scarcity of land resulting from such illegitimate property titles raises the marginal price of land relative to that of labor, and forces labor to pay an artificially high share of its wages for the rent or purchase of land….”
I didn’t read the whole debate, but I can say that Mr. Carson’s argument is well demonstrated in the state of Oregon, where state mandated land-use planning has been in force since the mid-70’s. Each city is required to maintain an urban plan that defines an urban growth boundary that stipulates what lands are classified as commercial,residential, commercial, industrial etc. Lands outside the UGB are typically EFU (Exclusive farm use) in the populated areas of the state. The effects are manifold but the general tendency has been to suppress non-UGB land values and artifically inflate others. It also has the result of benefitting the politically connected, such as large developers, in any zoning disputes. It is also commonplace to find nearly all industrial zoned property in the smaller cities owned by a single person/corp.
I would disagree with some of this other positions, though. In the instance of timber prices, for example, it matters less whether the timberlands are private, state or federal but rather what the allowable cuts are. The general tendency in an era of restricted logging (public lands only) is the overcutting of timber from private tracts. There are other factors influencing this as well, such as revenues from severance taxes that benefit counties and municipalites. I think I’ve digressed…
Thanks a lot, Lila. To my dismay, Mr. Marks apparently suffered some sort emotional meltdown in the comment thread under the Libertarian Alliance blog post announcing the publication. Toward the end, it was like Gorgan the Friendly Angel chanting “Death to you all. Death to you all.”
I recall Paul Marks storming off denouncing the Libertarian Alliance as having turned into a bunch of socialists.
I think the last straw was Sean Gabb defending Kevin.
The reaction is sadly all too common from some groups of libertarian, especially those who deny the possibility of an anti-authoritarian left or socialism.
Hi –
Haven’t gone into this in much detail, but off hand, I’d say that there should be some presumption in favor of the validity of contracts. In other words, the burden of proof in specific cases would be with the person who wants to prove the contract to be fraudulent.
I am bringing this up because of a previous debate between Kinsella and Spangler over support for ACORN squatters. I don’t know the specifics of the situation there, so I won’t venture to comment on that, but in general you’d have to find a bit something a bit more specific to the particular contract you entered into, in order to
1) find it fraudulent
2) judge yourself the sole or principal victim of the fraud
3) judge yourself the valid recipient of any change in ownership resulting from the contract having been proved fraudulent.
That’s just a general proposition….
It doesn’t address the ACORN situation which I don’t know enough about to comment on
Rep Ron Paul, Daniel Hannan, Lew Rockwell, Jason Sorens, R.J. Harris, Cody Willard & Shelly Roche, Free State Project, Secession, Nationalization FREEDOM WATCH!!! 2PM EST TODAY (Wed., Apr. 29th)! http://www.foxnews.com/strategyroom
There was a similar debate over the South Central Farmers in LA, with divisions between those sympathizing with the farmers and with Horowitz being pretty intense.
In general, I think the burden of proof should fall on anyone who wants to evict someone from the space they occupy. If that’s a tenant, even under Lockean property rules the burden is on the landlord to produce evidence of title, the terms of the rental contract, etc., and not be able to simply evict the tenant without first going through some sort of due process.
In addition, I agree with the Rothbardians that any title to vacant and unimproved land should be null and void. And in circumstances where the land is worked by people whose ancestors have occupied it for generations, and paying rent to someone whose title is pretty obviously feudal, the burden of proof for nullifying the title should be low. Obviously there should be some attempt at due process, but in the case of haciendas/latifundios, “the soil to the tiller” should be pretty much the default position.
Hi Kevin –
I have no problem with emphasizing usufruct in areas where that has been the common understanding
Usufruct is not possession, though..
I don’t think I would sympathize with someone who just happened to be squatting on property for a length of time and had never looked into the ownership issue because of the owners not being around…and then staked a claim.
If an author did not exert copyright over written material in one instance, it does not preclude them from exerting it later, right?
Now, I am not talking here about large landholders but of small holders. In Inida, squatters rights are well developed and people often lose, say, their grandmother’s small cottage, because they didn’t live close by and a family just occupied. Then the owner has to go to court to defend what is theirs by any understanding. It’s one reason why markets can be very very risky.
As for haciendas or latifundias, again, I think it would depend on the specific case, and theoretically, if the land was acquired legally and justly, say, through inheritance, it seems to me to be very difficult to just void that ownership.
Lockean mixing of labor (if one wanted to accept Locke as a final authority on that) presumably doesn’t include mixing it where someone else had already mixed it previously…even if the ownership claim had not been asserted at the time of occupation or squatting.
In the cases you mention, of squatting on land that unknown to the squatter was previously owned, the relevant question IMO is not whether it was legally required, but what should be the proper criteria for ascertaining ownership. If the only legitimate way to appropriate vacant and unimproved land is through admixture of labor, a title founded on state grants of vacant and unimproved land to someone who in turn simply charged others for access to it, should not prejudice the person who actually homesteaded it by labor. By definition, a piece of vacant and unimproved land should be considered unowned, and any preemptive title to such land not accompanied by actual use should be dismissed as invalid.
Any claimed right to collect rent from the people actually working the land and their descendants, based on a land grant to conquistadors or William of Normandy’s chief vassals, should be regarded as null and void and the people working the land recognized as rightful owners.
Locke was not defining the process of “privatization of the commons” so much as trying to philosophically justify the theft of the lands of the North American aboriginals which was occurring JUST at the time of his writings (from Wiki: “Detractors note that (in 1671) he was a major investor in the English slave-trade through the Royal Africa Company, as well as through his participation in drafting the Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas while Shaftesbury’s secretary, which established a feudal aristocracy and gave a master absolute power over his slaves. They note that as a secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673-4) and a member of the Board of Trade (1696-1700) Locke was, in fact, “one of just half a dozen men who created and supervised both the colonies and their iniquitous systems of servitude”[6] Some see his statements on unenclosed property as having justified the displacement of the Native Americans. Because of his opposition to aristocracy and slavery in his major writings, he is accused of hypocrisy, or of caring only for the liberty of English capitalists.”
Anybody using Locke as a philosophical guide would seem to be on very shaky MORAL ground. That would especially apply to Rothbard who conveniently takes the liberty to give “our man” Friday as much free land as he needs (on Crusoe Island in Ethics of Liberty) in order to have Friday be able to get into even-steven trading with Crusoe, and then uses that tradiong (arising from the Rothbard -supplied free land) to justify modern-day Fridays being uncompensated for their loss of the “right to free access to land” which Tom Paine (in his “Agrarian Justice” plan) demonstrates is required for a “right to life” to be anything besides “a clever phrase to get the boobs to fight your Revolution for you”.
Alan: I use Locke more as a limiting factor on the power of landlords than to empower them. Whatever Locke’s own motivations and his questionable ties to the Whig oligarchy, his ideas took on a life of their own and influenced a good number of radical and socialist thinkers (including one of my favorites, Thomas Hodgskin). Whatever Locke’s intentions, his thought has become a common legacy and is “contested terrain” for a wide range of interpretations. In other words, people like Hodgskin and Oppenheimer and Nock created a Locke who should have existed, even if he really didn’t.
And it’s simply a fact that Lockeanism, literally applied, would operate as dynamite at the foundations of the present system of de jure property titles.
Of course I don’t consider American Indian hunting grounds or cultivated areas to be “virgin land” or “unowned.” And since I don’t think Crusoe “owned” the sections of the island he hadn’t actually cultivated, Friday didn’t need permission to use any unused portion he damn well pleased without permission.
You missed my point with Friday and Crusoe. Rothbard gives Friday some unowned land so his theory will work, but in the real world, governments “privatize” ALL the land they claim and cut off everyone from free access to all their claimed lands (which today includes pretty much every square foot of land – and certainly all arable land – on the planet).
Paine’s point was that land-owners owe the rest of us compensation for impairing our “right to free access to land”. He wanted to assess a charge when land was transferred from one owner to another (and thereby create the first Social Security program; see his “Agrarian Justice” plan), whereas I point out that the ACTUAL owner of any land is the government that can defend a claim to that land, and that how that government parcels out that land (via all the “property title” bs that you rwlib guys like to immerse yourselves in) for development is irrelevant to actual ownership. In other words, “Lockeanism”, real or otherwise, is bullshit, and that, if governments paid appropriate compensation to the people whose “right to free access to land” they have impaired, the world would be a far better, far more just place. (This would seem to be the rwlib “blind spot”.)
In fact, you could easily argue that the failure of governments to pay compensation for abrogating everyone’s right of free access to land is the cause of most of the world’s inequities. For starters, if all people were paid such compensation, the price of wage labor (at least for crappy jobs) would be a lot higher (which is, of course, the main reason why the people who make the biggest profits off that labor – and who also tend to be very influential in determining what capitalistically-oriented governments do or fail to do – would have a vested interest in making sure such just compensation is never paid).
With higher wages (and more personal capital), people would have less need for bank loans. So who might have a vested interest in making sure that people need as many bank loans as possible? hmmm…tough one…how about the same people that took over the country in 1787: those monopoly-on-money-claiming, Ponzi-scheming, fractional-reserve mongering, booms-and-busts-caused-by-over-leveraging-loans BANKERS!!!
Not their fault really: the problem is the maze, not the rats who run through it and ring the bells to get the cheese. The only way to get different results is to change the maze (the system). If we get control of our money back from the bankers and commence paying ourselves the above-mentioned just compensation, bingo, bingo: no credit crisis, no massive unemployment, no need for socialistic welfare, no need for income taxes, etc, etc. The plan is detailed on the “alajac” profile at http://www.u4prez.com.
two more things:
1. I recently read that the total net worth of U.S. property (not including all the people who prbably should also count for something) is
340 TRILLION DOLLARS. That would seem to me to be sufficient backing for a U.S. dollar (which I propose should replace Federal Reserve notes). Would the new U.S. dollar be “convertable”? Absolutely, by purchasing gold with it at whatever gold happens to cost that day; you would keep the value of the currency (and prices) stable by draining out as many dollars as you were adding in over during any particular time period. Not rocket science. See the plan on the “alajac” profile at http://www.u4prez.com for details.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice