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From: nrh@inmet.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: A Question for Libertarians
Message-ID: <1754@inmet.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Oct-84 01:11:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: inmet.1754
Posted: Thu Oct 25 01:11:46 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Oct-84 06:17:59 EDT
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Nf-ID: #R:hao:-122000:inmet:7800145:000:4199
Nf-From: inmet!nrh    Oct 24 02:31:00 1984

>***** inmet:net.politics / hao!ward / 10:28 pm  Oct 20, 1984
>[]
>Every posting and all correspondence I have seen from Libertarians
>indicates that they base their strong adherance to property rights
>on two principles: the right of a human to control his own self,
>and the right of a human to control what he creates his own self.

Do not forget the right of a human to assign control of property
to other humans....
>
>This seems to exclude the right of a human to own land, which
>was not created by any human.

Not at all.  Nothing whatever is "created" by humans -- try making
pottery without clay, electronics without metal and silicon, cheese
without milk, and so forth.  The "original owner" of land is the 
person who first claims it and uses it.  Libertarians differ
on what happens when the land is not, in fact, used.  (Note that 
"use" need not be industrial development: wetlands are "used" by 
duck hunters, private parks are "used" by park rangers and invited guests
or owners).  I believe Murry Rothbard holds that if land is not
possessed continuously it reverts to the "unowned" state, but I'm
not up on the finer points.

>and seems to make very problematical
>the situation where a human must give the fruits of his labor
>to another to avoid starving.

This is, in a nutshell, the problem lots of people have when they first
hear libertarian ideas.  Socialists in particular argue that a starving
man is not free, and therefore only through whatever measures are necessary
to prevent starvation can man be freed.

This is an emotionally satisfying sort of argument, until one realizes
that there are no measures that are absolutely guaranteed to prevent
starvation, that by attempting to take such measures, one will give up
more and more freedom, and that people will still starve.  How free are
they?  Is it possible that on balance, a society of unfettered people
with some starving is freer than a society of slaves, all of whom eat?

Now consider.  Suppose that it is NOT POSSIBLE to feed all the slaves --
that the mechanism by which one turns people into slavers and enslaved
has some economic inefficiency, so that some of the slaves still starve.

NOW was it a good idea to enslave people to prevent starvation?

I have, of course, exaggerated here to make a point: it is difficult,
probably impossible, to measure the "net gain" or "net loss" of freedom.
By enslaving everybody a little bit, you might feed more people.  Did
that make the society more or less free than when you found it?  On the
other hand, it IS possible to say: this or that law restricts this person's
freedom -- and if the only justification of the law is a hazy, hard-to-measure
notion that somehow it will increase society's net freedom, well....

In a hypothetical libertarian society where initiation of force or 
fraud are the only crimes,  our starvation-avoiding laborer is free
to find other markets for his labor (as the factors of the other markets
are free to find him).  No mechanism for institutionalizing his
slavish dependence on a particular market exists.

In a society with a government (originally
imposed, perhaps, to help this laborer) the person whom he is forced
to give his labor to may corrupt the local officials and thus keep
the laborer from being allowed to seek other markets.  This corruption
need not be illegal -- indeed it mostly is not: thus railroads were
finally able to fix prices only AFTER they were regulated, and the 
railroads came to control the regulators.  (To explain: in the
railroad example, farmers were critically dependent on railroads,
but the railroads were unable to collude for price fixing.  The farmer
was thus in the position of the laborer critically dependent on 
someone else -- but he didn't suffer that much until pricefixing
made it impossible for him to get competitive prices from the
railroads).

To sum up: we ALL benefit from a free society, since almost all
of us MUST trade the fruits of our labors (or the labors themselves)
for food and necessities.  Restrictions on freedom in order to prevent
starvation provide a ready avenue for institutionalizing what could
otherwise be transient dependencies.

Hope this helps.