skews13
Diamond Member
- Mar 18, 2017
- 10,021
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The fundamental flaw in libertarian thinking is its failure to take into account the interdependent nature of social life and, in particular, how property is acquired, and must be acquired, in a settled society.
We are all born propertyless.
This is as true for the person who eventually becomes a billionaire as it is for the impoverished. The only way to acquire property in a settled society, where all the natural resources have been divvied up and are already owned by someone, is to acquire it from those who already have it. Those who cannot acquire property from those who own it will die.
If we now say that property owners have the right to do whatever they like with their property – share it or not, hire people or not – this is as much as to say that they have the right to determine, at their sole discretion, who, among those who do not yet have property, shall live and who shall die, who shall prosper and who shall founder, who shall have the opportunity to fulfill their potentialities and whose potentialities shall be quashed. In effect, it is to say that property owners have a right to establish a tyranny over everyone else.
In other words, to grant that people have the property rights that libertarians claim is to grant that some (the propertied) have the right to deprive others of the very things libertarians themselves generally claim we all have a right to – life, liberty, and property.
But this amounts to a contradiction. By definition, no one can have a right to deprive others of those things they have a right to.
It follows that there must be a flaw in the libertarian understanding of the right to property – and indeed there is. Wherein lies this flaw? To answer this we need to take a closer look at what the ‘right to property’ really means.
The Libertarian Error
We are all born propertyless.
This is as true for the person who eventually becomes a billionaire as it is for the impoverished. The only way to acquire property in a settled society, where all the natural resources have been divvied up and are already owned by someone, is to acquire it from those who already have it. Those who cannot acquire property from those who own it will die.
If we now say that property owners have the right to do whatever they like with their property – share it or not, hire people or not – this is as much as to say that they have the right to determine, at their sole discretion, who, among those who do not yet have property, shall live and who shall die, who shall prosper and who shall founder, who shall have the opportunity to fulfill their potentialities and whose potentialities shall be quashed. In effect, it is to say that property owners have a right to establish a tyranny over everyone else.
In other words, to grant that people have the property rights that libertarians claim is to grant that some (the propertied) have the right to deprive others of the very things libertarians themselves generally claim we all have a right to – life, liberty, and property.
But this amounts to a contradiction. By definition, no one can have a right to deprive others of those things they have a right to.
It follows that there must be a flaw in the libertarian understanding of the right to property – and indeed there is. Wherein lies this flaw? To answer this we need to take a closer look at what the ‘right to property’ really means.
The Libertarian Error