Comments Elsewhere

Micha, replying to Scott:

So you are making a positive and not a normative claim?

Scott:

Yes.

The problem here is that you can’t make purely positive claims about property; to say that A owns P is to make a statement that involves normative claims about A, P, and what A can do with P. (“Owning” a piece of property just means having certain rights with respect to how it is used.)

For example, to say that the State has the right to transfer property rights in all the means of production, by fiat, to the Politburo, is to say that the State can (at will) give itself the right to do whatever it likes with the factories, mills, mines, etc.; that it will be within its rights to “recover” its new property from those holding it, using proportional violence if necessary; that anyone who resists the legally authorized grab by either passive resistance or violence will be trespassing or aggressing against State officials (and can rightly be punished for it); and that any successful effort to keep capital in private hands in spite of State efforts to “recover” it will in fact be organized theft and (since it disrupts the Politburo’s exercise of their newly-minted “property rights”), violent interference with the free market. These are all weighty normative claims that Scott’s theory seems to entail; apparently by State fiat innocents can be transformed into thieves and politically-connected brigands into peaceful property owners. I wonder if “for legal purposes, at least” they can make up into down, too.

If you make claims about how property rights are determined you’re making a normative claim, not a positive one. And treating government edicts as if they had unlimited authority to determine legitimate property rights is not conducive to libertarian politics.