Comments Elsewhere

Kevin,

Thanks for the round-up, and for the analysis.

A couple of points, in reverse order.

First, I don’t think it’s safe to infer from what’s been posted that the lot was never developed by Horowitz and the other real estate investors who held it prior to the 1985 seizure. Maybe it was, but maybe it wasn’t. It was a vacant lot in 1994, when the farmers got to it, due to the city government’s decision to mothball the trash incinerator project that they’d intended to put up on the land. But there may very well have been something there prior to the mothballing of the project, which was bulldozed after the city seized the property. From what I can gather the formal method by which the city seized the land involved a condemnation order, which indicates that there might have been some structures on the land. I just don’t know yet; Dain and Brad are trying to find out what the property looked like before the city government sank its claws into it.

Second, I actually don’t see how the money that the city government gave Horowitz in the forced “sale” matters on the question of whether Horowitz has a claim to the land. Since the transfer was made under duress, throwing some money at Horowitz doesn’t invalidate whatever claims he has to recovery of the land itself, if he would prefer that to the money. It’s true that if you rob me of $1,000 in gold and then give me $400 back in silver, I’d only be entitled to recover $600 more back from you, not the full $1,000 in gold. But that’s because the value of the metals is monetary, and the money is fungible, so by giving me back $400 in silver you’ve effectively given me back part of what you stole from me in the first place. If you forced me at gunpoint to sell my car to you for $1,000, then I’m still fully entitled to recover the car itself, not just enough money to make up the difference between the forced sale price and whatever price I would have freely agreed to sell the car at. I’m entitled to recover the whole thing, because it never stopped being my property; it just stopped being in my immediate possession. Maybe I should return the money that you gave me for the car once I’ve recovered it, but I doubt that that’s true, either.

Third, I didn’t state my position clearly enough in the post and had to clarify it in the following comment thread. I don’t think that anything that the the government seizes automatically counts as unowned and suitable for homesteading. My position is that governments don’t have any property rights in anything, so if the city government claims title to the lot it is morally either unowned, or else owned by someone else. However, if the property was seized directly from one or more identifiable victims, then those victim have a legitimately enforceable claim to recovery of the property that was stolen from them.

That would tend to count in favor of Horowitz’s moral right to reclaim his former share of the land, as the right-Rothbardians have been arguing. (It would, of course, do nothing at all to justify his forcible seizure of the entire lot; there’s no excuse for treating that as anything but an act of privateering under the State’s colors.) But I think that other factors undermine the claim that he has to his former share of the land.

Specifically, while Horowitz may have a claim to recover compensation for the lost property from the city officials who stole it from him, he lost his claim to recover the property itself when the farmers began to cultivate it. That’s because the property had been abandoned for years when they came to it. Now, the abandonment resulted from the city’s seizure of the property and its enforcement of a piratical property title on it; since Horowitz et al. only “abandoned” their former property under duress, that does not affect his right to come back later and demand compensation for the lost property. But it does affect innocent third parties’ right to treat the land as open for homesteading. And once the farmers have established a claim on the abandoned property through years of transformational labor, Horowitz can no longer recover his property out from under them. Since he made no public effort to recover the land until nearly a decade after the farmers had begun to cultivate the land, his only legitimate claim, if he has any, is against the city officials. The farmers don’t owe him anything.

While I disagee with the position that Horowitz has a right to recover a share of the land by dint of rightful ownership, I don’t think it’s beyond the pale. I can’t say the same thing for the sorts of arguments advanced by the anti-farmers commenters at Hit and Run. The entire argument boils down to the claim that we are morally obligated to defend every arbitrary entitlement to a share of the loot that’s handed out by the State, because that’s how the pirates’ code says the booty should be divvied up. I guess that if people want to interpret “private property rights” as nothing more than that, they can; the piratical view of property rights has a well-established pedigree. But they ought to at least have the decency to stop calling themselves “libertarians” if they are going to advance that sort of argument, and come up with a new, more descriptive name for themselves, such as “Constitutionalists,” or “entitlementarians,” or perhaps “liberal Mussolinists.”