crispy,

No doubt, but how does that make it a "moral accomplishment" on the part of the psychopathic abuser? It was better when Stalin died than when he was alive, but I don't think death counts as a "moral accomplishment" for Josef Vissarionovich, at least not under any ordinary usage of the term "moral."

…but that’s a say-so.

Well, no, that does not follow — not unless you have just ignored my specific claim to the effect that “What they’ve earned is a matter of what they do,” not what they or someone else say about what they do. Perhaps you disagree with this claim; but if so you need to give an argument against it, not just proceed with an argument that presupposes its falsity.

My intent in citing “the government is bigger than anyone” is to counter the argument that “property is what you can hold in your hand”.

OK, so you’re countering an argument that nobody in this thread made. But why?

You made a claim earlier that one cannot have property protections without government, and NoPublic responded with a way that you could. The claim was not that anything someone successfully defends is (therefore) their property; rather, the claim was that if something is someone’s property, it can indeed be successfully defended even without the state. Your entire argument seems to be a confusion of claims about necessary condition with claims about sufficient conditions. And your response seems to amount to “Well, property is what the government can hold in its hand, because government is more powerful than anybody.” The bit after the “because” is false (governments fail and fall all the time), but even if it were not, what you’ve just recommended is no less authoritarian than the theory you thought you were responding to.

How does that deny the notion that abstract concepts can be treated as property–protected, exploited, transferred, sold, repossessed, etcetera?

Dude, I have no idea what you’re talking about here. NoPublic’s implicit objection to “intellectual property” laws? I don’t think I said anything about that one way or the other. (As it happens, I am against so-called “intellectual property,” but I’m not very interested in arguing the reasons why here — I don’t think it has much to do with this thread of conversation.)

The businessman running the cafe can “have a problem” with whatever he wants. What I am honestly saying is that he shouldn’t be able to deal with his business problems by having his competition arrested. I don’t believe that it’s government’s job to protect the bottom lines or captive markets of the economically privileged. Do you?

As for the police and lemonade, I’m sure that nobody in government very much likes making little kids cry. However, it is manifestly clear that they are willing to threaten children with fines and arrest if that’s what it takes to rigorously The Rules — which in this case happen to be Rules designed to enforce a set of anticompetitive regulations expressly designed to uphold the economic privilege of local capitalists.

Decent people often end up doing something cruel without quite realizing it, when they pursue a fixed policy, but decent people will generally stop and reconsider their life choices when they see that, for example, the Rules that they are insisting on involve pointless hostility towards innocent children, taking away a kid’s lemonade stands even though the kid isn’t hurting anyone or anything by having it, threatening children with insane punishments simply for playing a game without specific, detailed permission in advance. Realizing that you have made a child cry for no real reason at all is the sort of thing, in real life, outside of political power-trip la-la land, often serves as an effective reductio of the kind of rules you’ve been insisting on. But if there is one thing that legalistic sanctimony does, it is to do everything it can to cripple people’s sense of decency, and to obliterate any sort of scruple or principled argument in favor of the crudest appeals to authority.

And that is why I believe in getting legal force out of human relations to the extent that it is possible to do so.

On the bus, I pass by, literally dozens of small businesses who have somehow managed to deal with the regulations that come with opening a business. And I’m pretty sure only a small amount of them are rich and well-connected.

Nobody is claiming that there is no such thing as a small business. The left-libertarian claim is, generally, that in a freed market there would be many more small businesses, including a rich set of “microenterprises” far smaller than the storefront businesses that you seem to be thinking of, than there currently are. Not because it’s impossible to start one now, but because it is both difficult and costly. Not (just) because of the costs and risks that are inevitably involved in any business venture, but because the regulatory market makes it overwhelmingly more difficult, more risky and more costly than normal market factors would make it.

When I walked around my old neighborhood in southeast Las Vegas, I saw a fair number of “small,” locally owned businesses in which hardworking but relatively privileged and comfortable “small businesspeople” had set up shops. (These are in small storefronts that typically cost about $1,000-$2,000/mo for rent, or in out-parcel buildings that cost much more.)
But of course those who make enough money at their business to pay $1,000-$2,000 a month for a small storefront are already people who have, and are making, a fair amount of money, or at least have decent access to credit. I also saw a lot of the local homeless people who barely scratched by by gathering up discarded goods from dumpsters and curbsides, loading them into grocery carts, and carrying them down to an impromptu swap meet on some of the empty parking lots in the neighborhood. I suppose you can guess which of these two groups was more likely to have cops show up and force them to close up shop because they hadn’t paid out a hundred bucks for a business license. You probably also can guess which group of entrepreneurs was, relatively, more wealthy and more well-connected than the other.

Anyway. Where the regulatory state really cuts against small businesses, on the margin, is amongst people who would be able to make a living, in a very small scale business, but don’t have tends of thousands of dollars a year to spend on commercially-zoned storefronts, licenses, inspections, etc. etc. etc. And amongst those who can afford these things for the moment, but whose business is constantly on the edge of failure because of the very high fixed costs that the regulatory structure forces upon them.

(About 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years; but the reason for that is not just because it’s so hard to start a business. It’s because businesses face a cost structure that is extensively rigged in the direction of high compliance costs and potentially disastrous legal punishments.)

Right now, the kind of regulations that left-libertarians typically complain about (e.g., those that effectively require food vendors to have a separate, extraordinarily expensive commercial kitchen; those that exclude them from running businesses out of their homes; those that require them to spend hundreds of dollars on a business license before they can so much as sell things off a folding table or out of the back of a truck) cut against small businesses in general, and most of all against the kind of worker-run microenterprise that many ordinary people might easily be able to engage in, were it not for legal restrictions that effectively require you to be in a socioeconomic position to join the ranks of established “small businesspeople.”

So let’s check in on the conversation about Lemonade Freedom Day.

Libertarian: You know, I don’t think the police should be threatening or arresting children for setting up lemonade stands without asking government permission.

DensityDuck: Oh yeah? By that logic, you must not have any problem with BUMS squeegeeing windshields, or people COMPETING WITH wealthy established brick-and-mortar businesses, or ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS [sic] making a living without paying taxes.

Libertarian: You know, you’re right. I don’t have any problem with that. I kind of like it when the poor and socially marginalized are not harassed or arrested by police for peaceful attempts to make a better living for themselves. And I don’t think government should mainly be in the business of busting working folks or criminalizing their survival strategies, for the sake of the aesthetic sensitivities or the business interests overwhelmingly more privileged people and “established businesses.”

DensityDuck: You libertarians are all a bunch of capitalist tools!

Incidentally, I’d like to encourage you to get rid of the racist, scapegoating crap about “illegal immigrants” (i.e., undocumented workers) trying to make a living for themselves. There is nothing wrong with being from another country, and the problem with so-called “illegal immigration,” insofar as there is one, is the government’s brutally racist and classist persecution of desperate, marginalized people. Not the immigrants themselves.

DensityDuck: Congratulations, you’ve identified the difference between fee simple and allodial title.

Well, no, the comment you’re quoting had nothing in particular to do with the legal distinction between fee simple and allodial title. My remark was not limited to real property at all, but intended to encompass property in chattels as well as in land and other immovables. The point rather has to do with the distinction between claims based on moral right and claims based on superior force.

In your earlier comment, you first claim that “Property is something you have no matter how many guns either side has,” but then you say that it has to do with the what the government says belongs to you, because (?) the government has more guns than anybody else. The difficulty here, you see, is that if you’ve just said appeals to force are just a matter of “who’s the bigger monkey?” and not really a matter of property rights, then it seems odd to try to justify government’s exclusive say-so on questions of property rights by appealing to its full-spectrum dominance in the use of force. My own approach is, by contrast, that property rights are not a matter of anyone’s say-so, but rather a matter of what people have earned the right to, and what they’ve earned the right to is a matter of what they do, not a matter of what first, second or third parties say about it.

Which, when acting in the role you suggest they could play here, are functionally identical to a government and can be treated as one.

Functionally identical for your purposes, maybe; not for mine. Government is not just a matter of what an institution does but how it does it; governments are institutions which claim not only the right to settle disputes, but a special kind of sovereignty over dispute-settling, and they are thus, among other things, centralized, monopolistic, territorial, tax-funded, and non-consensual. But it is perfectly possible to conceive of social institutions that do various things that government claims to do (e.g. protecting rightful claims of property) while lacking one or some or all of those features — that are, for example, non-territorial, or funded only by voluntary contributions, or don’t make any claims of an exclusive prerogative, or…. Now, maybe you want to claim that a non-governmental institution would be ineffective at defending property claims if it didn’t have all the features that sovereign governments have (e.g. territorial monopoly or non-consensual sources of funding). You can do that, but if you do, you need to argue for that position, not simply define the alternative out of existence. Or you might want to use the word “government” in a broader sort of way — for example, not to mean a territorial monopoly on the legally legitimated use of force etc. etc., but rather just something like “any institution that offers effective settlements of interpersonal or social conflicts, no matter how it does so.” If that’s how you want to use the word, you can do that too, but you should then realize that you’re now discussing many institutions that are “governments” by your definition, but not “governments” in the sense that free-market Anarchists oppose.

Ah-heh. Your “view” lets me justify taking anything from anyone, because all I have to do is declare that they haven’t got the moral right to it.

I don’t know why you put “view” in scare quotes. I promise you that it really is a view, not something else. (What else would it be? An end-table? A duck?) And it really is mine.

Anyway, all this would be an accurate criticism if I held that moral rights are a matter of what you personally declare moral or immoral. I don’t, so it’s not.

In fact I specifically contrasted moral relationships (as I use that term) with relationships which are defined either by force or by arbitrary say-so.

If property is a moral concept rather than an objective one then it doesn’t exist. The whole point of property is its objectivity.

And this would be an accurate criticism if I agreed with your (apparent) view that moral relationships are somehow “not objective” relationships. But I don’t, so it’s not.

There are probably too many cans of worms already open at the moment, so let me table the word “moral” for the moment, and just repeat that on my view property rights are not a matter of “declaration” at all (not by you, not by the state, and not by any other party). They are a matter of what, objectively, you have done or have not done with respect to the stuff that you are claiming as your property. Not what the government says about what you have done, but what you have in fact done.

That’s not “property”. That’s “I’m a bigger monkey”. Property is something you have no matter how many guns either side has, …

Well, there’s the part where you say it….

because the government (who has more guns than anyone) …

… And there’s the part where you take it back.

My own view is that ownership is primarily a moral, not a legal, relationship, and doesn’t depend on what some authority declares you have a right to, but rather on what you have earned the right to by your actions. Getting a declaration from the biggest monkey of them all is no doubt a clever way to secure your position, but it has no strong relationship to the moral question of property rights. Sometimes governments respect rightful property claims; a lot of the time they don’t (I would argue that they are especially likely to ignore or bulldoze over the rightful claims of the poor and socially marginalized).

Considering that the kind of abstract concepts like “property” can only be protected by non-private actors (i.e. a government)…

I don’t know what justifies the “i.e.” instead of an “e.g.” here. Government is not the only kind of “non-private actor” that might involve itself in questions of property claims or disputes over questions of legal right. There are lots of social institutions other than government; what Anarchists generally suggest is not that we do away with all social institutions in favor of everyone for herself and devil take the hindmost; rather, what we propose is that one particular social institution (the coercive monopoly known as the State) should stop usurping control over all other institutions, and should stop demanding the unique privilege to confiscate the material support for its activities by means of force. Part of the reason for this is because we value sociality so much and would like to see free association able to flourish and address social needs outside of the coercive confines of political government.

Second, I would venture that nearly all government favors to corporations come through the regulatory system, not through subsidies (we’ll set aside the military-industrial complex for now, though we shouldn’t).

Tracking the regressive effects of the regulatory state is really important, but even if we are just comparing chunks of the budget, I’d also note that if you include subsidies to J.P. Morgan Chase, say, or AIG, the balance looks … somewhat less tipped in the direction of so-called “social spending.” I hear those guys got a little bit of money from the government a couple years back.

"Though I do not have any evidence to prove it, I personally believe and would not be surprised if websites such as Antiwar.com and groups that further conspiracy theories about 9/11 are having money funneled to them via indirect means from political Islamist groups as part of an effort to undermine US military and clandestine efforts in the middle east to stop terrorism in order to create doubt in people's minds about U.S. foreign policy in the court of public opinion."

Good God. So let's just pretend, for a moment, that you did not< just admit that this is a completely unsupported bare-ass guess on your part. Let's just pretend that this were not a smear based on nothing but insinuation and what you openly admit to be evidence-free wild speculation. Let's pretend, for the moment, that when you said this you were holding a list in your hand with the names of 205 organizations who had been proven to have received money from some particular jihadist or Islamist group at some point (let's say Hamas, Hizbollah, Jemaah Islamiyah, whatever), and that you saw Antiwar.com's name on it.

Well, OK. If that were true, then so what? What crime would they have committed? What would justify their being held, raided, arrested, or jailed by federal agents?

People have a right to publish opinions which "create doubt in people's minds about U.S. foreign policy in the court of public opinion." And people have a right to take donations from others who share the same doubts. And it is the height of anti-libertarian police-statist garbage to propsoe that people's right to engage in peaceful free speech is somehow contingent on their first thoroughly investigating every single donor in order to make sure that those donors are not on the government's public or secret blacklists. Are you accusing Antiwar.com of participating in any form of violence against person or property? Are you accusing them of providing material support to groups who do? Or are you really just doing what it looks like you are doing -- trying to smear people on the basis of who might agree with them on one or two isolated issues?

If the Mafia orders pizza from your restaurant, that's not a reason to investigate your restaurant, and if jihadist groups choose to channel some of their money away from carbombs and into peaceful contributions to public discourse over the warfare State, then they damn well ought to be encouraged to do so, rather than the (witting or unwitting) recipients of the donations being surveilled or raided by federal agents.

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Hume:

There are many legal posivists, Hart included, that specifically reject any connection between legal statements and moral statements

Well, I know that they say that, but saying that you reject any connection between legal obligation and moral obligation is not the same thing as actually giving an account of legal obligation without “smuggling in” moral principles. The point of calling it “smuggling,” after all, is to say that the importation is concealed rather than explicitly acknowledged, and it’s not uncommon, you know, for a philosopher’s arguments to tacitly rely on premises which the philosopher would not explicitly acknowledge, or would even, if asked, try to deny.