Comments Elsewhere

Macer:

Saudi Arabia allows NO immigration period. They only allow temporary workers in.

This is a form of immigration, just as Bush’s crackpot scheme for a bracero program is a form of immigration. Workers live and work in Saudi Arabia for substantial periods of time. The fact that they are denied legal rights that they ought, by right, to have, and that this results in very shitty treatment, says many bad things about the Saudi dictatorship but it does not say that they don’t allow immigration by non-Muslims.

Anyway, now what? What do you think that the shitty selective immigration policies imposed by Saudi royals entails about how you can treat ordinary Muslims? (I.E., people other than Saudi royals)

Macker:

You use other ideological concepts like “non-person” that I just don’t use.

People have rights. To claim that Jones does not have rights anymore just is to claim that you have no more obligations to her than you do to a rock, or perhaps a wild animal. It means that you can, without doing anything wrong to her, beat her, take the house she lives in or the things she uses, enslave her, or kill her. You might think that there are other reasons that you shouldn’t do these things (just as there are reasons you might not want to smash a rock) but on your avowed position, none of the reasons not to do these things to an avowed anti-propertarian involve her moral standing as a fellow human being.

That’s treating someone as a non-person. If you don’t like your position being so described, then you should change your position.

There are plenty of good reasons not to steal from someone who makes a phony assertion that property rights do not exist. If however his claim is genuine, then his property rights cannot be one of them. If genuine then he has rejected all claims to property so there is no reason for him to even complain. It would be physically impossible to steal from him, he has nothing to steal.

Whether or not Jones can consistently complain about you taking stuff from her against her will is immaterial to whether or not you are actually violating her rights. Property rights do not come from your claim to hold property and they don’t evaporate if you cease to make those claims. Jones could, of course, abandon all her property—by setting it out at the curb, for example, or inviting people onto her land to take it. But just saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything” is not an abandonment of your property; it’s just a statement of (mistaken) philosophical belief.

Suggesting that you have the right to use force to take stuff away from someone who holds foolish beliefs about property rights is, of course, both unhinged and totalitarian—whether or not you actually think you ought to do it.

(You can, of course, abandon property. But saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything”, while continuing to hold onto and to use your property exactly as you always have, may be hypocritical, but it’s not an act of abandonment.)

Besides where do you get the idea that all of the sudden I have this desire to steal from the other guy and beat the shit out of him (assault him) just because he denied the right to property. That’s just one right. He didn’t deny the right to be free from unprovoked assault, did he.

I think the distinction you’re trying to draw here is spurious: the reason that you have a right to alienable property is ultimately the same as the reason you have a right not to be assaulted; if you deny someobdy the one then you ultimately deny them the other. But suppose that it were not so. Then so what? If someone did say, “I believe that human beings have the right to assault or enslave other human beings if they can get away with it,” that would certainly a wicked belief. But does that give you the right to assault or enslave the person who utters it? If so, why?

People have rights because they are people. They don’t lose them by being bad people. Not even if they commit crimes. It would be bad enough if your theory entailed that criminals have no rights (what I originally took it to entail); but from what you have said it appears that you actually believe that having bad thoughts—a vice, not a crime—is enough to do the job. That’s not libertarianism; it’s totalitarianism, or possibly sociopathy.