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Does Star Trek Boldly Go Beyond Scarcity? – Article by Frederik Cyrus Roeder

Does Star Trek Boldly Go Beyond Scarcity? – Article by Frederik Cyrus Roeder

The New Renaissance HatFrederik Cyrus Roeder
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As a long-time Trekkie (with several conventions and selfies with William Shatner) and an economist, I was more than delighted when a good friend of mine gave me the recently published book Trekonomics: The Economics Behind Star Trek by Manu Saadia.

Saadia’s highly exciting book attempts to explain the economy of Star Trek and describes the Federation of United Planets (which includes Earth) as a post-scarcity society that no longer uses money because everyone maximizes their utility by just doing what they want to do. The main driving force behind people’s behavior is vanity, not profit. He calls this economic system “Trekonomics.”

Economics Is an Intergalactic Concept

While describing a post-scarcity society, Saadia admits that there are some resources that are scarce. He mainly focuses on dilithium crystals that are the source of energy in the Star Trek universe:

Logic would dictate that near-absolute abundance has driven prices to zero on all but few strategic goods. These strategic goods are of limited use for most people anyway. I do not need a big chunk of dilithium crystals in the course of my everyday life. Matter-antimatter power plants require it, whether on board starships or on the ground, but not me. I am not in the market for it, society as a whole is.

While Saadia praises the replicator (Star Trek’s version of the universal 3D printer) as the driving force behind post-scarcity, he omits the fact that replicators (and holodecks, and warp drives needed in delivery shuttles bringing the latest vintage of Chateau Picard to your cottage on Mars) require energy in order to create food out of nothing.

If there’s a shortage of dilithium, there needs to be a market in order to efficiently allocate energy. Therefore, every individual is interested in a sufficient supply of dilithium crystals. An analogy to our world can be seen in oil dwells or nuclear power plants. While individuals rarely explore oil fields or build power plants, they do purchase their product (energy) on a daily basis.

Even if every one of the tens of billions of citizens of the Federation would act altruistically, it would be impossible to allocate energy to the projects with the highest priority. Only central planning or a market for energy can solve this.

The 24th century’s technological progress has reduced all physical resources to one: energy. Humans and aliens can nearly produce everything out of energy. This is great and probably significantly cuts down value/supply-chains, but there is still scarcity.

Price Controls in the Trek Universe

The value chain of the Federation’s economy most likely includes the following few stakeholders: dilithium explorers and miners, dilithium transporters/shippers, dilithium power plant operators, power grid operators, B2B replicator manufacturers (those replicators that replicate replicators), replicator owners, and replicator maintenance providers. 

Assuming there’s a natural monopoly in running these services, one company or institution running all of this might also be thinkable (though given our experiences with centrally managed energy supply, I would highly doubt that there’s a natural monopoly in the dilithium value chain).

Without a price for the resource energy, a single individual could deplete the Federation’s dilithium supplies by merely replicating a galaxy full of larger-than-life Seven of Nine action figures. Thus a price system for energy is crucial in order to allow consumer choice in the Federation. The only other way to solve this issue would be the creation of the United Socialist Republics of the Galaxy (USRG) and centrally plan the energy distribution. Good luck with queuing for holodeck time in that USRG!

Light-Speed, Among Other Things, Isn’t Immune to Scarcity

Dilithium seems to perfectly qualify as a private good because both rivalry (it is scarce and you need to find it somewhere in deep and hostile space) and exclusivity (it’s pretty easy to cut someone off the energy grid) apply.

While Saadia acknowledges the scarcity of dilithium, he misses several other scarce goods:

Private Property: rivalry also exists when it comes to the use of land. Imagine a beautiful cliff in Europe that gives you a perfect view of Saturn during sunset. The cliff has space for exactly one cottage. Who decides who can build and live there? Galactic homesteading is probably a feasible means of solving this problem in times of early inter-planetary exploration, but the moment the galaxy gets more crowded, a land-registry proving property rights will be necessary in order to prevent and solve disputes and facilitate the transfer of ownership.

Unique locations and goods: Saadia admits that there’s a scarcity of seats at Sisko’s restaurant or bottles of the famous Chateau Picard, but as people have overcome the idea of enjoying status, they are not interested in over-consuming such gems in the galaxy.

In trekonomics, the absence of money implies that status is not tied to economic wealth or discretionary spending. Conspicuous consumption and luxury have lost their grip on people’s imaginations. The opposition between plenty and scarcity, which under our current conditions determines a large cross section of prices and purchasing behaviors, is no longer relevant.

This reasoning comes short in explaining how people demand dinner at Sisko’s or a good bottle of wine at all, and what happens if the demand is higher than the supply. Would first customers start hoarding? Are there black markets for these non-replicated goods and experiences?

Incentives: a Terran settler on Mars craves the 2309 vintage of Chateau Picard and wants to get it delivered in light speed from the South of France. How do we incentivize the shuttle pilot (beaming wine spoils the tannins) to stop soaking in the sun in the Mediterranean and swing his body behind the helm of a shuttle? How do we compensate him for the time and energy he spent delivering the wine to the Red Planet? If vanity is the major driving force in trekonomics, one can just hope that someone sees more vanity in the delivery of this excellent wine instead of chugging it day-in day-out himself. A more realistic way of getting people to do (annoying) things is to create incentives (e.g. to pay in dilithium units).

Live long and prosper as long the central planners allow it?

Star Trek Federation is a great thought experiment on what a post-scarcity society could look like. However, there are major shortcomings such as the allocation of property rights, a price system for energy, incentivization of services, and the existence of rivalry.

A free, prosperous, and open society such as the Federation can only function with a price system in place in order to deal with the scarcity of energy. If trekonomics would really be applied in the Federation, we would see a much more repressive version of this interplanetary union forcing its citizens to work in certain professions and rationing energy.

frederik-roeder


Frederik Cyrus Roeder

Fred Roeder is the Vice President of Students for Liberty and member of the Executive Board at Young Voices. He is based in Germany.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Nazis on Twitter? That’s What Blocking Is For – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Nazis on Twitter? That’s What Blocking Is For – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The New Renaissance HatJeffrey A. Tucker
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I’ve followed the fascinating case of Jonathan Weisman, The New York Times’s deputy Washington editor, and his conflagration with the legions of Nazis on Twitter. After he tweeted an essay about the rise of fascism in the U.S. — an essay not unlike the one I wrote this time last year — he was dogpiled by a variety of crazy alt-right accounts, and bombarded by some deeply malicious messaging.

You wake in the morning and find 100 notifications from people calling you a tool of the Jews.It might have been new to him, but for most curious Internet users of a certain generation, this is nothing new. For Weisman, it came as a shock, and understandably. The tweets featured photoshopped images of Weisman being marched to the gas chambers, for example. They threatened him with vile anti-Semitic and hard-core racist rhetoric.

He knew that if he merely claimed that this happened, he would be met with incredulity by a mainstream audience. To make sure that people believed him, he spent the day retweeting the vile messages to his followers, as if to say: “this stuff really does exist.”

I know exactly what he means. After my first critical article on Trump last year, one in which I reported on an early campaign speech I watched, I was trolled hard too. You wake in the morning and find 100 notifications from people calling you a tool of the Jews, slamming you with racist cartoons, telling you that you have sold out the white race, and even calling for your death.

These are people who perhaps begin their trajectory with some harmless anti-PC racial banter, but it escalates to become a full-scale political ideology, one that eventually crowds out all concern for human rights and decency. What they have joined isn’t a real army with guns, but when you are targeted it is still emotionally draining and politically frightening to say the least.

It’s supposed to be. That’s why they do it. The point is to shake you up, and make you feel like you are being bombarded.

When I told people about it, they didn’t believe it, or didn’t want to believe it. I too ended up screenshotting and posting in private messages, just to make the point that these vile movements do indeed exist. Even then, people doubt, probably because the sheer aggressiveness of this crowd is rather new in public life, at least in the US.

Hatred, Left and Right

For most of my writing career, I’ve been called a corporate shill by the left, a puppet of the Kochtopus, an apologist for capitalist exploitation and frankenfood. None of the attacks from the left have matched the sheer vitriol of those from the supposed opposite side. These days, though I hold the same libertarian perspective I always have, I’m being denounced as a witting dupe of the rootless commercial class, a shill for the global banksters and usurers, a cuckservative (look it up), and probably a secret Jew myself.

Welcome to Twitter in 2016.

The world truly does seem to be dividing between authoritarians of the right and left, and the rest of us. At some point in last year, hundreds of bitter people left their 4chan caves and became Twitter mavens. It became the choice venue for the far right, which has developed its own internal signaling systems such as putting the signs ((( ))) around ostensibly “known Jews.” They use swastikas as avatars. They post Nazi-era caricatures of Jews. And the rhetoric is a revival of interwar hate that most people believe was vanquished from the earth with the defeat of the Nazis 70 years ago.

Not all the accounts are so blatant. Some prefer the dog-whistle approach in their own posting and merely retweet the more hard-core material. After a while, you can become very talented at spotting the members of this internet junta, and have it confirmed with only one or two degrees of separation from the more overt deniers and/or celebrators of the actual Holocaust (strange how deniers and celebrators hang out together).

Just as left socialism never seems to go away, no matter how many economic disasters it brings about, so it is with national socialism with a rightest tinge. In fact, it seems to be growing, both in Europe and the US, posing a serious challenge to those of us who consider ourselves classical liberals: hard opposition to the left and to the right. As I’ve written elsewhere, the world truly does seem to be dividing between authoritarians of the right and left, opposed consistently by a small but growing group of genuine liberals all over the world.

Terms of Use

Now, to be sure, Jonathan Weisman was exactly right to wonder why Twitter puts up with this stuff. As he points out, banning such accounts is not censorship; this is a private venue that can set its own rules, same as a restaurant or movie theater. And Twitter does indeed have rules against “hateful conduct” that threatens people based on religion and ethnicity, as well as a policy on harassment that prohibits targeting people and inciting others to do the same. There’s no question that these accounts are in violation.

Why doesn’t Twitter act? Well, it sometimes does. After the Weisman articles, Twitter banned some 30 or so accounts. What happened to them? It’s pretty easy: they can easily come back again with another user name. In this sense, Twitter is, by design, much easier to game than Google or Facebook, both of which have much stricter policies. Sockpuppeting is a way of life here.

How does a digital venue decide how strict to be on these matters? It is all about the value of the platform for users. Sometimes tighter is better and other times it is not. In the case of Twitter, a main contribution it makes to global culture is its openness to all. You can find and see and hear just about anything. You can curate your feed. You can include or exclude. Sure, that takes a bit of work, but it is more than worth it.

For Facebook and LinkedIn, matters are very different. Permitting hate, harassment, sex solicitation, porn, and so on, is a problem for the kind of culture they want to create for members. And so it is more carefully policed. Again, this is not censorship anymore than a restaurant that demands shoes is violating human rights. You have the human right to be a Nazi all you want on your own property, but you don’t have the right to do so on property that belongs to others.

What To Do?

As it turns out, the nasty junta of hate-spewing freaks is not an army after all.When this started happening to me, I was initially disoriented and, I admit, a bit shaken. But then it struck me that Twitter surely has permitted a way to deal with this. Sure enough, there is a little gear that allows you to select a pretty little option: block. With the block, that account can no longer contact you or post among your notifications. Quite simply, you stop hearing from them.

I spent about a month doing this to trolls. Oddly, it is very satisfying. Someone tags you in a hate-filled post. With one click, you can blast them out of your curated universe. Once I got the hang of it, it became a game. Instead of getting mad, you just get even. Well, not really. But it sort of feels like it.

You know what? It works. After blocking about 100 accounts over the course of the fall, the problem almost entirely vanished. As it turns out, the nasty junta of hate-spewing freaks is not an army after all. In the end, we might in fact be talking about a few hundred accounts. Maybe it is more. And maybe after this article, they will all be back.

It might not be possible to make them all go away, but there is a way to reduce the influx and almost eliminate the stress. That’s not to minimize the alarming rise of fascism in politics here and abroad, but only to say that we are wise to distinguish between reality and digital illusion.

Blocking Is Betting than Beatings

And this is a much better option than leaning hard on Twitter to do more enforcement of its own terms of use. As much as these people disgust me, I would actually prefer to live in a world in which even deranged Nazis have access to widely available communication channels. I won’t invoke the right of free speech here because that’s not what this is about.

I will, however, say a good word for openness to all – and I mean all – points of view, access to media by all the world’s people (this is a wonderful miracle), and, above all else, the right of individuals to exclude through blocking. This is the way the opinion market should work. This is how we curate our own intellectual lives.

What we absolutely do not need – which Europe has tried to do – are government controls on what types of opinions one is allowed to hold and what books one is allowed to read. If you want violent extremism to grow, this is a great path towards guaranteeing that it will. Shutting people up by force is not the solution. The block button is far more effective than any censor.

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. 

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

 

No, Mr. Trump, Victims of Eminent Domain Do Not “Get a Fortune” – Article by George C. Leef

No, Mr. Trump, Victims of Eminent Domain Do Not “Get a Fortune” – Article by George C. Leef

The New Renaissance HatGeorge C. Leef
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Trump’s huge mistake about eminent domain

During the debate among Republican presidential candidates last month, Jeb Bush hammered Donald Trump on his abuse of eminent domain. But Trump apparently sees nothing wrong in having government officials force people to sell their property.

Trump replied,

Eminent domain is an absolute necessity for a country, for our country. Without it, you wouldn’t have roads, you wouldn’t have hospitals, you wouldn’t have anything. You would have schools, you wouldn’t have bridges.

And what a lot of people don’t know because they were all saying, oh, you’re going to take their property. When somebody — when eminent domain is used on somebody’s property, that person gets a fortune. They at least get fair market value, and if they’re smart, they’ll get two or three times the value of their property.

This last assertion led George Mason law professor Ilya Somin (an expert on eminent domain) to quip at the Volokh Conspiracy, “If eminent domain really were a good way to make a fortune, the Donald Trumps of the world would be lobbying the government to condemn their property. But that rarely, if ever, happens.”

Put aside Trump’s hyperbole about the supposed impossibility of schools, hospitals, and bridges without eminent domain. What I want to focus on is his claim that eminent domain is not objectionable because people who have their property taken make out just fine financially.

That claim is simply indefensible. The truth is that people who lose their property to eminent domain proceedings are almost never made whole.

Legal scholars have for many years been writing about the injustice that usually befalls people who have to settle for what the government deems “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment. I wouldn’t expect Mr. Trump to know about that because he is too busy making deals. But the kind of deals businessmen usually make involve two parties who can say “no,” unless and until they think the deal will improve their positions.

With eminent domain takings, however, the property owner can’t say “no,” and usually must settle for much less than he or she would have bargained for in a voluntary setting.

Professor Gideon Kanner has written extensively about the problem of inadequate compensation for people who’ve been forced to sell under eminent domain. In his article “[Un]Equal Justice under Law: The Invidiously Disparate Treatment of American Property Owners in Taking Cases,” he writes:

The true standard of compensation is not indemnity, but rather fair market value so artfully defined as to exclude factors that sellers and buyers in voluntary transactions would consider, and that the government need only pay for what it acquires, not for what the owner has lost.

Those losses include business goodwill, relocation expenses, and the emotional damage of having to leave a community where one may have strong ties. In the government’s calculus, people are expected to suffer such losses as part of the price of living in America.

As the Supreme Court stated in the 1949 takings case Kimball Laundry v. U.S., “Loss to the owner of non-transferable values … is properly treated as part of the burden of common citizenship.” That “tough luck, property owner” mindset still prevails.

Knowing that they hold the high cards (and ultimately the guns) when they deal with property owners, government officials take full advantage. As Kanner observes, “Condemning agencies regularly reap unjustified windfalls from the fact that the majority of their offers (including the many low-ball ones) are accepted without litigation or even involvement by a private appraiser or lawyer.”

Therefore, eminent domain causes many property owners to suffer uncompensated losses.

Far from “getting a fortune” or “two or three times” the market value of their property, most owners are left substantially worse off for their unwanted encounter with condemning government agencies. Few if any of them shrug off the losses as their part of the “burden of common citizenship.”

Although the eminent domain issue came up during a debate among presidential candidates, there is hardly anything that the president can do to rectify the problem of under-compensation for property owners. He (or she) cannot issue an executive order mandating that property owners be made whole.

If there is to be a solution, it must come from the judiciary.

Judges, and especially the justices of the Supreme Court, will have to stop ruling that merely because an individual is paid an amount deemed “fair market value,” the Fifth Amendment’s requirement of “just compensation” has been satisfied.

It would also help property owners if the Supreme Court would overturn Kelo v. New London and establish that property can only be taken for actual “public use,” as the Fifth Amendment requires, and not for private use that local politicians think might have some “public benefit.”

Since we are going to have confirmation hearings for a new member of the Court eventually, it would be important to find out precisely what the nominee thinks “just compensation” and “public use” actually mean.

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Why Free-Market Advocates Are Not Obligated to Defend the Economic Status Quo – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Why Free-Market Advocates Are Not Obligated to Defend the Economic Status Quo – Video by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
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Many on the political left today equate advocacy of free-market capitalism with an “anything goes” support for the economic status quo. Many on the political right give credence to this perception by, indeed, seeking to defend the status quo just because it happens to be so. Yet this is neither an obligatory nor an advisable approach for characterizing a genuinely well-considered free-market outlook.

Suppose that you are a free-market advocate and also an engineer, well-versed in the principles and methods for constructing durable, safe structures. Suppose you also identify severe deficiencies in a bridge proposed to be constructed by a completely private enterprise. Mr. Stolyarov explores the implications of this dilemma and the appropriate responses in a free society.

Reference

– “Why Free-Market Advocates Are Not Obligated to Defend the Economic Status Quo” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Why Free-Market Advocates Are Not Obligated to Defend the Economic Status Quo – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Why Free-Market Advocates Are Not Obligated to Defend the Economic Status Quo – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
******************************

Many on the political left today equate advocacy of free-market capitalism with an “anything goes” support for the economic status quo. Many on the political right give credence to this perception by, indeed, seeking to defend the status quo just because it happens to be so. Yet this is neither an obligatory nor an advisable approach for characterizing a genuinely well-considered free-market outlook.

Suppose that you are a free-market advocate and also an engineer, well-versed in the principles and methods for constructing durable, safe structures. You hold that individuals and businesses should have the freedom to be able to build structures which would improve human well-being, in exchange for the opportunity to earn a profit (or not, if they wish to build structures for a charitable purpose). Now suppose that you are tasked with evaluating the integrity of a particular structure constructed by a private business – perhaps a bridge. This particular bridge happens to be fully privately funded – no subsidies, no exclusive rights, no barriers to competitors’ entry. The business undertaking the construction intends for the bridge to be used as part of a major new toll road that is intended to carry massive amounts of traffic.

Unfortunately, upon deploying your technical skillset and studying the bridge design carefully, you find that the bridge, while it is represented as being able to withstand one thousand cars at a time, would in fact collapse under the weight of only five hundred cars. You also find that, in your basic repertoire of engineering techniques, you have knowledge of construction techniques and superior materials which would rectify these design flaws and enable the bridge to be as safe and as durable as originally represented. The trouble is that the business owners want to hear none of it. They are attached to their original design partly out of cost considerations, but mostly because they simply cannot understand your findings or appreciate their significance, no matter how many different ways you have attempted to communicate them. The business owners have almost no engineering knowledge themselves and are generally contemptuous of overtly mathematical, “nerdy” types (like you). They are skilled salespeople who have capital from a previous venture and are eager to make additional money on a high-profile project such as this bridge. Suppose that you know that you have all of the technical knowledge of your discipline firmly on your side, but it is the owners’ money on the line, so, unconvinced by your arguments, they build the bridge according to their original specifications. They still advertise it as highly durable, but in a sufficiently nebulous way that the advertisements do not truly make any specific promises or technical claims. (This business is short on technically knowledgeable professionals, but spares no expense in hiring attorneys to litigation-proof its marketing materials.) The driving public’s impression from the marketing campaign is expected to be, “It is an incredibly sturdy, state-of-the-art, daring new bridge that you will enjoy driving on in safety and style.” The business owners contend that there is no problem. After all, were this a truly free market, the public could choose to pay to use their bridge or to find some alternative in getting from point A to point B. And competitors could build their own bridges, too, if they could buy the land, purchase the tools and materials, and hire the labor to do it.

Of course, on most days, this bridge would not collapse, since it is rare for five hundred cars to be on it simultaneously. The owners could well be reaping profits from their bridge for years and convince the lay public to drive on it with no visible ill consequences during that time. The bridge is, however, vulnerable to high winds, earthquakes, freezing damage, and gradual deterioration over time (exacerbated by substandard construction). As time passes, the risks of collapse increase. No bridge is invulnerable, but this particular bridge is about 30 years farther along the path to decay than other bridges that you know could easily have been built in its place, had the owners only listened to you. As a free-market advocate, you have some sympathies with the owners’ view that the construction of the bridge should not be forcibly prevented, as they are using their own property for their own chosen purposes, and they are not forcing anyone to use it. However, as an engineer who knows better when it comes to quality of bridge design and construction, what do you do?

This dilemma illustrates a question at the core of how free-market advocates approach the world in which they find themselves – a world, of course, which is far from free in an economic sense, but where many people still use their own property for their own purposes. There are some who will assert that the very fact of private, voluntary use of property renders such use inherently above criticism, provided it is a manifestation of free choice. (We can overlook, for the sake of this argument, the fact that, in the real world, many incentives and constraints upon human action are routinely distorted by the effects of political influences in favor of one group or set of outcomes and/or in opposition to others.) In this argument’s more typical instantiation in today’s world, some would assert that any outcome of “private enterprise” in today’s world must be acceptable for free-market advocates, since it was (ostensibly) somebody’s use of private property for a private purpose. For example, mass corporate layoffs (virtually unheard of until the 1970s), raising the price of a life-saving, long-generic drug by 5,556 percent (as pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli did with Daraprim in 2015), listening to or creating brutal “gangsta rap” (virtually unheard of until the 1990s), teaching of creationism in private schools (common throughout history, but increasingly untenable in the face of over 150 years of mounting evidence), and many other behaviors of questionable rationality and/or taste are defended as being the decisions of private entities – so what could be wrong about them?

The problem with reflexively defending any and every behavior, just because a private entity undertakes it, even in the absence of market distortions, is that it misses an essential point. The market is nothing more than the sum of the choices and actions of its participants. A market outcome is not a Panglossian “best of all possible worlds” scenario. Even in the absence of compulsion or restraint, some people will be mistaken, irrational, overconfident, immoral, confused, or all of the above. Ex ante, they may expect that the transactions and behaviors they engage in will benefit them – much like a tribal shaman might believe that his rain dance would bring forth water for the tribe’s crops – but, ex post, they may well find themselves regretting their behavior, or even if not, they may have still become materially, intellectually, or emotionally worse off from it compared to the alternatives. In addition to choice, there is also truth – which comes in the form of scientific, mathematical, historical, and philosophical principles and facts. Truth is an outcome of combining induction from the empirical facts of reality with deduction from the application of logical reasoning to known facts and incontrovertible first principles. It is entirely possible for a person – including a wealthy, powerful, influential person whose decisions affect thousands or millions of others – to completely miss what the truth is, or even to be ignorant of the correct methods of arriving at the truth. In other words, if the external reality is objective and governed by comprehensible natural laws – and if morality is also objective in the sense that some outcomes are incontrovertibly more beneficial to human well-being than others – then it must be the case that somebody who is thinking in a rational, well-informed manner can truly “know better” than a particular decision-maker who is not.

Does that mean that the market could be replaced by some “superior” system of decision-making? Ultimately, no. We have no guarantee that any substitution of decision-making for that of private actors could lead to a necessarily preferable result from those decision makers’ free choices. If Person A is irrational and mistaken, we have no guarantee that leaving Person B in charge of A’s life would not lead to even more irrational and mistaken choices, compounded by the knowledge problem that B will necessarily have in relation to A’s situation. The possibility that B could be not simply misguided but nefarious, and seek to sacrifice A’s genuine interests in favor of B’s own, is a further argument against this kind of command-and-control approach. More devastating, however, would be an outcome in which a different person, C, really is doing his best to act in a truthful, rational, and just manner, but the controller B does not see it. Or perhaps B does see it and thinks it is all well and good, but B needs to set uniform standards that would keep the lowest common denominator in check, and C’s scrupulous, innovative, and principled way of living could never be generalized to a society-wide system of controls.

But getting back to you, the engineer: How to address the dilemma that you are in? Has the “market” not “decided” that the bridge of substandard technical quality is just fine? Not so fast. We must never forget that we are the market, and that the market does not only consist of the first decisions and inclinations of some small group of wealthy, powerful, or connected individuals. Quite the contrary: We are what a truly free market consists of. A truly free market consists not only of our affirmative choices, but also of our negations and criticisms of certain other choices. It consists of our knowledge, including those situations where we truly “know better” than certain others. You, the free-market engineer, could not force the bridge owners to change their design. However, you could fully publicize its flaws in a fully free society, one characterized by robust protections of free speech and lack of a climate of frivolous litigation with regard to libel laws. If today such professional criticism is difficult, it is because many larger, politically connected enterprises will hire legions of attorneys to squelch sufficiently specific assertions in meritless litigation that is too costly for ordinary people to counter. But a truly free society would lack this obstacle and would include a legal system that is designed with speed, simplicity, affordability, and protections for peaceful natural persons in mind. A corporation would not be able to sue you for publicizing detailed criticisms of its products; the judge would be empowered to simply throw out such a lawsuit at first glance. A truly free market of goods and ideas is not an indiscriminate stew of anyone’s and everyone’s plans. Any such plans also would get tested, scrutinized, refined, and ultimately accepted or rejected by the other market participants. To the extent that one owns property that could sustain the perpetuation of a plan, one might counter even strongly held prevailing opinions – but only temporarily and only if one has other means of replenishing that property if the plan causes it to be depleted.

Moreover, in a truly free market, barriers to entry exist only on the basis of the constraints of the physical world, not on politics and special behind-the-scenes influence. Thus, competitors can always arise with a superior business model. Perhaps if you, the engineer, criticize the existing bridge sufficiently, another business enterprise will learn of its defects, purchase another piece of land, and construct a parallel, sturdier bridge that takes your suggestions into account. The misguided owners of the first bridge might eventually find themselves out of business because travelers will discover that safer, more convenient routes are available. And if the bridge ever does fail, a free-market system of civil liability will penalize those businesses who, through negligence, failed to take reasonable precautions to protect the health and safety of their customers. If the bridge ever becomes an imminent danger to travelers, it would be proper for public warnings to be issued and for the law-enforcement entity (be it a minarchist government or a private dispute-resolution agency) to order that traffic to the bridge be discontinued until the immediate danger is averted (perhaps through structural improvements at that time). A free market does not permit the reckless endangerment of unwitting, non-consenting others.

But always, in a hypothetical free-market society or in our own, a free-market-oriented engineer – or any professional, really – should have no compunction about expressing the truth about the soundness and validity of any party’s decisions or proposals, be they private or governmental. Just as a private party may well propose building a substandard bridge, so might a government today actually develop a decent bridge, especially if the incentives of a given political system are conducive to that particular outcome. The free-market engineer should not hesitate to praise the technical design of a good bridge, no matter what its source – because truth is true, and a bridge that could support two thousand cars at a time would, indeed, support those cars no matter who constructed it (provided the methods and materials used are identical in each case). A free-market perspective is a political and economic position which is compatible with completely rigorous, objective views of matters of science, technology, mathematics, history, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, psychology, and any other conceivable discipline. Free-market advocates should respect people’s right to make choices, even when those choices are mistaken, but can maintain their own right to criticize those mistakes using as high a set of standards as they consider justified. If your values include striving for truth and justice, then those values are a part of the market as well, and you can improve market outcomes by working to instantiate those values in reality.

This essay may be freely reproduced using the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike International 4.0 License, which requires that credit be given to the author, G. Stolyarov II. Find out about Mr. Stolyarov here.

Eminent Domain for Private Gain Is Terrible and Cruel — Even When It “Works” – Article by George C. Leef

Eminent Domain for Private Gain Is Terrible and Cruel — Even When It “Works” – Article by George C. Leef

The New Renaissance HatGeorge C. Leef
August 18, 2015

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Despite a “success” story, eminent domain for economic development is a bad policy

Ilya Somin’s excellent new book The Grasping Hand on the infamous case of Kelo v. New London recently drew a negative response from a professor who defends the use of eminent domain for “economic development.”

In his letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Wayne State University professor John Mogk took issue with Somin’s book and with Ed Glaeser’s favorable WSJ review. Mogk claims that they did not adequately weigh what he regards as a successful use of eminent domain to promote economic growth in Poletown, Detroit.

The New London redevelopment project that cost Suzette Kelo her little pink house was, Mogk admits, a fiasco. But, he says, we shouldn’t paint all eminent domain cases with that brush. He wants to buttress the case that the public welfare can be enhanced by using eminent domain to obtain land for projects that are supposed to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

Mogk believes that the apparent success of Poletown saves the day for eminent domain enthusiasts.

Here are three reasons for believing that he is mistaken.

First, as a policy matter, we either give the green light to property seizures for any “public purpose” conceived by politicians, or we prohibit them and limit eminent domain just to seizures for a clear public use. (That’s the language in the Constitution.)

We cannot have a rule that says, “Eminent domain may be used for economic development plans, but only when it actually produces net benefits.”

No one can know ahead of time whether a plan will “work” (which is to say, produce at least some of the promised gains) or utterly fail. In Kelo, the City of New London’s grand redevelopment plan fell through completely. Where neat, modest houses once stood, you now see only rubble and weeds. Nobody knew that would be the outcome when the plan was conceived.

Consider this analogy: The law forbids warrantless searches by the police, but suppose that, in some illegal searches, important evidence of criminal activity is found. Should we conclude that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement can be discarded because there are some instances where we get good results from warrantless searches?

I don’t think that conclusion follows. And neither should we allow property seizures whenever authorities want to, just because those seizures sometimes have “good results.”

Second, Professor Mogk’s Poletown example isn’t as telling as he thinks. Perhaps it is true, as he writes, that most of the inhabitants were content with their buyouts. What I don’t think anyone can deny, however, is that for some of the residents, especially elderly people, the forced relocation was extremely disruptive and painful.

Outsiders like Mogk and the bigwigs at General Motors (who wanted the land for a new Cadillac plant) may have thought that Poletown was “declining,” but to the people who called it home, living there was their best option.

The right to quietly enjoy their property was taken away from them so that others might be more prosperous — GM stockholders and UAW workers, in particular.

We have to oppose the collectivistic philosophy that says it is permissible to use coercion against some individuals as long as those in power think they might thereby create a net utilitarian gain for more politically powerful (and usually much richer) interests.

Third, all that these economic development eminent domain takings can ever do is to redistribute where economic activity takes place. It cannot create any overall gain.

Let us suppose that the GM management was correct in forecasting an increase in demand for luxury cars. (It appears that they overestimated that demand, at least for their own vehicles, since the plant never employed nearly as many workers as they had said it would.) Free market competition to satisfy that demand would have led to increased output without Detroit confiscating land for a new GM plant.

If it hadn’t been able to resort to coercion to get the land, GM would probably have found other ways of increasing Cadillac production, but even if it couldn’t have done so, other auto-makers would have built more luxury cars. Auto jobs would have been created somewhere, and car buyers would have benefited without property owners losing.

Instead of proving that eminent domain can be a good economic development tool, the Poletown example is just another illustration of Bastiat’s broken window fallacy. Demolishing Poletown to build a new auto factory brought about visible benefits for some people, but only at the expense of benefits for others that would have otherwise occurred.

No, not every eminent domain seizure for economic development purposes is as pointless and utterly destructive as Kelo, but we still ought to stick with this rule: Government should protect property rights, not violate them. The government should do those few order-keeping functions appropriate to it and leave the allocation of resources and planning of production to people who risk their own money and cannot take what isn’t theirs.

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Little Free Libraries: A Love Letter – Article by Sarah Skwire

Little Free Libraries: A Love Letter – Article by Sarah Skwire

The New Renaissance Hat
Sarah Skwire
February 14, 2015
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Still falling for the written word, despite America’s killjoys

The Little Free Library movement began in 2009 when Todd Bol built a miniature model schoolhouse, put it on a post in his front yard, filled it with books, and put up a sign stating, “Free Books.” It was a way to honor his mom — a former school teacher — and to share his love of reading with his neighborhood. The idea took off, and now there are thousands of Little Free Libraries.

The idea is simple. You put a small book box up on a post in your front yard, stock it with books, and people who are passing by on the way to the park, or the mailbox, or the ice cream store, or the coffee shop grab a book, read it, and return it later. Or maybe they keep it and replace it with one of their own. It’s a quiet way of building community and of sharing the pleasure of books with your neighbors. It’s simple. It’s something one person can do to make a difference.

So, naturally, people want to shut it down.

Shreveport, Louisiana, recently declared Little Free Libraries to be “commercial enterprises,” which cannot operate in residential zones. Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, told citizens that Little Free Libraries could only be put in backyards — which completely destroys the whole idea of offering books to casual passers-by. Leawood, Kansas, made a nine-year-old take down his Little Free Library until the town council managed to pass an emergency moratorium that allowed him to return it to his yard. As soon as the Little Free Libraries go up, it seems, some killjoy finds them annoying and wants them taken down.

I know a lot of words. I’m not sure I have any that are harsh enough for people who want to stop others from making it easy and pleasant and fun and free to bring a book into your life.

Maybe that’s because I remember almost nothing that happened before the day I learned to read. But I do remember the day I learned. I was 3 1/2. My brother had just started kindergarten and was learning how to read. In the grand tradition of annoying little sisters everywhere, I immediately insisted on doing the same. So my earliest clear memories are of sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor while Mom loaded the dishwasher and listened to me sound out Arnold Lobel’s Small Pig one slow and painstaking phoneme at a time.

Vacuum.

Cement.

The words were difficult. But I was stubborn, and Mom was patient.

Over the course of two weeks or so, I read the whole book. By myself.

Having figured out the general principle, I assumed I could read anything and everything. And so I did. I stayed up past midnight to finish the Wizard of Oz because I had to make sure that Dorothy got home okay. I sat on the sidelines at recess, reading. I walked into more than a few walls, reading. And the local library should probably have named a wing after me because I racked up so many late fees on books I just couldn’t bear to give back.

Miserable and lonely middle school years were leavened by friends in books and by fantasy novels about escapes to other worlds. Heartbreaks in high school were softened by Jane Austen’s wit and by the greater tragedies in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Well-thumbed, borrowed paperbacks of Interview with the Vampire and Forever Amber provided another kind of education. And college? And graduate school? Orgies of the written word.

I loved all of it. I still love all of it. From the most erudite and complex poetry to comic books and genre fiction to (when I’m really stuck) the text on the back of the cereal box, my first and best and longest-lasting romance has been with the written word.

It started with Small Pig. It started on the kitchen floor. I fell in love, and I have never stopped falling.

And because I am so smitten, I want everyone else to be. I write this column and post on Facebook and annoy my friends by evangelizing about my latest book obsessions because I want a world of people whose minds and lives and hearts are changed by reading. I want a world of people who have the chance to have the experience that Quilliam founder Maajid Nawaz had when he read Orwell. Reading, he realized that if the jihadis with whom he was allied ever achieved their goals, “they would be the Islamist equivalent of Animal Farm.” I want a world of people who find books that overturn everything they think is true and that challenge them to become better.

I want a world of people who do what Yeon-mi Park did. After escaping North Korea, she “read and read and read, even when I didn’t know what I was reading.” She read Orwell, too, and found that “it made complete sense to me. I was still so angry and hateful at this time because of the way I’d been treated.” Reading Gandhi and Mandela, she says, taught her compassion to balance that anger.

And because I want that world — a world where we exchange books and ideas peacefully and productively — the people who began and spread the Little Free Library movement are some of my heroes.

So I thought I’d write them a love letter.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Sarah Skwire is a fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis.
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This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
The Extraordinary Business of Life – Article by Sanford Ikeda

The Extraordinary Business of Life – Article by Sanford Ikeda

The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
May 25, 2013
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I heard it again from this year’s commencement speaker: the common mistake of thinking economics is just about business and making money. I know I’m not the only economics teacher who every year has to disabuse his students (and many of his own colleagues from other disciplines) of that same error.

Economics is not business administration or accounting. Economics is a science that studies how people interact when the means at their disposal are scarce in relation to their ends. That includes business, of course, but a whole lot more as well.

Where Does That Notion Come From?

Well, for starters, perhaps from one of the greatest economists in history, Alfred Marshall. He opens his highly influential textbook, first published in 1890, with this statement:

“Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing.” (Emphasis added)

This definition more or less prevailed until 1932, when another British economist, Lionel Robbins, defined economic science as being concerned with an aspect of all human action insofar as it involves making choices, not with a part of individual action. Economics, in other words, is the science of choice. Its starting point is not the “material requisites of wellbeing” but a person’s subjective valuation of her circumstances. Ludwig von Mises got it, which is why he called his magnum opus, simply, Human Action.

Similarly, Libertarianism Isn’t Pro-Business

An equally common mistake is to think that supporters of the free market are “pro-business” and favor so-called crony capitalism. But a consistent free-market supporter is neither pro-business nor anti-business, pro-labor nor anti-labor. A free market to us is what happens when you safeguard private property, free association, and consistent governance and then just leave people alone.

Part of the misunderstanding here might stem from the term “free market” itself. Since people tend to associate markets with buying and selling, jobs, and making (and losing) money, it’s perhaps understandable that they would think that advocates of the free market must be concerned mainly about business-related stuff: profits and losses, efficiency, and creating and marketing new products.

Indeed, I’ve met quite a few who claim to favor “free-market capitalism” merely because they believe in making as much money as possible in their lifetimes. It’s not surprising that many of these folks do tend to be pro-business and supporters of crony capitalism. I want to ask them not to be on my side.

Connotations aside, the free market encompasses far more than the stuff of business or a money-making scheme. Yes, it does include the essentials of private property, free association, and stable governance. But a dynamic market process that generates widespread material prosperity and promotes the pursuit of happiness would not be possible if it were based solely on the relentless pursuit of one’s narrow self-interest. Markets would not have gotten as far as they have today (with per-capita GDP up more than fiftyfold since 1700) if people didn’t also follow norms of honesty and fair play, trust and reciprocity. Such norms are without question partly the result of self-interest; few would trade with us if we weren’t honest and fair. But, as Adam Smith taught us, these norms also arise in large measure from a sense of sympathy, of fellow-feeling and fairness, that comes from our ability to see others as we see ourselves, and vice versa. This is why in most contexts I usually prefer the term “free society” to “free market.”

Bourgeois Virtue

But I think one good reason the association between business on the one hand and economics and classical liberalism on the other has been so persistent is that business and the free society arose together. That is, the liberal idea—that certain fundamental individual rights exist prior to and apart from the State—sparked one of the most momentous social changes in history: the commercial revolution and the emergence of the modern urban middle class. 

The triumph of liberty, of personal freedom, unleashed the creative potential of people, who found expression in art, religion, literature, but most of all—or at least most visibly—in the Marshallian “ordinary business of life.” The changes that have taken place in the past 500 years—scientific revolutions, religious reformations, political upheavals, artistic rebirths—were driven by the same human propensities as the commercial revolution and fueled by the wealth it produced. Indeed, the social and political changes of the past century—for women, workers, and minorities—would not have been possible without the entrepreneurial pressures of competition and innovation that forced radical changes in conventional thinking and socially conservative attitudes.

Tradition’s Worst Enemy

In short, business is the most dynamic social institution known to mankind. The critical and competitive attitudes that enable business to flourish erode custom and break old ties even as they foster new ones. The products of business tend to offend people whose sensibilities were refined by generations of tradition. The free market is tradition’s worst enemy.

Business has become part of the default mode of modern society. We take it for granted. We don’t realize what a radical, subversive force it is, to the point where it sounds strange to say so. But try to imagine a world without businesses and commerce. A world like the Dark Ages of, say ninth century Western Europe: static, grindingly poor, strictly hierarchical, socially intolerant, and, apart from the occasional battle or beheading, boring like you wouldn’t believe.

So, while it’s still a mistake to think economics and classical liberalism are somehow about studying and promoting business, maybe at a deeper level it’s not such a bad one to make after all. Business is subversive.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
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This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 3 – A Rational System of Land Ownership – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 3 – A Rational System of Land Ownership – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
November 11, 2012
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In this third installment of my short series on land and property rights (see my first and second installments), I aim to outline a rational, libertarian system of land ownership that simultaneously respects each individual’s private property and allows each individual ample opportunities to obtain land of his or her own. This is a system that allows every individual his or her inviolate sphere of action and control, while at the same time ensuring that no individual who strives to obtain land through sufficient exertion will be denied the ability to own landed property.

The rational criterion for how land may be initially appropriated from the state of nature is the first-occupier rule. The first person to transform a piece of land from the state of nature becomes that land’s rightful owner – but only if the land is substantively transformed and put to a use that can be reasonably expected not to terminate at any fixed time. In other words, a person may only initially appropriate that land which the person actually uses and does not expect to stop using entirely. The use may be sporadic and intermittent, but as long as the land is not abandoned altogether and the reasonable possibility of using it remains, the right to ownership remains with the person who first transformed it. A person can indirectly “use” the land by hiring others to work on it or manage it. As long as there exists an economic connection back to the owner, the use criterion is met. The land’s original owner may sell it to others or give the land as a gift. At that time, the new owner obtains the same prerogatives as the original owner had.

The use criterion prevents arbitrary claims over un-transformed land and also minimizes the possibility of conflict by reference to a criterion that relies on an ongoing state of use of the land. If a piece of land becomes completely abandoned by its owner, in the sense that the owner does not himself, or through the employment of others, perform or intend to realistically perform any physical actions on or pertaining to the land, then this land reverts to the state of nature and legitimately may be claimed by any subsequent first occupant. The use criterion distinguishes the libertarian view of land ownership from certain arbitrary legal precedents in many parts of the world – e.g., the “right” of kings in various Medieval and Early Modern European countries to all of the prime forests of those countries, which denied their subjects the ability to obtain any of the produce of the forests without special permission, or the “right” of certain Latin American potentates to vast tracts of completely undeveloped land, on which thousands of people have lived for generations as “squatters” who possess the land de facto but not de jure. The use criterion suggests that it may be the case that laws treat as private property land which should, in fact, be considered a part of the state of nature and opened to be claimed by future first occupants in substance.  This could, in practice, result in considerable upward economic mobility and improvements in standards of living for many people.

In an ideal libertarian system, owned land is truly owned – i.e., it is free of any encumbrances that the owner has not voluntarily entered into. The owner has the complete right to utilize the property as he sees fit, as long as he does not infringe on others’ rights to life, liberty, and property. There may be some role for the law to restrict the use of certain activities that necessarily infringe on others’ rights, such as spilling sewage into a river that runs adjacent to numerous owned plots of land – or emitting disease-causing chemicals into the air. These activities with negative external effects may be permissible in some cases if the affected other individuals consented to their conduct (with their consent possibly accompanied by compensation from the person engaging in the negative-externality-causing activity). Furthermore, the first occupier of a region has a greater prerogative to engage in such activities if the adversely affected neighbors voluntarily move in after the activity was known to be underway. (In other words, the neighbors could have avoided the adverse effects by going elsewhere, but they knowingly chose to move in anyway.)

An ideal libertarian system would have no property taxes or any other taxes that depend on one’s present wealth in any way. Irrespective of what other taxes may exist (and I have elsewhere argued for a system that can fund the government without relying on compulsory taxation at all), the concept of ownership should not be tied with any ongoing payment, unless the property was purchased by means of assuming a debt obligation. Even with regard to debt obligations, foreclosure on a property should be prohibited until the purchaser’s equity has been reduced to zero by an accumulation of amounts equal to the sum of delinquent payments, plus interest at the agreed-upon loan rates.

An owner of land may agree to an easement on the land in the form – for instance – of allowing a utility to place its infrastructure there, or allowing public traffic through a portion of the land. This easement should be entirely voluntary on the part of the owner, and it is legitimate for the owner to request compensation for granting the easement if he wishes. Likewise, the owner may rent the property to others at a mutually agreed-upon price, or, at his discretion, allow others to use or live on the property at no cost. A contractually conferred easement or tenancy may limit the owner’s subsequent ability to deny certain prerogatives to the tenants or parties using the easement, and a free market would facilitate the evolution of contracts that allow such parties the ability to use the land, subject to certain basic conditions, without fear of unilateral or arbitrary cessation of an arrangement on which they rely.

How would roads be built in such a world? How would utility lines be laid? Perhaps a contractually irrevocable perpetual easement might be the way to facilitate such arrangements while fully respecting private property. Instead of being bullied by eminent-domain legislation to sell the land or grant the easement, the owner may be enticed to collect a perpetual stream of income from the private road company or private utility. The road easement would be priced at prevailing market rates – not through a judicial fiat determining “fair market value,” but rather through negotiations based on millions of data points regarding what owners of similar land used for roads have been willing to accept without any compulsion.

As Roderick Long points out, it is also possible for a libertarian view to accommodate a type of “common” land which is neither private nor governmentally owned. This category of commons could be created by means of a private owner opening his land to common use in perpetuity – as in a landowner designating his property a public park or thoroughfare. Such common land does not revert to the state of nature, because it continues to be used regularly – e.g., by means of moving through it. The latest private owner retains a certain degree of rights to the land, in the sense that his designation for how the land may be used must be respected. However, as long as this designation’s terms are obeyed, the latest owner has surrendered his discretion over any particular instance of the common land’s use. The ability of common land to arise could be facilitated by the formation of voluntary cooperatives that purchase private land and declare it to be common. These cooperatives could then also supply services to keep the land in proper order for the purpose to which it is intended to be put. An example of this might be a group of shop owners in a busy urban area deciding to render the street adjacent to the shops to be common, so that any person could approach the shops without paying fees to any party, or being otherwise restricted. The shop owners could form a cooperative to purchase the land constituting the street. The cooperative would then declare such land to be common and would provide maintenance and security services to ensure that the street remains clean and accessible, and that no one significantly obstructs passage.

A true libertarian system would likely lead to the creation of numerous common spaces that would give people without substantial wealth the ability to use land for certain purposes which may bring them economic benefit and enrichment. For instance, it is conceivable that a common working area could be established, where individuals may bring their tools and utilize certain space for the period of their presence – on a first-come, first-served basis.

A legitimate question may arise as to how far up and down a right to legitimately acquired land extends. Again, the boundaries of such ownership should be circumscribed by considerations of use, as well as considerations of personal safety. It is reasonable to conclude that one’s owned airspace does not extend 10,000 meters into the air – which would have restricted the ability of airplanes to pass overhead. However, it is also reasonable to conclude that airplanes should be prohibited from flying at 50 meters above a residential area – even if they do not directly damage any property during a particular flight – because the risk of such damage is too great. The precise amount of owned airspace cannot be given a priori through philosophical argument – but use and safety do set some minimum bounds for the owner to rely on, and a rational legal system would work out the implications of these principles for various types of situations and technological possibilities.

Similarly, to what extent could a land owner lay claim to resources underneath the land? Clearly, one owns the land on which one’s house stands, to a depth that is sufficient to ensure that the house would not subside into the earth. However, does a land owner have the right to a mineral deposit 5 kilometers underneath the land? Perhaps so, if extracting the mineral would require transformation at the surface of the land. However, if a vast underground cave network leads to the mineral deposit from an entrance external to the land’s surface – or if such an access route can be created without any risk to the land on the surface (or the health, safety, or comfort of the owner), then does the owner still have a property right to the mineral – particularly if the owner does not intend to do anything with it and lacks the technical skills in any event? This is again a question that can only be addressed fully by considering the technological possibilities at hand, as well as the circumstances of a particular case. The general principles of use and safety would, however, result in the land owner receiving some claim to most underground resources in most real-world situations.

A libertarian system would penalize violations of others’ private property using Murray Rothbard’s “two teeth for a tooth” rule. In other words, a person who has infringed on another’s rights to property owes the victim twice the amount of the economic harm inflicted. A person who steals a television owes the victim two televisions (or the market value thereof). A person who breaks a window owes the cost of replacing two windows. This treatment both fully compensates the victim and punishes the violator by having the violator forfeit an equivalent item to the item of which the rightful owner was unjustly deprived. Monetary compensation may often be an appropriate way to address this when the property damaged could not easily be conceived of as a discrete unit.  It is important for the punishments for violations of property rights to be proportionate and only directed toward true violators. In other words, there are limits to the kind and degree of force that a property owner may wield to protect his property – depending on the circumstances and the nature of the threat. However, deadly force may be used if the property owner has justifiable reason to believe that his life or the lives of others on his property are threatened. When only inanimate property is threatened, incapacitation of the violator should be pursued instead of deadly force.

The great opportunity-promoting effects of a true libertarian system of land ownership would arise from the absence of any zoning laws and building restrictions – or restrictions of any sort on land use that does not pose negative externalities. Even private associations that attempt to foist such restrictions would be limited by law from prohibiting non-coercive, non-damaging uses of unencumbered property, over which the owner would remain sovereign. Thus, the tyranny of zoning and the tyranny of homeowners’ associations would both be absent in a libertarian system. Rapid economic growth and a flowering of individual expression on private property would result. Furthermore, more convenient economic arrangements  would arise – such as the pre-zoning-era practice of a store owner living with his family on the second floor above the store he owns on the first.  A libertarian system of true private land ownership would result in many more “mixed-use” areas arising, where functions of life and business are not artificially segmented from one another, but rather occur together in such a manner as is most convenient to the residents. Travel times to one’s place of employment would be greatly reduced, resulting in immense savings on transportation costs and improvements in personal safety. More rapid construction would occur, as building permits would not be required.

Under a libertarian system along the lines described above, much land currently in the state of nature would be converted to useful purposes, including the construction of residences for people who find the currently available stock of housing to be too expensive. The massive increase in the supply of housing would cause prices to fall to truly affordable levels for most. Furthermore, the freedom to build would result in an increased and accelerating rate of technological and design innovation – since no third party would be permitted to prohibit a structure for employing unusual esthetic elements or a method of construction that differs from what prevails in the area. More generally, esthetic criteria would never justify coercive prohibition of property use in a libertarian system; only physical harm to other persons would. Ultimately, the result of recognizing a genuine, rational regime of property rights would vastly enhance individuals’ standards of living not just through increased material prosperity, but through the improved satisfaction of living as a true master of one’s own sphere of life and activity.

“Occupy” Protesters Have Rights, Too – Article by G. Stolyarov II

“Occupy” Protesters Have Rights, Too – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
November 4, 2012
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I am generally skeptical of the “Occupy” movement and have expressed my ambivalence and criticisms here, here, and here in the past. However, for all of my disagreements and reservations, I will defend the rights of fellow human beings when they are infringed. And, without question, “Occupy” protesters have rights, too – rights that have been shamelessly violated in the brutal crackdowns on “Occupy” protests which occurred last year.

In response to my passing mention of the pepper-spraying incident at University of California Davis in November 2011 (for which the University has now offered to generously compensate the victims), Dr. Charles Steele wrote, “Mr. Stolyarov responds that he’s concerned about ‘Occupy’ protesters being pepper-sprayed at UC Davis.  I’m uncertain what this event has to do with the Romney v. Obama choice, but he and I have very different definitions of ‘peaceful.’  My definition of peaceful does not include forcibly blocking public thoroughfares and occupying public spaces so that others cannot exercise their legitimate rights to use them.  It’s shameful that taxpayer money is now going to these ‘victims.’

First, the facts of the situation do not bear out the allegation that anyone’s ability to use the UC Davis facilities was substantially impeded. The protesters blocked a sidewalk; that is all. Surely, anyone who wished to get from one facility to another could have walked around.

Second, the protesters were students who were paying customers of the university. Even though the right to use public property is a somewhat nebulous area (since it is funded through the payments of large numbers of people with competing preferences), it is clearly the case that a paying user of property – especially one who pays the immensely generous sums that often constitute tuition these days – should have a considerable degree of prerogative, as long as the property is not damaged and remains usable to others. This whole incident is a glaring demonstration of the power asymmetry between universities and their students. What other institution (especially a privately owned and funded institution) would treat its customers in this way? Would any private country club be able to get away with pepper-spraying its donors who happened to be sitting on the sidewalk approaching a golf course (without being in the way of the game)?

It is clear that the protest was not intended to obstruct the everyday goings-on at the university. Rather, like the many special events that regularly occur at every university, it was intended to attract attention to an issue important to students – in this case, the protesters’ grievances, justified or not. There is no evidence that the protesters befouled the grass and sidewalk they occupied, or that they prevented other students and faculty from passing through on unrelated business.

Third, even if the protesters violated a formal rule of the university (which is itself unclear), proportionality was not followed in the response. To physically damage a person for breaking a prohibition whose violation physically hurt no one is clearly not a proportionate punishment. Nor was the attempt to evict the protesters through any kind of force justified with respect to this kind of petty violation (if it was one). Even if it could justifiably be said that the protesters were clearly, unambiguously in the wrong in occupying the sidewalk, they should not have been interfered with forcibly during their occupation. An appropriate remedy would have been to inform them of the nature of their violation and to present them with a subsequent punishment that did not involve bodily harm. Preferably, the punishment should have been related to any alleged harms. Examples could include sidewalk-cleaning duty, or fines that reflect the estimated “economic cost” of the obstruction (if there indeed was one).

But, even more importantly, I fail to see how a clear criterion can be established to delineate which “occupations” of the sidewalk would constitute violations of other people’s rights. With regard to genuine public thoroughfares (e.g., roads and railroads), the delineation can be clearly made with regard to whether the flow of vehicle traffic is obstructed. But, on a mere sidewalk, how long would one need to dally in order to be considered a violator? Would sitting for a mere minute suffice? What about standing for a minute? What about standing for five seconds? What about walking really slowly so that others have to walk around? What about walking really slowly because one has a disability? What about walking at a moderate pace when the culture of the university encourages most people to be ultra-rushed and adopt a rapid pace at all times? What if a person occupies the sidewalk for a much longer time period, but no one else is around to use it? Ultimately, no such arbitrary delineation can be made – and if none can be made, then we must err on the side of permissiveness. The ability for people to peacefully express themselves is too precious for anything less to be done in the attempt to preserve it.