For whatever psychological/spiritual reason, in my experience this crucial truth is as if infinitely slippery, most unable to grasp it even for a second, going on dumb tangents: A society based on the Non-aggression Principle would recognize homesteading land & water as a cost/tax-free birthright of all humans, and those homesteads would be veganic, so as to apply the NAP toward animals and neighbors as well (no chemical or GMO contamination with the latter). This is the foundation of social-justice, no more having to pay other humans just to live on this planet (funding inevitable destruction from a fundamentally unethical institution), no more extortion, and no more control/monopolization of land, water & seed which is a gift of God for all equally. Does anyone else get this yet?
land and water are non-sentient scarce resources and thus can be considered property, while all sentient beings are also scarce but since their consciousness allows them to be the first user of themselves, as in by existing they homestead their own bodies, therefore a consistent ancap would have to be vegan, which i am, while allowing for the renting of property and sale of water to others which does not violate the nap
You become a libertarian when you realize that it's wrong to hurt people and take their things. You become an anarchist when you realize there are no exceptions.
What is a "political libertarian" and what is a "philosophical libertarian" and how do these two terms differ from the term "libertarian" as Kinsella uses it?
damn. this is the first video of yours that i disagree with. its a shame because it is systematic and it arrives at a nice simple conclusion that may even have good results (who knows?). but i cannot honestly say that it makes logical sense and so i cannot support it. i agree with self ownership (though i prefer to use the term "individual sovereignty") but i can see no reason why enclosing land should be a valid method of obtaining ownership, and also i cannot see why ownership of natural resources should be valid so long as they remain in their natural state, or return to a natural state after some previous human modifications.
Man Against The State i think the goal of property should be to prevent theft, rather than to allocate all scarce resources on earth to a human owner. i think if something exists without any human intervention then it cannot be stolen because nobody produced it. to answer your question - i basically take neo-lockean homesteading (as i understand it) to its logical conclusion. if one were to build a house from previously unowned rocks then to take this house away from them would be theft - it would be to deprive them of the product of their labor. likewise if you buy a house from someone who built it then you own it. but not all labor has a lasting value. take the example of a farmer with a field of wheat. taking that wheat off him would be theft - it would deprive him of the product of his labor. but if he leaves the field and weeds grow back to the point where the field is just as it was before he homesteaded it, then there is nothing left to steal from him. at that point, if someone else comes and plants wheat on the field then they are not depriving the farmer of any of his labor because all his labor has been washed away by nature (and we can't accuse nature of theft because it is not a moral agent).
+Peter Miller I'm not sure which part of Kinsella's article you are disagreeing with. I have no disagreement with what you said in your first two paragraphs, and I don't think Kinsella would either. As for your last paragraph, you are touching on abandonment theory, the flip-side of homesteading theory, which isn't something Kinsella talks about here (and is generally a neglected subject... the only person I know who talks about it is Walter Block). I completely agree that if the farmer has let his field go to weeds, he has effectively abandoned it, and therefore it is available again for homesteading, and the original farmer has no right to prevent the newcomer from homesteading it.
Man Against The State it was the part about enclosing land (which i assumed means building a fence) that i disagreed with. don't get me wrong, i have nothing against fences, but i think that if someone builds a fence then they should only own the fence, and not the land inside it. and if they build the fence merely to prevent others from using the land inside, which they themselves are not using, then others would be warranted in removing a small section of it to gain access (as non-destructively as possible, because the fence is afterall the product of labor). i will watch the video again and see if i can be more specific about the bits that jarred with my brain :)
+Peter Miller Maybe Kinsella could have made that a bit clearer, but by saying "enclosed" I don't think he had in mind that someone can JUST build a fence and then rightfully claim the land area inside it as his own. More than that is needed to be proper homesteading, but it is difficult to say from the armchair exactly what kind of labor-mixing is sufficient to make it a just claim. I would imagine a homesteader might START by building a fence, and then proceed to plow the field inside, or erect buildings, or whatever, shortly afterwards. As long as there is not too much time between building the fence and developing the land, I think we could say he owns it from when he builds the fence. There may also be private land registration organisations to make it clearer who is claiming land - registering the land the farmer intends to develop with these kinds of organisations would help establish his claim as legitimate. The alternative could be chaotic and wasteful, where a homesteader must "touch" (or more?) every part of the soil he intends to use, quickly before anyone else does. I think common sense needs to be applied here, and disagreements about exactly what constitutes homesteading, which will vary depending on the circumstances, will be referred to courts to decide if necessary. I think we all agree on the principles involved in homesteading, in the sense that there must be an objective and inter-subjectively ascertainable link between the homesteader and the scarce resource involved.
