Anyway, what’s the difference on this analysis between a hunter gatherer, a nomadic pastoralist (say, a plains Indian) and a rancher? Is it the building of fences? A claim of land ownership?
It doesn’t seem to me to be one of control, or productivity, or use. Large ranches frequently have very few fences, have a lower population density as would a hunter gatherer or group of pastoralists, less connection to land. It seems the ownership of a ranch is simply an artefact of the state and state power.
Plains Indians were not nomadic pastoralists. They were hunter-gatherers (mostly hunters).
No rancher produces less food per acre than hunter gatherers would on the same land. Sure the population density of the ranch may be lower, but he's supporting a larger number of people.
So is ownership productivity then? And who determines the level of productivity required for ownership to be proven? if a large corporation runs a neighbouring farm (or ranch) vastly more productive than a homestead, can they take that homestead? I think there was a movie about that. Or is a prior claim more relevant than productivity? But then we come back to the example of the unproductive hunter, who has been on the land for generations…
What about the Neolithic tribesman who subsists on seafood. Archeologists find these middens of shells that show tribes hunting and gathering in the same spot for thousands of years. They don’t grow crops, they take their food from a communal source (the sea), but dwelt on the same spot for an hundred generations. Would they theoretically own the land?
I discussed the first case of the less-productive homestead in the article.
Yes, productivity is a core part of a claim to ownership because your claim to ownership is based on the fact that you're *using* it, and productivity is the key part of *using* something.
So if 2 people were both fully utilising their land, but one was a better farmer, or chose better crops, or used genetically modified crops, they would have a right to ownership over the others land?
Your productivity example went to a hunter gatherer who hardly sets foot on their range (ignoring that ranchers don’t either- in Australia it’s almost all done by helicopter). But I suspect you will say that one homesteader can’t dispossess the other simply because they are more efficient.
I think you want to talk about use- clearly, if you aren’t using property you can’t assert a right to it (and this is reflected in the law in most anglophone nations). But the problem is then to justify manifest destiny, because the navies where using the land, but just differently.
This can all be solved if you just accept that property rights just flow from the nation state.
So the Australian aborigines (and I expect many other hunter gatherers) extensively used fire to open up forests into more open grassland, to facilitate hunting. That would clearly fall into your definition?
I think it’s back to the drawing board on this one.
Ownership stems from simple might or from commonly accepted rules. There is no ethical dimension beyond an ethical dimension of might (problematic), or that the rules are based in some common ethics. The bigger the group of people, the less the likelihood that there will be some common set of ethics, and/or the less likely that there won’t be a view that the rules haven’t been followed ethically at some stage.
I like it when what feels right to me finds an intellectual justification that can be defended by argument rather than just lamely saying, 'That's just how I feel'. Wonderful stuff. George Mason seems to specialise in interesting professors.
Good article but I was confused by one bit: doesn't your "Immigration is a violation of property rights" argument also mean that citizens having kids is a violation of property rights since those kids can vote and draw welfare? And just that voting in general is a violation of property rights? I mean I agree that voting for policies that violate property rights could be considered a rights violation but that does not mean any particular new immigrant or child is morally responsible, for all we know they could be voting libertarian! As a toy example, if we let in 100 immigrants (or have 100 kids), 50 of which vote for a rights violation and 50 of which vote against, the net effect is zero. I know there is a whole literature on the voting patterns of new immigrants that I am not super familiar with but I don't think it is obviously that they vote for more confiscatory policies than natives.
1. Citizens have a right to have kids because you have a right to pass on your property to your children.
2. Voting for bad policies is a rights violation and ideally we would punish people for voting for bad things.
3. If 50 new people vote for a rights violation and 50 vote against, the net effect is not zero. They have moved the median voter towards new forms of rights violations.
The net effect would be zero if 33 voted for a new rights violation, 33 voted for the status quo, and 33 voted to roll back government and stop current rights violations.
4. By every measure, immigrants and their descendants are far more supportive of totalitarianism than natives.
For example, Whites are the only group which supports freedom of speech. Asians, Hispanics and Blacks oppose freedom of speech by wide margins.
sure, voting for bad policies is a rights violation, but lets not forget who is really responsible for the rights violations: the state.
The state violates our rights by instituting welfare programs, and also by interfering with freedom of association between citizens and foreigners. I have a hard time seeing how one of these rights violations justifies the other. It's seems analogous to having the state ban consensual sex acts because one of the partners could potentially contract an STD and use state subsidized health care.
as for the impact of immigration on totalitarianism, opinions differ. Many people think that mass immigration helped (at least as some times in history) prevent the expansion of gov't by weakening unions and undermining support for the welfare state. For example:
re 3: good point, your 33, 33, 33 example is better.
re 4: I would not say "far" more supportive of totalitarianism, the average immigrant's views are slightly on the left of the median native, but the differnece becomes statistically insignificant after a few generations: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/edb_27.pdf
but yeah, I agree the trends on public opinion are definitely concerning, but I think they are not concerning enough to warrant the amount of rights violations (of both prospective immigrants and American property owners who would wish to associate with them) implied by closed borders.
I totally agree with you that an UAE-style system would be better, but until we can reach that point we should not be so willing to give the state license to further violate our right to free association in the meantime.
On this account would illegally immigrating to the United States (and not having children who will become naturalized citizens) be permissible? It is legal to not hire or not rent your property to an illegal immigrant on the basis that she is an illegal immigrant (not in all states). Illegal immigrants cannot collect welfare or other benefits from the state.
The Lockean theory of land ownership is a good rule of thumb. As such, it can be viewed as analogous to Newtonian physics. But Newtonian physics is less precise than relativity theory. And Lockean ownership is less precise than a theory of ownership with an explicit philosophical theory of liberty. https://jclester.substack.com/p/eleutheric-conjectural-libertarianism
As a good libertarian rule of thumb, whoever started to use the land first. Only problem cases (whether real or thought-experimental) require resort to the philosophical theory of liberty and its relationship to property.
1) a much simpler guide is that might makes right. You own the land if you can conquer and defend it.
In the pre-industrial world you could often conquer land by being violent and unproductive. In the post industrial world productive people generally have higher military strength than unproductive people. So conquest has generally brought productivity.
Id characterize early modern European society as proto-industrial.
The new world was also a strange case because disease did 90% of the killing and the environment was conducive enough to European settlement.
2) when the immigrants to the UAE inevitably use their numbers to takeover the state (the same way blacks did in South Africa), will that retroactively make their immigration illegitimate in your view?
3) In the late Roman republic the mass importation of slaves impoverished ordinary roman citizens who were displaced by them. These slaves had no welfare or civil rights, and yet they had the effect they did on ordinary Roman who literally lost their farms to the latinfundia.
Google says 50-90%, so maybe I'm on the high end. I don't think it really changes much. Mexico may have had 20 million natives in 1520 before smallpox. The thirteen colonies in 1776 had just 2.5 million.
The point is that the only places the Europeans actually settled were in the new world, because disease caused a massive population drop. In the old world where disease wasn't doing most of the work they never settled in great numbers.
Also when you say immigration to the US is not legitimate do you mean overall or in every single case? I should think that you would agree some immigration to the US is legit and some is not right?
What do you think about Jewish immigration to Ottoman and later Mandatory Palestine? Legit or not? I guess legit as it brought prosperity to Arabs and the Jews didn’t ask for money from them. The majority may or may not want it but your Emirati case isn’t predicated on majority will either. Anyway most of the 750K Palis fled, some were expelled but many left behind, and were only expelled because they attacked the Jews. With the settlements the ones on private Palestinian property are not ok, I’m not a fan of the settlements in general but I feel you are basically accepting international law and collective ownership by an ethnic group of land if you think the Green Line is such a big deal. I’m pretty libertarian but not as extreme as you so I’ll bite the bullet.
How about immigration to the US from Europe? Early days? Later days? Legit since no welfare state?
Also it’s true the US was sparsely populated but so was Mandatory Palestine in the 1940s, now it has almost 10x more people.
Immigrants to the US aren’t allowed to vote and I haven’t seen any credible evidence of non-citizens voting illegally en masse.
What’s wrong with immigrants legally moving to the US, signing a work contract with a consenting employer and signing a rent contract with a consenting landlord? Isn’t libertarianism a philosophy that prioritizes individual rights over government permission?
This is an absolute banger. Really well done!
Thank you!
This article and the comment section is wild.
Anyway, what’s the difference on this analysis between a hunter gatherer, a nomadic pastoralist (say, a plains Indian) and a rancher? Is it the building of fences? A claim of land ownership?
It doesn’t seem to me to be one of control, or productivity, or use. Large ranches frequently have very few fences, have a lower population density as would a hunter gatherer or group of pastoralists, less connection to land. It seems the ownership of a ranch is simply an artefact of the state and state power.
Plains Indians were not nomadic pastoralists. They were hunter-gatherers (mostly hunters).
No rancher produces less food per acre than hunter gatherers would on the same land. Sure the population density of the ranch may be lower, but he's supporting a larger number of people.
So is ownership productivity then? And who determines the level of productivity required for ownership to be proven? if a large corporation runs a neighbouring farm (or ranch) vastly more productive than a homestead, can they take that homestead? I think there was a movie about that. Or is a prior claim more relevant than productivity? But then we come back to the example of the unproductive hunter, who has been on the land for generations…
What about the Neolithic tribesman who subsists on seafood. Archeologists find these middens of shells that show tribes hunting and gathering in the same spot for thousands of years. They don’t grow crops, they take their food from a communal source (the sea), but dwelt on the same spot for an hundred generations. Would they theoretically own the land?
I’m finding it a bit confusing.
I discussed the first case of the less-productive homestead in the article.
Yes, productivity is a core part of a claim to ownership because your claim to ownership is based on the fact that you're *using* it, and productivity is the key part of *using* something.
So if 2 people were both fully utilising their land, but one was a better farmer, or chose better crops, or used genetically modified crops, they would have a right to ownership over the others land?
Your productivity example went to a hunter gatherer who hardly sets foot on their range (ignoring that ranchers don’t either- in Australia it’s almost all done by helicopter). But I suspect you will say that one homesteader can’t dispossess the other simply because they are more efficient.
I think you want to talk about use- clearly, if you aren’t using property you can’t assert a right to it (and this is reflected in the law in most anglophone nations). But the problem is then to justify manifest destiny, because the navies where using the land, but just differently.
This can all be solved if you just accept that property rights just flow from the nation state.
You have a right to the land if you are using it and causing it to produce more than it would naturally (without any human cultivation).
So the Australian aborigines (and I expect many other hunter gatherers) extensively used fire to open up forests into more open grassland, to facilitate hunting. That would clearly fall into your definition?
I think it’s back to the drawing board on this one.
Ownership stems from simple might or from commonly accepted rules. There is no ethical dimension beyond an ethical dimension of might (problematic), or that the rules are based in some common ethics. The bigger the group of people, the less the likelihood that there will be some common set of ethics, and/or the less likely that there won’t be a view that the rules haven’t been followed ethically at some stage.
I like it when what feels right to me finds an intellectual justification that can be defended by argument rather than just lamely saying, 'That's just how I feel'. Wonderful stuff. George Mason seems to specialise in interesting professors.
Good article but I was confused by one bit: doesn't your "Immigration is a violation of property rights" argument also mean that citizens having kids is a violation of property rights since those kids can vote and draw welfare? And just that voting in general is a violation of property rights? I mean I agree that voting for policies that violate property rights could be considered a rights violation but that does not mean any particular new immigrant or child is morally responsible, for all we know they could be voting libertarian! As a toy example, if we let in 100 immigrants (or have 100 kids), 50 of which vote for a rights violation and 50 of which vote against, the net effect is zero. I know there is a whole literature on the voting patterns of new immigrants that I am not super familiar with but I don't think it is obviously that they vote for more confiscatory policies than natives.
1. Citizens have a right to have kids because you have a right to pass on your property to your children.
2. Voting for bad policies is a rights violation and ideally we would punish people for voting for bad things.
3. If 50 new people vote for a rights violation and 50 vote against, the net effect is not zero. They have moved the median voter towards new forms of rights violations.
The net effect would be zero if 33 voted for a new rights violation, 33 voted for the status quo, and 33 voted to roll back government and stop current rights violations.
4. By every measure, immigrants and their descendants are far more supportive of totalitarianism than natives.
For example, Whites are the only group which supports freedom of speech. Asians, Hispanics and Blacks oppose freedom of speech by wide margins.
thanks for the reply!
some thoughts:
sure, voting for bad policies is a rights violation, but lets not forget who is really responsible for the rights violations: the state.
The state violates our rights by instituting welfare programs, and also by interfering with freedom of association between citizens and foreigners. I have a hard time seeing how one of these rights violations justifies the other. It's seems analogous to having the state ban consensual sex acts because one of the partners could potentially contract an STD and use state subsidized health care.
as for the impact of immigration on totalitarianism, opinions differ. Many people think that mass immigration helped (at least as some times in history) prevent the expansion of gov't by weakening unions and undermining support for the welfare state. For example:
https://reason.com/2021/07/17/how-mass-immigration-stopped-american-socialism/
re 3: good point, your 33, 33, 33 example is better.
re 4: I would not say "far" more supportive of totalitarianism, the average immigrant's views are slightly on the left of the median native, but the differnece becomes statistically insignificant after a few generations: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/edb_27.pdf
but yeah, I agree the trends on public opinion are definitely concerning, but I think they are not concerning enough to warrant the amount of rights violations (of both prospective immigrants and American property owners who would wish to associate with them) implied by closed borders.
I totally agree with you that an UAE-style system would be better, but until we can reach that point we should not be so willing to give the state license to further violate our right to free association in the meantime.
On this account would illegally immigrating to the United States (and not having children who will become naturalized citizens) be permissible? It is legal to not hire or not rent your property to an illegal immigrant on the basis that she is an illegal immigrant (not in all states). Illegal immigrants cannot collect welfare or other benefits from the state.
There are approximately zero people who fit that description, but yes, it would probably be possible for a person like that to immigrate.
The Lockean theory of land ownership is a good rule of thumb. As such, it can be viewed as analogous to Newtonian physics. But Newtonian physics is less precise than relativity theory. And Lockean ownership is less precise than a theory of ownership with an explicit philosophical theory of liberty. https://jclester.substack.com/p/eleutheric-conjectural-libertarianism
Ok, so who owns Greenland, Israel/Palestine, Nagorno/Karabakh, etc.?
As a good libertarian rule of thumb, whoever started to use the land first. Only problem cases (whether real or thought-experimental) require resort to the philosophical theory of liberty and its relationship to property.
1) a much simpler guide is that might makes right. You own the land if you can conquer and defend it.
In the pre-industrial world you could often conquer land by being violent and unproductive. In the post industrial world productive people generally have higher military strength than unproductive people. So conquest has generally brought productivity.
Id characterize early modern European society as proto-industrial.
The new world was also a strange case because disease did 90% of the killing and the environment was conducive enough to European settlement.
2) when the immigrants to the UAE inevitably use their numbers to takeover the state (the same way blacks did in South Africa), will that retroactively make their immigration illegitimate in your view?
3) In the late Roman republic the mass importation of slaves impoverished ordinary roman citizens who were displaced by them. These slaves had no welfare or civil rights, and yet they had the effect they did on ordinary Roman who literally lost their farms to the latinfundia.
It's not true that disease wiped out 90% of Amerindians. That's leftist propaganda. The true number is 30-50%
Whether it's 30%, 50%, 90%, or something else, I doubt if anyone was actually counting.
Google says 50-90%, so maybe I'm on the high end. I don't think it really changes much. Mexico may have had 20 million natives in 1520 before smallpox. The thirteen colonies in 1776 had just 2.5 million.
The point is that the only places the Europeans actually settled were in the new world, because disease caused a massive population drop. In the old world where disease wasn't doing most of the work they never settled in great numbers.
> a much simpler guide is that might makes right. You own the land if you can conquer and defend it.
That's certainly what happened historically
Yeah, imagine asking if the Romans had the right to conquer Gaul (they had farms you know). Or the Spanish the right to do the ReConquista. Or...
I don't see why we pick a point in the line of conquerers and decide a particular conquerer is the "legitimate" conquerer.
Possession is 9/10th of the law.
Also when you say immigration to the US is not legitimate do you mean overall or in every single case? I should think that you would agree some immigration to the US is legit and some is not right?
What do you think about Jewish immigration to Ottoman and later Mandatory Palestine? Legit or not? I guess legit as it brought prosperity to Arabs and the Jews didn’t ask for money from them. The majority may or may not want it but your Emirati case isn’t predicated on majority will either. Anyway most of the 750K Palis fled, some were expelled but many left behind, and were only expelled because they attacked the Jews. With the settlements the ones on private Palestinian property are not ok, I’m not a fan of the settlements in general but I feel you are basically accepting international law and collective ownership by an ethnic group of land if you think the Green Line is such a big deal. I’m pretty libertarian but not as extreme as you so I’ll bite the bullet.
How about immigration to the US from Europe? Early days? Later days? Legit since no welfare state?
Also it’s true the US was sparsely populated but so was Mandatory Palestine in the 1940s, now it has almost 10x more people.
Immigrants to the US aren’t allowed to vote and I haven’t seen any credible evidence of non-citizens voting illegally en masse.
What’s wrong with immigrants legally moving to the US, signing a work contract with a consenting employer and signing a rent contract with a consenting landlord? Isn’t libertarianism a philosophy that prioritizes individual rights over government permission?
Immigrants can vote after they are naturalized and so can their children and grandchildren.