Under libertarianism an owner of a piece of land has absolute and total power over it. Therefore he can run his patch whatever the way he wants, which means, basically, absolute monarchy. The only ideological difference between libertarians and absolutists (both are secular) is that libertarians are deontologists, and absolutists are pragmatic moral nihilists.
Structured argument for why libertarianism fails:
1. Total amount of land on Earth is, for all intents and purposes, unlike total amount of capital, a fixed constant.
2. Under “pure anarcho-capitalist model” all land on Earth is owned.
3. By the nature of things, people who own the land, the landowners, are a very tiny minority of humans.
4. The landless must agree to the rules, the terms and conditions, set by the landowner on whose land they’re living on, otherwise they’re, *at best*, trespassing.
5. If the landless can’t find a landowner with whom he agrees with, he is an outlaw.
An outlaw can be killed, imprisoned, enslaved, etc. whatever the landowner sees fit, since by the very definition outlaw is exempt from the protection of the law. This means that you really aren’t allowed to disagree with the landowner, i.e. you must do what he wishes you to do, or you become an outlaw and then you do what he wishes you to do regardless.
Libertarianism fails. It doesn’t protect you from bad kings, but it does lead to kings.
Hi there, I am someone who recently discovered your blog.
So do you think that, the land should ultimately be owned by some sort of authority? But how would you solve the problem of, say, if “the government” want to confiscate the land away from someone because that person commits “hatespeech crime”?
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Hi there! Thanks for commenting.
Moldbug’s point was that there is always someone holding the land area with might, and that is the sovereign property. Ordinary property rights are therefore granted to the people by sovereign property holder, and are thereby “secondary property”. Moldbug claimed that libertarians don’t believe in sovereign property, but I wouldn’t agree with that. The problem with libertarian philosophy is that their claims are ethical claims that reality has no reason to oblige, i.e. if bandits take your house and chase you away, that may be ethically wrong (and thus libertarians ethically right), but what can you do? Here we get to another of Moldbug’s claims, namely that sovereign property holder is always “omnipotent” e.g. if government decided to have you assassinated who will protect you? So, if “the government” wants to confiscate the land (“secondary property”) away from someone because that person committed a “hatespeech crime” no one can stop that. Moldbug concluded then, that given all this it’s best to have a ruler that will have every incentive to leave you alone and provide law and order. Moldbug thought it best that such a ruler be a single man, an absolute monarch, since division of Power grows the government, and necessarily leads to anarcho-tyranny. What Moldbug overlooked however, is the fact that since no outside entity grants sovereign property, absolutism suffers from the same problem as anarcho-capitalism, i.e. there’s an irreducible anarchy between sovereigns. Unlike feudal monarchies, historically, absolutism proved very fragile (some are proposing right-wing analogues to Stalinism as a solution to this problem, but if the price of having a secure absolutism is Stalinism then what’s the point of it all?). Owing to all this, your guess on how to prevent anarcho-tyranny is as good as mine, for unlike some, I am not so sure that absolutism is going to work.
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I think the only way to prevent absolutism is to have the ruler to be of the same
– religion, or
– political ideology, or
– race, or
– a combination of any of the two above, or
– a combination of all the three.
I personally believe that what is called ‘absolutism’ comes from the point of view of the person is at the receiving end of the absolutism. If you live in the Soviet Union and you did not believe in Communism, then chance is you would experience the iron hand of the state. If you did believe in all the Communist ideals however, it is unlikely that you would describe the Soviet state as “absolutist”, and write off the arrests of anti Communists as what the state should do.
The best way to prevent absolutism, therefore, is to have the ruler to be of the same mind as the ruled.
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You are right, but I feel some clarification is in order. What you describe I wouldn’t call “absolutism”, but “tyranny”, and is the subject of James Calb’s most excellent book The Tyranny of Liberalism, i.e. one man’s freedom is another man’s slavery. What is meant by “absolutism” is rather a system of government where the entire country is owned by the single man, and presided over by his personal fiat. He can then arbitrarily grant and revoke each other man’s property, for example. The only law of the land is his unbound whim. In contrast to absolute monarchy, feudal monarchy isn’t absolute i.e. different parts of the country are granted to lords, there are corporate rights (for example church and family have special status), and monarch is expected to respect his commitments (thus his Power isn’t unlimited).
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I guess it comes down to whether you prefer a strong aristocracy or a strong monarch.
Perhaps absolute monarchy could be available in say, China or India, but not in the West.
Feudal monarchy seems to be a predominantly European, or even Western (or even Northern) European phenomenon. I do not know if you can run China on the same model as France or England.
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While we are free to discuss merits of different systems government on the Internet, in practice people can rarely pick and chose their government, let alone design it. It is especially the case with reactionary governments. Revolutionary systems of government are designed, reactionary systems of government are born, out of Realpolitik and compromise. So, when the Restoration comes we get what we get.
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Everything you say makes sense, except for the last two sentences. I don’t see how you got to your conclusion. Yes, you do need to abide by my rules if you want to come into my home. In what sense is this a “failing” principle?
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Since majority of mankind are going to be landless, this means that on Earth under “pure anarcho-capitalist model” they cannot be protected in any way from the landowners who are now absolute monarchs, i.e. there are, for all intents and purposes states again.
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Tenants are protected by contracts they nogotiate with landlords.
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And who’s going to punish the landlords when they break the contracts? Nobody, since there is no higher authority. The only thing landlords can be punished with is bad reputation.
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Not according to AnCaps. They envision a whole set of private institutions: protection agencies, courts, etc. Looks like you may not be familiar enough with the theories and arguments that you are so confidently rejecting.
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Institutions don’t matter when it’s assumed that property rights are absolute.
I’m familiar enough. For the same reason I reject absolutism, I reject libertarianism.
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If you are just stating your rejection, then I have no objection.
But if you are presenting an argument, you really need to explain the flaws of the models you are rejecting.
You are not even aknowledging them.
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I though that I already did that in the post itself. Since all land is owned, the tenant that rejects the conditions the landlord presents him with (so there is actually no reason for landlord to ever break the contract, all contracts would always be made in such a way to suit him) automatically becomes an outlaw unless some other landlord accepts him (which may not be possible for various reasons). My conclusion there is that this is no anarchy, but simply a bunch of absolute monarchies. Ancaps hope that every single one of them would have their own piece of land, and would thus be their own kings, and protection of their land provided by independent agencies, but there is no reason to assume such a thing. Indeed, my argument scrutinizes what happens to those that do not own any land.
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