What is Geolibertarianism?
I think the best way to understand geolibertarianism is by defining
what they think. I have formulated below a set of fundamental
assertions that all geolibertarians would nod their heads to:
- Geolibertarians consider "land" to be the common property of
all mankind.
- Private property is derived from an individual's right to the
fruits of their labour.
- Land is not property since it was not created by anyone's
labour.
- A person can privately possess land on the condition that rent
is paid
I only unwaveringly agree with #3. I
strongly agree with #4, I have a lot of problems with #1 and #2
Myth 1: Earth was Left in Common to Mankind
Libertarians (and their geolibertarian neighbours) today derive
their understanding of what "makes" private property from the works
of John Locke. John Locke was struggling to solve the earlier
Grotius-Pufendorf problem of how property could be justified, if God
gave Earth to mankind in common. Grotius and Pufendorf postulated
that consent justified private property. However, John Locke
advanced that appropriation of those goods is justified by labouring
on them. The Earth belongs to all, John Locke asserts (by appealing
to natural law which he argues is knowable by reason).
The earth was not left to anyone unless one
wants to consider might makes right. The geolibertarians who adopt
natural law are just as wrong as neolibertarians who do so -
natural law doesn't exist in the way humans try to make it exist.
Property, and indeed all rights, are only justified to others
based on what those others are willing to consider justification.
Rights only exist by consent so, given only the above,
Grotius-Pufendorf was far closer to the truth than John Locke was.
You can only "access" that which you own. It is a necessary
condition of ownership.
Theft proves otherwise. Possession and
ownership are two separate concepts - which is a large reason why
self-ownership is a muddled starting point.
This creates a positive obligation on every human on the planet to
ensure they are not breaching the entitlements of others.
I see it as the same negative obligation in
making sure they are not breaching the entitlement of others to
life, property, etc.
A "collective" is made up of individual people (it can be six people
on the planet or even six-billion people). The collective
entitlements are derived from the rights of its individual members.
Thus, if one man cannot claim land – nor can the collective. If it
is the case that man cannot claim ownership of land, then nor can
any collection of any number of individuals.
That's false. Individuals may respect
institutions differently than individuals thus affording
institutions more rights than individuals. While I don't think
this should be the case, it definitely is the
case. In geoism, a man can own land subject to certain
obligations. Unlike some other geoists, I don't legitimize
communal rights, so I don't think that a town should be able to
own land without also being subject to certain obligations.
The very definition of "ownership" is exclusive control over the use
of a scarce good. The concepts of "ownership" and "common" are
incompatible.
Multiple people can have exclusive legitimate
control over a scarce resource or can have legitimate control
subject to certain conditions. Nolibertarians claim first use
(though use is a fuzzy word), but there's no abstract reason why
other conditions can't confer legitimate control.
One can't help but noticed that geolibertarians (or commonists) also
invoke the "… when there was only one man on earth …" state of
nature to explain that "we would have a right to the use of the
whole earth."
Those people are wrong. Functional rights
don't exist in the absence of respecters. The only person on earth
would have no rights, only abilities.
Anyone, with even the vaguest concept of evolution, should
dismiss this nonsense. But even if you are the only man on Earth,
you don't have any more entitlement to resources – than sheep or
horses. You're free to do as you please. But you have no
entitlements. Indeed, planet Earth has been in existence for
billions-of-years. What about all the animals and our primate
ancestors? Do they not have an equal 'entitlement' to resources?
Should chimpanzees, therefore, be locked-up in zoos? When did homo
sapiens decide that they have a unique positive entitlement to
everything on the planet.
Chimps probably shouldn't be locked up. Humans
believe that they have rights/entitlements and, due to getting
respect for those things from others, they can actually get those
rights and entitlements. They don't, sans-agents, actually exist.
Humans, on their own, don't have a right to property.
Notice the sophistry when the say that the first human (Adam from
the bible, of course) would have been able to go anywhere and do
anything. But this is obviously not true. He couldn't, for instance,
march into a lion's den to snatch a cub – not for long. With a big
gasp, geolibertarians should be asserting that the lions are
preventing Adam's "right" to access!
Rights and ability are two different things.
Further, they would say, shouldn't the lions compensate Adam's
'right'? Perhaps the pride ought to give Adam one of their cubs as
payment. But, for some strange reason, this hysteria is directed at
homo sapiens and their activity. Geolibertarianism suffers from a
grand confusion of positive entitlements (or 'right') to land and
the freedom to act. (Not forgetting the notion that Earth was given
to mankind).
Animals kill one another all the time. Should
animals grant humans a right to life? Do you see the problematic
parallel there? Rights are a way to get humans societies to work
well. If non-human animals could consistently be reasoned with and
had compatible goals, then both groups could grant one another
rights. Humans only grant one another rights so long as it's
useful to do so. Property isn't some magical thing encoded in the
laws of reason or handed down by god - it's a way for humans to
not have to fight one another and there is nothing which says that
one way is absolutely the best in all circumstances.
Further, the problem with so-called "collective rights" only begins
by asking who determined what they are? Who proposed these rights?
And who is bound by them? Geolibertarianism assumes land is owned in
common as the beginning point. How did such ownership exist? It is
entirely question-begging with no real answers. Hence, one really
does need a God to support this foundationless sculpture.
I agree, but that is the same problem with
individual rights. In both cases it comes down to power. Rights
which are too hard to respect won't exist.
Myth 2: Private Property is the Product of Human Labour
Fundamentally, nobody "creates" anything.
Land, like everything else, is a "product of labor" to the extent
that it is initially transformed. According to the Lockean
proviso, man is no more entitled to a house than a mountain. He
happens to have taken some wood of the floor, and re-arranged it.
But the wood is not the product of his labour. Thus, the "man
didn't create land" is an utter strawman.
It is kind of a strawman, but not entirely. All wealth
has a land component and has value based on both the land
component and the form/invested labor. Land enclosure diminishes
opportunity for others - there's absolutely no way to argue
against this point. Arguing for personal wealth whose land
component, and hence diminished opportunity for others, is
relatively low compared to the value people ascribe to the labor
component makes sense because people don't want to have their past
effort taxed especially if it's not causing (much) harm. Arguing
against land ownership free and clear in cases where improvements
are minor or diminished opportunities are major is far more
defensible to most people.
That doesn't mean that the enclosed opportunity in personal wealth
shouldn't demand compensation - but it is probably not worth it to
do so: the cost of enforcing that both monetarily and in the
dangers of creating an overarching detection and enforcement
agency is greater than the value of what would be recovered.
We must depart from this Lockean notion and refine the arguments
about rights and property. Labour does not establish private
ownership. Scarcity establishes private ownership.
If labor doesn't establish private property,
then how does first use make sense - since use is necessarily an
act of labor. Secondly, scarcity doesn't establish private
property - it necessitates it. The rights of property
attempt to resolve conflicts which arise due to scarcity. There
can be multiple systems which resolve conflicts effectively in
different circumstances.
Moreover, how on Earth (excuse the pun!) does someone separate the
"original" value from the value added by human labour?
This is the hardest problem for practical
geoism, but I don't believe it to be insurmountable by using
market mechanisms. Even if it can't be separated perfectly, good
enough is good enough.
Private property sometimes involves the production of security
(risk-taking) and information. In other words, land has to be
discovered. Christopher Columbus was sent by the King of Spain to
find new lands. This was a carefully planned & operated and
financially-backed venture that wasn't even sure to produce any
results! Shouldn't the King of Spain be entitled to claim the
Americas as being under his dominion? If not, there are no
incentives to discover new resources.
This is another problem which was raised and
kind of makes sense - so long as one is also willing to accept
intellectual property rights. If one denies that, then the grounds
on which it is objected to and the methods of incentivizing
individuals without intellectual property are the same for this
scenario.
Lastly, how can individuals claim that they have ownership over
themselves if they didn't create themselves? Since the
geolibertarian position is that one can only claim private property
over that which one labours. By that account, man doesn't 'own'
himself. I hardly think any libertarian would assert we're not
entitled to our own bodies, since we didn't create them.
Self-ownership is a muddled position and needs
to go away.
Myth 3: Private Ownership is Harmful
In many ways, John Locke paved the way to the Marxist trap that
ownership is harmful (and thus, bad). But appropriation and private
property is NOT a zero-sum-game.
It's not necessarily a zero-sum game.
Wealth involves some enclosure but can make people better off in
the aggregate. It might be the case that land can be held out of
use and it can turn out better overall. However, there are no
foundational values or foundational way to compare values. Values
are subjective and expressed by what people are willing to give
up. Without a way to prove one's value for something which doesn't
involve luck such as being first, there's no way to express that
value completely in a non-foundational-value manner.
When we imagine first appropriation, we imagine a race in which
first-come-first-serve are the lucky ones. The unpalatable reality
is that life was very harsh for those first appropriators. Consider
the first settlers to England. If given a choice, would you rather
live in primitive bronze-age England or today?
Sure, being first can suck a lot of the time,
but that doesn't mean that others should be excluded from what
they would have otherwise had in the absence of another. The
poorest of society would do far better in a hunter/gatherer tribe
in warm climates than in first world societies - at least by
certain standards. Sure, poor people in the U.S. and U.K. might
have clothes and a phone, but they are not self-actualized, they
have their power process restrained.
Myth 4: Freedom is Dependent on Land
It is said that freedom is dependent on the availability of land!
It is, try to do something without access to land, see what you can
do!
This is what someone said on an internet forum I'm a member off:
This stops the choice of 'work or die', for many, which isn't really
freedom at all.
There's a difference between voluntary and euvoluntary. If another
puts you in a shitty position (with some caveats), then something
isn't voluntary. If it's just bad luck it's bad luck.
I don't own land. Lots of people I know don't own land. What is
wrong with working and saving (other than the fact I am a
capitalist)?
In order for that to be a justified out, one
would need a right to a job to have a right to life. Do you want
to go there? I'd rather say that people have a right to land
subject to certain conditions and leave it at that. Sure - if you
don't work, you're probably not going to eat, but you don't need
someone else to provide you with a job. And, no, you can't
work without first having access to land. Since:
- you need to work to live, and
- you need to live to have self-ownership,
and
- if any prerequisite of something is a
priviledge, then that thing must be a privilege since it is
contingent then
- if all land access is a privilege for
you, then self-ownership is a privilege for you
Namely, you can't have a right to
self-ownership without a right to land access. Even though I
think self-ownership is a stupid starting point, this fact is
inescapable unless one wants to say that not all humans have a
right to self-ownership.
Human labour is necessary for survival – not land. Wealth is created
by the productive efforts of man in the division of labour – simply
owning goods is no guarantee to anything.
False. Labor is necessary for survival - but
where can you perform labor? You need to have a right to labor for
yourself, you need to have a right to labor for yourself...
somewhere.
Even if one is designated a certain space, you can't live long
without trade or working the land. By all accounts, therefore, one
still isn't free since one has to work.
One isn't free from the demands of reality.
One is free from the demands of other humans which is the
group that rights are meant to influence.
Therefore, we need to revise what freedom really means. People act
as a means to an end. There is always something that would make us
more satisfactory. Freedom is not about the limitations of choice
people must make (which is qualm against the nature of reality) –
but being free from coercion to make one's own choices. The real
non-freedom is when someone denies another person the option to
work, in the example above.
Exclusive ownership of land is a form of
denial of the option for another to work. Case in point: I want to
grow corn. There's a forest over there no one is currently
possessing. I start to clear it to grow corn. People show up with
guns. They claim that they bought it off of someone who,
eventually either homesteaded it or, more likely got a grant from
a government or king or conquered the original inhabitants. They
have the gall to be offended if I suggest that I fight them for it
now.
Myth 5: A Difference Between the State and the Community
If it is true that humans need land to survive (which it is not),
then surely – to geolibertarians – taxing land is tantamount to
taxing existence. There are two ways to tax. You either tax humans
for action, or you tax humans for the resources by which they act.
It is perceived that there is a difference between the two.
Resources are scarce, and man needs resources to act. Either way,
man is being taxed for acting.
Sure, but one taxes things which tend to
benefit others, another taxes things which tend to impose external
opportunity costs on others. If something has to be taxed,
maximal wealth creation, opportunity and actualization demand it's
the latter.
Some choose to call it a rent or tax. The question becomes how does
one pay it? How does the assessment, calculation, collection and
distribution take place without an institution with the monopoly on
the use of force that cannot be retaliated against?
How do anarchists propose DROs work? How do
rent collection agencies work now? There are market mechanisms
such as auctions which can deal with assessment and calculation,
there are trusts other technological solutions to deal with
collection and distribution.
What happens if I decide I don't want to pay this tax, and that may
land is indeed justly acquired.
There is no such thing as "justly acquired"
without others considering something just - there are no rights
without respecters. You're arguing against geoism by presuming
neolibertarianism is correct.
You need such an institution that has the monopoly on the use force
without being retaliated against.
No, you just need more power at the time than
the other party has - power can be in the form of overt or covert
threats or general sentiment. What I like about geoism is it gives
others a (non-false) reason to respect the property rights of
another.
But how is the LVT 'calculated'? The fact that the quasi-government
would have to be involved in this process makes that government
inherently political. And the nature of government (or the
seductiveness of the monopoly on force) is such that it can only
expand. But the LVT can only be calculated by either: (1) an
arbitrary figure and/or (2) whenever the lease on a given land is
up, the new one is auctioned off to the highest bidder with
government approval.
It doesn't have to be a government in form or
name. There is one point I never hear addressed by
neolibertarians: other than scale, how is a landlord different
than a state?
The reality is that the people in the market determine the value of
a given stretch of land. Land is still scarce as it was 100 years
ago. And if the market-place is the most efficient way to ensure an
optimal supply of a scarce good (elastic or inelastic), then it
holds that land – on the free-market – would tend to an optimal
supply too.
The optimal supply of land is whatever people
want and what they're willing to give up for it. However, the
person holding the land didn't have to give anything up to the
other person if he holds out - it's not a trade, it's a
situation of begging.
Purchasing land does not reduce the supply of land. If land starts
to actually become really scarce, economic incentives would induce
resources to be spent on building more land — either by building
skyscrapper, or digging deeper into the earth — or to discover land
on different planets (if things got really serious!).
Agreed.
Some declare that the LVT has no economic effects. This is
bewildering! The LVT has about the same effects as the income tax.
It certainly has effects, but causes the least
economic negative wealth-affecting distortions of all the primary
tax proposals. Its effects are far less damaging than the
corporate and personal income (wage) taxes.