Message #5 (35 is last):
Date: Thu Sep 23 02:04:29 1999
From: lawecon@SWLINK.NET ("Craig J. Bolton")
Subject: Re: Property Rights
To: LIBERTARIANS@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Reply-To: LIBERTARIANS@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU (Libertarian Students at the University of Arizona)
At 10:37 AM 9/22/99 -0700, you wrote:
>Here's a premise I'd like to see explored:
>
>Whose property are you? The state and your parents both lay claim, but
>which is more in-the-right? I perceive each of those entities as using you
>toward their own perverseends, but what can you do about it? Commercial
>entities also use you to get money from you. But you use them, too.
>
>Perhaps property is really the ways we permit each other to use one
>another. Can anyone provide a description that better describes the
>transactional manifestation of property?
>
Well, according to the 13th Amendment you can't be property. That is
perhaps a problem in our legal system, but that is the way it is. For
instance, you can't definitively sell your labor services to another person
for a given period of time [no specific performance is available as a
remedy on labor contracts, only damages]. Certainly, you cannot sell your
remaining life to another person ["voluntary slavery"].
Now presumably it follows that if you can't be property [or at least you
can't be alienable property] for anyone else that there is an argument that
you can't be property for yourself either. If you truly had a "property
right" in your life, then it would follow that no one could deprive you f
either your life or the right to use your life as you wished. But we know
that isn't true, and we further know that isn't true in more cases than
just "conflict of right" cases.
Now is this situation, where you are not property, more or less liberating
than a situation where you are property? I presume from your remarks above
that you think that it is a good thing to not be property because you
connect "being property" with "being used" by others for their "perverse
ends." Well, think about it for awhile. Do the other organisms in the world
that are "not property" benefit from that status? Do sperm whales, for
instance, benefit from being "not property"? Did Brazilian slaves [who were
not alienable property but were bound to the land] benefit from that status
relative to slaves in the U.S. [who were alienable property]? Does Garrett
Hardin's "the commons" benefit from not being anyone's property?
Craig Bolton