Where Does Liberty Begin: Reply to Bruenig
Now, a voluntary association doing equity would not be an invader, but a defender against invasion, and might include in its defensive operations the protection of the occupiers of land.
Benjamin Tucker
In an article for Jacobin titled “How Did Private Property Start?” Matt Bruenig makes the claim that libertarian thought:
…has no way of coherently justifying the initial acquisition of property. How does something that was once unowned become owned without nonconsensually destroying others’ liberty?
He includes examples of how certain prominent libertarian thinkers have fallen short of the mark. However, the first step would be to see if Bruenig’s premise is itself coherent. What is the nature of this liberty to which he refers? My position is that the state of liberty to which he is ultimately referring is self-defeating and nonsensical.
Bruenig’s main contention is that “property acquisition violates the liberty of others.” This liberty being denied by the claiming of and the exclusive use of property, withholding the access of others, and so, therefore, taking something away from them. For something to have been taken away–for someone to have experienced such a loss–it would be necessary to identify them as some kind of initial acquirer. This initial acquirer being the one whose status and access, aka liberty, has been denied by the latecomer.
However, the status of the initial acquirer in Bruenig’s scenario is not really someone acquiring anything. That is not his point. This is not simply an easement rights issue. His claim is open-ended. It is not that someone is losing access to something which they have acquired initially, but rather that the one who does at some point acquire something is now denying such access to any person who may have previously interacted with said thing and passed it up or to some hypothetical future actor who may decide to interact with it. Bruenig’s liberty is merely the potential for any particular user at any given time to have access.
This is the nature of something which is unowned. There is a present moment of potential to access by any given actor. It is in this suspended form to which all actors share this presumed sense of liberty.
It is the availability of the unowned item that is the liberty to which he speaks. However, the exclusive use for such an item, even for just a moment, denies any other person that availability and therefore their liberty. Any morsel of food, toothbrush, clothing, parcel of land, or any other finite resource which is occupied for any moment in time would be a violent denial of any other particular person’s freedom to partake.
For what differentiates the present moment liberty from the future moment or past moment liberties? Is liberty itself merely a static moment availability, any action upon which denies its future state that of its present state?
It is for this reason that we must conclude that the original liberty at hand to which Bruenig refers is itself a denial of its original condition. This suspended state of liberty of any one person, as well as all other persons, cannot be simultaneous, for such a liberty of one actor would itself be a denial of the liberty of another whose potential to access has been denied.
If, let us say, due to some paradisiac superabundance of bananas, my present consumption of bananas does not in any way reduce my own future supply (possible consumption) of bananas, nor the present or the future supply of bananas for any other person, then the assignment of property rights, here with respect to bananas, would be superfluous.
Hans Hermann Hoppe
About The Author
Joshua Bond
Contributing writer for principledlibertarian.com