AMA Tuesday
I plan to make my next post an AMA (Ask Me Anything). Put questions in the comment thread to this post. I will try to answer as many as I can.
Anyone Want a Talk In Europe In April?
I will be attending Libertycon in Madrid from April 24th to 26th and plan to make it part of a two week speaking trip, schedule to be determined. If you would like a talk let me know.
What is your favorite memory of growing up as the son of Milton Friedman?
In some of the debates between libertarians and non-libertarians about immigration, immigration opponents tend to bring up an analogy between private property and state sovereignty.
I was struck in earlier iterations of these arguments by the fact that I considered private property more plausibly legitimate than communal or governmental sovereignty, while many other people thought it was exactly the opposite way around. E.g. I remember Mike Huben years ago saying that clearly property had to be derived from sovereignty. I think his arguments were essentially (1) property is only meaningful if it is defended by force, which normally state sovereigns do, and (2) the means by which governments acquire and defend territory are analogous to the means by which individuals acquire and defend property rights, and one is not more obviously legitimate than the other.
This again was the reverse of my intuition, because I thought one could acquire property via a peaceful and commendable activity like making productive use of it (if one believes in some theories along these lines) and then asking others to respect one's efforts by not interfering with them. On the other hand, the state sovereignty claims seem to mostly rest on killing people and seeing who's left afterward, or who surrenders afterward. "You should stay out of here because I've been working hard on my own thing" or "because I personally physically live here with my vulnerable family" feels more morally significant to me than "you should stay out of this whole area because some people in our group killed everyone else here, and we're prepared to do the same to you, too".
However, if one thinks that neither is really a moral question (either because of moral antirealism or because of skepticism toward property institutions in particular), then perhaps the entity that has the most conspicuous and organized willingness to enforce its claim with force has the greater "positive" claim. I think my confusion with Huben is that he seemed to feel that *all* property claims were forms of "might makes right" and that gradually we had systematized some of these things in ways that produced less chaos and violence on a day-to-day basis (in fact Scott Alexander also said something somewhat like that in his own critique of libertarianism). On the other hand, if you think there's a plausibly legitimate way for individuals to acquire property (at least in chattels, maybe also in land) then you won't think of that as a matter of "might makes right" and it will perhaps not seem to be the same thing as territorial sovereignty claims, unless you also see those as sort of aggregating smaller property claims or somehow repeating the same kind of legitimate process.
I wonder what you currently think about the analogies and disanalogies between individuals' property claims and states' territorial sovereignty claims. Also, how important is it what the actual historical facts behind each claim are, as opposed to the Schelling point of how people think about the claims today?