A Deconstructive Repartee to Dr. Block: Regarding the CHAZ
Recently, I had the pleasure of reading an article published on Mises.org by the magnanimous Dr. Walter Block, a man for whom I’ve had great respect. His willingness to address otherwise uncomfortable political topics with an unwavering stoicism is something any of us would be grateful to possess. Dr. Block addresses the CHAZ or the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in this article with which I’m sure most people in the libertarian ideosphere are now familiar. The article was written as a response to Jeff Deist's article here.
Dr. Block begins his article with a few setup questions and clarifications about the ownership of property. This particular point will be relevant later:
“From a libertarian perspective, we must first distinguish between (previously) city government–owned property and that of the private storekeepers, homeowners, and other private citizens. As to the latter, the analysis is easy: they should remain in control of their property, and if the CHAZ folk interfere with their continued use of these possessions of theirs, they are in the wrong. But what about public property? CHAZ now possesses the streets, police stations, libraries, museums, post offices, parks, opera houses, and other assets previously in government hands. Who, now, has a right to take charge of all of these goods?”
Indeed, what of “public” property, the misnomer I love to loathe. What of the property that was seized and controlled by the state, improved, and changed with your tax dollars and use? Who has the most justifiable claim to the goods in a post-state ownership society?
Dr. Block continues:
“Suppose we were privatizing this area under Rothbardian rules. Who would obtain which government assets? “Homesteading” and “Rothbard” are not synonyms in the English language, but in the present context they might as well be. All of these resources would belong to the owners of private property in the area. However, there is one difficulty in concluding that control of this material properly belongs to them and not to the CHAZites: these locals did nothing to claim ownership.
How easily Dr. Block dismisses the property claim of the surrounding private property owners in Seattle simply because they did not stand in the middle of a baseball field and exclaim: “This is mine!” A bit of an absurd idea, when there are rioters, looters, vandals, and violent communists running the streets. The same communists who are now claiming this property. I hardly believe the “first come first serve” method of homesteading so easily applies to state-owned property.
To illustrate, I’ll use an example:
Who would you say has a better claim of ownership to a bridge?
Two homeless vagrants who sleep under it and have never paid a dime in taxes but hold a sign saying “this is our bridge” as they scare small children away.
The people who were stolen from to build and maintain it and now use it every day to attend their jobs where they are again stolen from, who then return to their homes which could be taken from them for not paying the taxes that built the bridge.
In my estimation, the evidence is quite clear that the second group has a better claim to the property than the first. But wait, Dr. Block says maybe since they don’t have such a great claim, they should be paid a finder’s fee for the seizing of illicit property.
“At the very least then, even if the previous owners were to be given a portion of these statist goods, the CHAZ people would certainly be owed what might be considered a “finder’s fee.””
The “CHAZites”, so to speak, are nothing but violent vagrants squatting property they have very little (if any) claim to. A finder’s fee is an interesting concept but not one that bears much merit. You usually pay a finder’s fee voluntarily or through contract, of which the private property owners neither requested nor needed. I think with the violence and destruction the communists have pushed upon those people and their livelihoods you’d be hard-pressed to justify any amount that wouldn’t be immediately be washed away by the mountain of debt they’ve incurred.
Authors Note:
After some very cordial conversation with Dr. Block, he's kindly informed me that he is referring only in reference to the Rothbardian example here.
I don’t think I can prevent myself from using another example scenario. A ball rolls into the street, it’s dangerous to retrieve and you haven’t made the decision to retrieve it yet. Your neighbor runs into traffic causing a car to swerve and drive through your yard and hit your house. Your neighbor now requests a finder’s fee for retrieving your ball. Should you pay the finder’s fee? Most people would laugh or maybe even be angry at the idea of paying the neighbor. Now imagine the neighbor wasn’t a neighbor at all, just some vagrant walking down the street. The idea becomes even more absurd.
“Of course, implicit in the Rothbardian notion of homesteading is that it is open to just about anyone, except for criminals. The actual possessors of CHAZ, as of this writing, are members of Antifa, a criminal organization, guilty of vast mayhem, looting of private property, assault, threats, etc. So, they cannot be the proper owners of the goods in question.”
I would agree with Dr. Block that the incessant use of aggression by the violent communists in the autonomous zone is neither justifiable nor warranted. Their burning and looting of businesses are reprehensible. I will stipulate to all of this, quite readily.
“But suppose that instead of Antifa a group of Rothbardians took on this role (we pass quickly over the point that the powers that be in Seattle and Washington State, although looking on somewhat askance but also benignly at CHAZ, would crush without mercy any free enterprisers who acted as they have, in a similar manner to what happened to David Koresh in Waco).”
I could not agree more with Dr. Block here. If this scenario were flipped and we had a right-wing movement of people doing this the state would, without question, come down with its iron fist to destroy them. Clearly here the left-wing communist groups are enabled by the state, adding to Dr. Block’s previous argument that they have even less of a legitimate claim to the property now that the state has colluded with them. This is evidenced in WACO, as mentioned, but also with the Bundy Ranch situation, and the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where a man was ultimately murdered by FBI agents and a group of armed protestors arrested and tried for numerous felonies.
“After all, according to strict Rothbardianism, these amenities are not—cannot be—legitimately owned by a coercive government. If this is so, then they are unowned and therefore available for the taking by the next homesteader to come down the pike.”
Whoa, hold your horses. I take some exception to the leap in logic it takes to go from “illegitimately owned” to “unowned.” There’s quite a difference here. As Dr. Block even mentioned above in the first paragraph of this article, it is state-owned property. As I wrote in a previous article on Hoppean.org entitled The “Right to Travel” Does Not Exist:
“… With the population as it currently sits the non-existence of unowned property, at least on this planet and especially within the united states, is a forgone conclusion in a practical sense. Meaning, unowned land simply does not exist today, it either comes under the purview of the state or is controlled by private interests.
Some will object here and say: “the state doesn’t own that land!”, to which my reply is “how so?” There never seems to be a well thought out answer because these individuals don’t understand what ownership is.
Mises defined ownership as the full control of the services that can be derived from a good. Ownership is simply the exclusive control of a scarce resource. While a property right is the valid claim to the exclusive control of a scarce resource. These distinctions are important and are very rarely properly understood. So yes, the state does in fact own that land. It just has no valid property right claim to it.”
I would never imply that Dr. Block doesn’t know what ownership is but it’s clear he’s making the same fatal error that many others do when opposing Dr. Hoppe’s proposition that the net taxpayers have property rights to state-owned property, that even though the state doesn’t have a legitimate property right claim that they don’t own the land. They clearly do own the land, as Mises defined above.
This is also echoed by Professor Hoppe; where he states:
“None of the various forms of social theory deny property rights; each version will specify an owner for every scarce resource. If the state nationalizes an industry, it is asserting ownership of these means of production. If the state taxes you, it is implicitly asserting ownership of the funds taken. If my land is transferred to a private developer by eminent domain statutes, the developer is now the owner. If the law allows a recipient of racial discrimination to sue his employer for a sum of money, he is the owner of the money.”
Dr. Block then continues on to discuss the Hoppean net taxpayer argument:
“In this Hoppean view, the proper owners of the government roads, streets, parks, libraries, museums, etc., are not the libertarian homesteaders. They are but trespassers. No, the appropriate titleholders are the long-suffering taxpayers. And which organization is their agent? Why, the very government that has long been abusing them in this manner.”
It seems a bit dismissive to say that just because someone is an abuser of their client, they’re not a legitimate agent. At least in so far as the “agent” is defined as one that has the power to act for another. This may seem a bit pedantic but defining these things is important to understand where each party is coming from. If Dr. Block has another definition he’d prefer to use; I’d be amenable to addressing those arguments separately. For now, let’s assume this definition is what everyone is speaking about for argument’s sake.
Dr. Block further states:
“The Hoppean solution to the problem is open to several objections. First, Hoppe is a world-class anarcho-capitalist. There is at least a certain tension, not to say a blatant self-contradiction, in such a scholar holding out the state apparatus as the agent of the tax victims. No, the government is not their agent; it is their abuser. Hoppe here is in the unenviable position of taking on the role of a progovernment anarchist. So much for deontology.”
Oof Walter, that’s a bit rough. As stated above, the government is the net taxpayer’s agent, albeit a poor agent to an unwilling taxpayer in many cases, but an agent nonetheless. Just as when someone is represented by a public defender they’re acting as an agent, in this way the state is acting as an agent of the net taxpayer, whether they like it or not.
As such, that agent should morally act in their client’s interest as best they can until such time as that agent can be replaced. If someone steals your paycheck to pay your house payment, they have indeed stolen your money and that is ethically corrupt, but simply not fighting an overbearing and violent criminal entity that pays your house payment is not the promotion of theft. Though the state takes your silence as your consent, we know ethically no consent was ever given.
One can hold both positions that it is ethically impossible to support the state and simultaneously want it to act in our best interests. Just as asking the state to continue to attempt to stop murders while it maintains its monopoly on violence until such time that its monopoly can be destroyed and replaced with private interests, I can ask the state to continue to act as an agent for the net taxpayer's property until such time as that property can be held by the net taxpayer. I see no ethical conflict in this.
“Second, this thesis also faces a pragmatic difficulty. Remember, the would-be homesteaders here are all Rothbardians. They will attempt to engage contractually with the home and business owners along the hypothetical lines of what would have occurred had free enterprise been the order of the day right before the time of settlement. For example, the road owners will not charge the locals gigantic fees for usage of their holdings to the locals. Rather, they will require an amount that would have arisen had they attracted businesses to locate along their thoroughfares before anyone had located there. This hypothetical fee level would have been voluntarily agreed upon. And, ditto for use of the parks and other features of the urban landscape.”
Pragmatically Dr. Block is very much correct that the state’s ownership of property creates negative externalities and we can’t easily predict how the lack of state ownership might have created or changed the landscape of the world. However, does this really matter? Lots of things should have been, but rarely will we ever know what could have been. We do however know what the world looks like right now, and we can do our best to minimize harm to the victims of the state. That’s what our philosophy is all about after all, property rights.
“But Hoppe’s theory would say nay to these arrangements. This author would place in charge, as their “agent,” the very institution responsible for the deviation from pure Rothbardianism in the first place. Thus, the implication of Hoppe’s theory would be a very conservative one, conservative in the worst sense. What would be conserved, in this view?”
Dr. Block misses a key point here that Mr. Deist and Professor Hoppe are not advocating for the state to have property rights but that is objectively the owner and as such (since the state is illegitimate) act as an agent for the net taxpayers’ best interest instead of the interests of the democratic mob. From the Hoppean view, I am personally not advocating to conserve anything, the only thing conservatives have ever been any good at is conserving the progressivism of yesteryear, as I’m sure Dr. Block would agree. The Hoppean view, in my estimation, is that the state is the owner and the de facto agent of “public” property and should act in the best interests of the net taxpayers who have the most legitimate property right claim to the land.
“It would be the reinstitution of government control over these premises. The anarcho-libertarian homesteaders would be considered illegal squatters and arrested for their supposed violation of private property rights—the roads, parks, etc., presumably owned by the taxpayers. To see the falsity of this, let one of these citizens try to sleep in a government park or library overnight; he will soon become acquainted with their real owner. It is not him. Not even close. Under Hoppeanism, there would be no way for the ancap libertarians to “seize the streets.” The roadways would be forever in the hands of the evil state.”
I would argue here that Dr. Block is promoting a strategy rather than an ethical argument. That we should go out and quickly start claiming “public” property for ourselves and that if we were removed then “GOTCHA!” you’ve been shown that the net taxpayer isn’t really the owner. But again, the state is the owner, not the net taxpayer, the net taxpayer is just the one with the most valid property right claim, and as such the state should act in their best interests until such time as the state is abolished. Beyond that, something that is held in common by several owners is usually governed by rules of usage to avoid a tragedy of the commons. So, the fact that an individual owner may not do as he pleases as if he were the sole owner doesn't prove he's not an owner. However, in this case, the net taxpayer isn’t the owner anyway.
“That is not the libertarianism of the Rothbard variety. (I full well acknowledge that Rothbard himself would not allow the “bum” in the public library. He would side with Hoppe in this matter. I speak here, then, of the platonic version of Rothbardianism that would exult in such a ruination of public property.) Either we take the libertarian rejection of public property seriously, or we do not. If the latter, we reduce the power and accuracy of this philosophy. My motto in matters of this sort is the following: “If it moves, privatize it; if it does not move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or does not move, privatize everything. A CHAZ undertaken by Rothbardians is a move in the right direction.”
I’m glad Dr. Block concedes the point of the bum in the library, but then again if he concedes the “bum in the library” argument but would he concede the “vagrant under the bridge argument?” That point would have been a bit too easy to counter. I find Mr. Deists’ and Professor Hoppe’s argument to be one that is very compelling and while I will concede that Rothbard would contest the phraseology of the term ownership, he might be apt to reconsider his viewpoint when it is presented in this matter using the Misesean definition.
Further, Rothbard has previously stated:
“All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrific tangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State? Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most morally deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State’s act of aggression. These people then become the “homesteaders” of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners…[A]ny property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable…But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the “private property” of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution.”
So, it’s hard to judge exactly where Rothbard would fall in this argument. While on one hand, we have a clear understanding that somehow this state property must be re-distributed, how should the state act in the interim until such time as it’s redistributed? Rothbard went as far as to suggest nationalization of some industries so that they could later be redistributed appropriately to the taxpayers. Is it such a far reach to think that Rothbard would argue that the state then should act in the best interest of the taxpayer in the interim?
I’ll leave that for the reader to decide.
