The content chapter: the NAP finally says who the non-aggressor is — the first director. Then borders (objective, intersubjectively ascertainable), stalemates, the anti-Georgist reductio, self-ownership from the “mouthpiece” argument and Rothbard’s trilemma, the impossibility of group ownership, the donut problem answered with de Jasay’s let exclusion stand, a switch of definitions (ownership = just direction), and a coda against IP. The finding: every derivation in the chapter runs on a false dichotomy — first-comer or whoever-takes; labour-mixing or verbal decree; self-ownership or communism or castes; one owner or contradiction. The vault reaches most of the same conclusions comparatively (“least arbitrary”); LZ reaches them apodictically (“only non-contradictory”), and the second is what he cannot actually deliver. Plus one bullet bitten hard: enclosing land makes you owner of the unused interior, which is exclusion-as-ownership — the very thing the chapter’s first argument denies.
Source: liquidzulu-wiki → src/content/libertarian-ethics/homesteading-and-property-rights.md (n: 3, 2023-04-25, ~7.3k words) · live at liquidzulu.github.io/homesteading-and-property-rights. CC0; quoted, not copied.
Links: LiquidZulu hub, Ch. 2 — The NAP, Self-Ownership and Property Rights — the vault’s comparative version of the same derivation, and “bodies are not property”, The Hierarchy of Ownership — “the only absolute is scarcity; exclusion is one response to it”, and the children edge case queued there, Constructed ≠ Arbitrary — what “intersubjectively ascertainable border” actually is, Legal Theory — Upcoming: shared ownership — this chapter is the ancap input to that page, Performative Grounding — Lineage §4 — control ≠ ownership
LZ: ownership is assigned to the initial possessor/director of any external good — the prior/later distinction. Crusoe and Friday presuppose that ownership ≠ direction (each says he justly directs). If B could own by taking from A, then C could own by taking from B, so whoever controls, owns — which collapses ownership into direction, contradicting what both presupposed. “Therefore … initial direction is the only just direction.” Kinsella: “the very idea of ownership implies that only libertarian-style ownership is justifiable.”
(vault) — the retortion is good and the conclusion does not follow from it. The premise establishes that some rule other than “the current controller owns” must hold — agreed, and it is the modest ownership/possession move the video review praised. But “not the current controller” is not “the first controller.” Need-based assignment, allotment by lot, use-it-or-lose-it, Georgist use-with-rent, and collective assignment all distinguish ownership from possession. The argument’s only reason for landing on first is that the alternative it considers is taking. That is a false dichotomy, and it is the pattern of the whole chapter. The vault’s self-ownership page makes the same derivation and lands on first use — but as “the least arbitrary resolution norm”, after naming the alternatives. Comparative, defeasible, honest. LZ’s version claims apodicticity it has not earned.
LZ: borders must be objective (or the rule “A may punch B but not vice versa” could be a property rule) and intersubjectively ascertainable (Crusoe shouting “I own the moon” homesteads nothing; the astronaut cannot perceive the claim) — “communication lies at the very root of law.” Hoppe: only two ways to acquire the unowned, doing something with it or verbal decree, and decree cannot avoid conflicts. Stalemate: simultaneous grabs are not a conflict; neither action has begun “until the other backs off”; whoever forcefully excludes the other is the aggressor and forfeits; otherwise the less stubborn cedes. Georgism: to argue one must homestead at least standing room, so the anti-homestead ethic self-refutes; Hoppe: a latecomer ethic requires the consent of all posterity, hence “implies advocating death.”
(vault) — three notes. (a) “Intersubjectively ascertainable” is the right criterion and it is conventional: whether a cairn, a fence, a blaze on a tree or a registry entry counts is fixed by the practice of the community, not the armchair — constructed ≠ arbitrary, and one more instance of discovery-as-generation admitted in the example. (b) The stalemate rule makes title depend on the other party’s persistence: “the more stubborn man” wins, and “forcefully excludes” is undefined where both have a hand on the stick. That is a might-contest with a peace veneer, and it is also the first place Chris’s “initiation” question bites — two hands, one stick, who initiated? Not answered here; carried to ch. 6. (c) The Georgist reductio proves that an arguer must use some scarce means — a liberty to stand somewhere — not that permanent, transferable title follows from standing there. Georgism as actually held permits possession and use and socialises rent; nothing in the standing-room argument touches it. Hoppe’s “consent of all posterity” is a straw Georgist — no Georgist proposes consent, they propose a rule. Symmetric-grounding failure: the opponent is not steelmanned.
(Chris) — the two-diggers case. Homesteading is where the theory is weakest, so grant it everything and run one case: two people go together to dig at the same site; they partially uncover a valuable resource; they work together to fully uncover it so it can be brought out of the ground. Who owns it? On the chapter’s rules the best available answer is a contest of who is willing to hold on longest — “wild gamesmanship for what should be a simple concept.” (vault) It is worse than his stalemate, because it is not a stalemate: his case is a simultaneous grab with no act completed; this one is a completed joint occupation — by his own §4 criterion (occupation, not labour, confers title) both are first possessors — and §4 then says joint first possession is impossible. So the chapter’s answer to the most ordinary case of cooperative extraction is either stubbornness decides or this cannot have happened. Chris has raised the corporation/group-ownership problem inside the ancap community itself and reports they are still struggling with it. Filed as the lead specimen for the queued shared-ownership page.
(Chris, carried) The punching example again treats a bodily rule as a property-border rule. The chapter never argues that assault is a property matter; it assumes it in an illustration.
LZ: bodies are “an entirely different type of object” — not found in nature awaiting a soul; “necessarily linked to an actor,” and that objective link is what imbues ownership; homesteading is merely one way of demonstrating a link. The mouthpiece argument: for A to argue with B, A must presuppose B owns himself, else A is arguing with B’s owner C. Direct control beats indirect: an enslaver controls only through coercion, and the slave’s direct link is the superior one; a might-based assignment “authorises conflicts.” Hoppe: the enslaver presupposes his own self-ownership in the act. Then Rothbard’s trilemma — total self-ownership, universal co-ownership (“communist” — nobody may act without everyone’s permission, and asking is an act), or partial ownership of one group by another (“particularistic … sub-humans ruled by humans”; not derivable from the nature of the entities; all humans qua acting beings have the potential to argue, so no group has a different logic).
(vault) — the fact is the vault’s; the label is not. “Objective link” = exclusive direct control — the brute fact the self-ownership page grounds autonomy on. Agreed, and “direct beats indirect” is the slavery test in different words. The disagreement is the word ownership. The mouthpiece argument shows B is an independent decision-maker — agency — and agency is not title: it is the control ≠ ownership objection from the lineage page, and LZ himself has just said bodies are “an entirely different type of object,” then files them under the same concept anyway. That is Chris’s ch. 1 worry in its purest form: the label is chosen for tidiness (“ownership = just direction,” §6), and the danger — that whatever is owned can be sold, pledged, or forfeited — is deferred to ch. 4 rather than faced. Rothbard’s trilemma is a false trichotomy: guardianship, self-ownership-with-duties, and every mixed regime in actual law are absent — and ch. 5 will need one of them for children, which will contradict “universal.” Note also the word potential: universality is secured by “the potential to argue,” which is exactly the move hub question 1 asks about (is potential not the intrinsicism he rejects?). He has now used it.
LZ: if {A…Z} co-own a stick and A and B conflict, one is the just victor and the other therefore does not own it — contradicting co-ownership. Voting does not help (the loser did not own it; with two members every vote splits). Roderick Long’s village path (labour mixed collectively) fails because labour-mixing is the wrong theory — Kinsella: creation is neither necessary nor sufficient, occupation is; Long’s gift-to-the-public fails because contract theory follows property theory and cannot create contradictory titles; the polycentrist judge does not resolve it either; companies are “a web of contracts” with one nominal owner and conditional title transfers — “nowhere … is any property owned by multiple people.”
(vault) — the proof equivocates on “own.” It assumes that to own is to win every use-dispute. Co-ownership is a bundle with internal rules — use rotas, votes, buy-out, exit — and holding a share means holding a defined position in those rules, not a guarantee of victory. His own company paragraph concedes the point: a nominal single owner bound by conditional-transfer contracts to the shareholders’ voted goals is co-ownership, re-described so the ledger shows one name. The institution is identical; only the bookkeeping changed. Against Long: the villagers are the first occupiers of the path — first possession by several — and “several cannot first-possess” is precisely what is at issue, so the reply is circular. The vault has shared ownership queued on the legal-theory README and on the mens rea page’s open questions; this chapter is the strongest ancap statement of the no answer and should be the foil there.
LZ: Crusoe homesteads a ring 𝔸 around unowned 𝔹; Friday may enter 𝔹 but not 𝔸, and cannot reach 𝔹 without 𝔸 — Crusoe is forestalling, acting as owner of what he does not own. Block’s camp answers with a proviso (no donuts; Dominiak: Crusoe₁₀₀, who seals the ring, is the criminal). LZ prefers Kinsella-via-de Jasay: property is exclusion; “Crusoe in excluding others from … 𝔸 thereby becomes its owner”, and the act of exclusion is his initial direction of both the ring and the hole — so Crusoe owns 𝔸 and 𝔹 the moment the fence closes, unless someone already occupies 𝔹 or ℂ, in which case the fence claims owned land and is forestalling. Aside: a property right in a gun is a right to exclude others from it, not a right to use it however — “who owns the gun isn’t relevant to whether the shooting is just.”
(vault) — the bullet he bites contradicts §1 and §2. Owning the unused interior by enclosure is ownership by exclusion — the ability to keep others out — which is exactly the whoever-controls-owns rule §1 called a contradiction. And the interior has no “objective, intersubjectively ascertainable” border of use — nothing was “done with” it, which §2’s Hoppe quote made the criterion against decree. The fence is a decree with posts. The vault’s hierarchy-of-ownership assessment already put the point in one line: “the only absolute is scarcity — exclusion is one response to it”; LZ has promoted the response to the definition. (Chris) Others have proposed different fixes for the donut — e.g. one must provide means of egress for any surrounded person — and none is satisfactory either: an egress duty is a positive obligation the framework has no way to generate, and let exclusion stand is a bullet. The problem is not which patch, it is that enclosure-as-title needs one. The gun aside, meanwhile, is correct and cuts against him: if ownership is the right to exclude (de Jasay) and not the right to direct, then the chapter’s chosen definition (§6) is wrong by its own best paragraph.
LZ: “just possession” fails the sofa case (the invited friend justly possesses the sofa; may you ask him to leave?). Rather than antecedent/descendant rights (workable, “a little bit tedious”), he redefines ownership = just direction, because it will later let the right to retribute and the right of guardianship be treated as property rights — “scarce, so our property theory has to cover them, but they aren’t physical.”
(vault) — this is the sentence to remember for chapter 5. Guardianship over a child is to be a property right in the direction of the child — declared here, in a terminological footnote, for convenience. That is the body-as-property danger Chris named, extended from one’s own body to someone else’s. The definitional switch also leaves the chapter with two incompatible definitions in play: de Jasay’s exclusion (§5) and LZ’s direction (§6). Antecedent/descendant rights would have handled the sofa without either; “tedious” is not a reason.
LZ: ideas are not scarce (Friday can spearfish with a different stick and the same idea), so no property in them; IP = a criminal threat via the state; a consistent IP ethic needs permission to ask permission, ad infinitum → “the death of humanity.”
(vault) On the scarcity criterion, agreed, and this is the standard Kinsella result. The regress is rhetoric — patents claim specific embodiments, not “ideas” — but Chris has set IP aside as too specific and nothing here changes the ledger.
What holds. Ownership ≠ possession as a presupposition of any dispute (§1); intersubjectively ascertainable as the border criterion (§2); exclusive direct control as the fact under “self-ownership,” and direct-beats-indirect as the slavery test (§3); the gun aside — rights are exclusion rights (§5); IP on the scarcity criterion (§7).
What does not. First-comer is reached by excluding only taking (§1); Hoppe’s “labour or decree” excludes every rule in between (§2); the stalemate rule rewards stubbornness and leaves “initiation” undefined (§2); Georgism is straw-manned (§2); the mouthpiece argument yields agency, not title, and the trilemma omits every mixed regime, including the one ch. 5 will need (§3); group ownership is “impossible” only under a definition his own company example abandons (§4); enclosure-owns-the-interior is ownership-by-exclusion, denied in §1 and contradicting §2 (§5); two definitions of ownership in one chapter, the worse one chosen so that guardianship can be property (§6).
One-line read for the hub: the vault says first use is the least arbitrary rule and exclusion is one response to scarcity; LZ says first use is the only non-contradictory rule and exclusion is ownership — and his own donut and company examples side with the vault.