Skip to main content

THE FAMILY HOMESTEADING PRINCIPLE

I reserve the right to be wrong.



If you mix your time and labour with something that nobody owns you gain ownership of it. This process starts in the womb and in the first couple of years after birth as you homestead your body while learning to move, speak, think and so act*1.

Later on in life, one can homestead anything that isn't owned. Sadly this does not usually include squatting, as whatever edifice is being squatted usually has an owner. If it is owned, you are trespassing.

Your right to property is the exclusive right to use whatever the thing is that is your property; whether your house, clothes, furniture, computer. This right can be argued to exist because we have free will, desires, and a world that we act in, both alone and in concert with others. You smash all that together and people need clear lines to tell who gets to use what and where, and what land they can claim.

Humans don't like conflict and violence because it introduces them to the risk of harm. They'd much rather agree on a way to get along, even if many individual desires will be frustrated by this, at least the frustrated individuals will still be alive.

So homesteading is how property justifiably comes into being. But Matt, that's not what actually happened! Well, no. That's because these brigands called Kings took the land for themselves and then parcelled it out to their lieutenants. The more useful the lieutenant, the more land he got.

Does this sound like an indictment of the private sector / civil society? Surely people in a free society would just contract with each other for more things than is currently the case. And that way the scourge of socialisation would be held at bay forever.

So today we've established that homesteading starts in the womb and so is a first principle of moral living. We've also established that moral living is more expedient than everybody immediately trying to steal from everybody else, as nobody wants to be the one that gets killed in the act.

People who fear Libertarianism because - according to them - it could cause chaos should remember that we all fear chaos, which is exactly why it won't happen when government is no more.



*1 - Remember that action here means to do things in the external world to satisfy needs in the immediate or distant future, like getting an education, or going to the bathroom. Both of those qualify since you could in theory just soil yourself in front of everyone. ANYWAY!



On the next Ecomony Blogtime; Matt proves conclusively that he is not a salmon.

EDIT; Correction to opening sentence; "time and labour" replaces "time, labour or money" since you can't pay an owner for something that is unowned. Poor absurd Matthew.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?

Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index , which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available? The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions. If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income. An illustration of the score system is just below. And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000...

Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism

How many people have died because capitalism exists? How many would still be alive if it had never existed? Let's dig in! We will take two approaches over the course of this blog post by looking at the the death tolls attributed to the word in its broad popular definition - everything socialists don't like - versus the toll that fits the definition offered previously on this blog. By the same token I will not lay any outsized figures at any other mode of production's door except where that mode of production demonstrably caused the problem that killed people. It's political ideologies that really matter here, and this is where the first big problem with even trying to lay a specific body count before capitalism runs into problems - there is no political ideology called capitalism. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now then, Alfonso Gutierrez says  in a comment thread that "capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people" which is a risky cla...