You Don’t Own Other People
Posted by Kevin Carson on Aug 13, 2010 in Commentary • 22 commentsLaws against peaceful, consensual activity always seem to be in the news. Dianne Feinstein takes a hardline stance against marijuana law reform. Raids on raw milk distributors are a regular occurrence. Every little while a story breaks about another “family values” politician soliciting a prostitute who turns out to be an undercover cop.
A sizable share of people in the criminal justice system is made up of those who ran afoul of some law commanding “Touch not, taste not, handle not.”
If you support such laws, there is no ground on which you can consistently do so without believing that other people are your property, or are your inferiors and subject to your command.
You may argue that “society” collectively decides what to permit and not to permit, based on some vision of the “common good.” But remember those high school civics texts with the stuff about government exercising only powers delegated by the governed, government’s function being to protect the rights of the individual, and all that? Well, you can’t delegate a power you don’t have. And government can’t protect a right, on your behalf, that you don’t possess as an individual.
So you can’t delegate to government the power to tell other people what foods or drugs to ingest, or whom to have sex with, unless you, as an individual, already have the right to boss other people around. You as an individual, or acting together with any number of other individuals, cannot delegate to government the power to boss people around against their will in regard to peaceful and consensual actions, unless you own them. “Society” has a right to criminalize peaceful, voluntary behavior only if each individual is the property of society as a whole.
Roderick Long of the Molinari Institute (the parent body of Center for a Stateless Society) describes it as a simple matter of equality. If other people are your equals in dignity, authority, and self-determination, you don’t have the right to tell them what to do. You can’t boss another person around about their food or drug habits, or their sexual practices, unless they’re your subordinate in some sense. You’ve probably seen a kid tell some bossy stranger, or remember telling someone yourself years ago, “You’re not my daddy!” Exactly.
We anarchists don’t believe other people are our property. We don’t believe we have the authority to tell other people what to eat, drink, smoke, or whom to have sex with. We’re not their bosses. We don’t own them. And we have no right to act through government to do things we have no legitimate authority to do as individuals. In other words, we anarchists actually believe the things the authors of your civics texts claimed to believe.
The big difference is, we’re consistent about it. We judge all groupings of individuals, even groupings that claim to represent a majority of people in a community and call themselves a “government,” by the same moral principles that govern individuals. The legitimate powers an individual possesses — the right to life, liberty and property, and the consequent power to defend those rights without harm to innocents — can be exercised cooperatively by any number of individuals in concert.
But even if they comprise a majority of people in a community, they have no rightful authority to bind those who did not freely join their cooperative venture. No group, including a group made up of a majority of individuals in a community, has any powers or rights beyond those already possessed by its individual members. Individuals cannot delegate any powers to a government that they do not possess as individuals.
Like any other association, a government exists for the ends of its members, and has no authority over anyone outside it. The state has no aura of majesty, and exercises no divine power. Like any other human association, it has only those legitimate powers which individual human beings can rightfully grant it in the first place.
If you, as an individual, go to your neighbor’s house and order him to stop smoking dope or parking his car on the lawn, and shove him around or take him prisoner for refusing to comply, you’re nothing but a thug. Your neighbor has the right to tell you to mind your own business and leave him alone, and to resist your aggression if necessary. If you and a large number of other people in the community do the same thing to your neighbor, under cover of a so-called “government,” you’re still just thugs — plain and simple. And your neighbor has just as much right to tell you all to mind your own business, or to resist if necessary.
As an individual, or as a member of a group of individuals — no matter how large — you don’t own other people.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
Yes indeed!
It's a great source of frustration for me that this obvious principle needs to be repeated and detailed for so many humans. The delusions and brain-washing extant in America… frightening.
Kevin,
I like this. I made a point like this in "What Libertarianism Is"– http://www.stephankinsella.com/publications/#what… — that unlibertarian laws assume the partial ownership of others' bodies–which is slavery. That only libertarianism opposes slavery.
To your point that we don't believe in telling people what they can't do, I'd say that this also means we cannot tell two peopel that they cannot enter into a voluntary contract regarding ownership of property as between them. So, we cannot paternistically tell someone that he cannot agree to be a tenant using the property of a landlord, nor can we paternistically tell someone he cannot be an empoyee of an employer using the factory and property of the employer.
except you can tell them they can't own property and make a contract with an employee about it.
Carson, I hate to tell you this. But the entire "you can't delegate powers you don't have" argument is a fallacy.
Of course you can't delegate a power you don't have. But you have the right to decide about your own life. And when you joined this society, you delegated that right to the government. So they're not using a right to tell other people what to do, they're using YOUR delegated right to choose for yourself.
If you don't want them to have that right, why don't you just leave?
Bleicke,
“And when you joined this society, you delegated that right to the government.”
That is an extraordinary claim, and it’s up to you to justify it. How so? If you’re going to justify killing and imprisoning people, you’re going to have to do a little better than that. Especially considering that it is exactly this cringing, boot-licking, medieval attitude that is under challenge in this piece, if you want to make your case, you might want to make a better argument than just repeating it.
Thanks, Stephan. I don’t want to get into an extended debate on property rules, in part because so much of my own thought on the issue is inconclusive. But I think it makes more sense, rather than framing property rules in terms of restraints on freedom of contract, to frame them in terms of identifying who the rightful owners is in a given case and therefore has standing to make a contract in the first place.
Bleicke: I don’t find that “implied social contract” argument at all convincing. As others have pointed out (e.g. Roderick Long, although I’m too lazy to look it up), it begs the question. It starts out by assuming that the state possesses the same authority over the territory where it claims jurisdiction, that I claim over people in my living room: do as I say, or get out. But whether the state (or rather the majority of individuals in a territory) can acquire this authority over the property of those who have not explicitly delegated it in the first place is precisely the question at issue. If you can show me a social contract by which 100% of the population in an area unanimously formed an association governing all the property in an area (and even this assumes there’s not vacant, unhomesteaded land over which even the entire population has no legitimate authortiy to govern the first homesteader of a vacant lot in their midst), and that the subsequent laws are just the bylaws of such an incorporated covenant organization which a majority have the right to determine by previous unanimous consent, then I’ll listen. Otherwise, I suspect you’re just arguing from the unstated assumption that “society” owns the entire territory over which the government claims jurisdiction, and that government is its agent.
Bleicke:\If you don’t want them to have that right, why don’t you just leave?\
Where do you suggest I go?
Even if there were alternatives, why not just reform the current society instead of being forced to leave because of an oppressive government that very few people are satisfied with.
I know the social contract is bullshit, I’m just playing devils advocate here. I’ve never heard someone say they delegated their right to bully you to the government. It’s always the social contract. So you’re essentially defying an argument nobody ever makes.
So, Bleicke, you’re essentially saying that you’re just a useless troll?
No, I’m saying he refutes an argument nobody ever makes.
I’d say it’s the argument that’s made explicitly in the Declaration of Independence, which comes as close to being a statement of \official\ US political theory as I can imagine.
But, in any case, whether anyone makes the argument at all, this piece isn’t framed, per se, as a rebuttal of some imagined bad argument: it’s making the positive case that the only authority a state *could* have would be delegated authority–where else would the authority come from?–and that, since the authority obviously hasn’t been delegated, the state can make no legitimate claim to authority.
Kevin,
When I saw the title itself, I knew it was a must read and then you went the extra mile and referenced Roderick Long. The reason this struck a cord with me was because of a 2004' piece by Roderick posted at Strike the Root entitled "Libertarianism in One Sentence" which I thought made one of the most concise, to the point simple statements of what libertarianism is.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/long/long9.html
My hat's off to both Roderick and yourself in covering this subject and offering POVs that challenge the thought processes that lead to freedom and liberty, Thanks!
Reading between the lines, distilling a Shorter Bleicke: “Whenever I find this subject discussed, I defecate on the comments thereafter, because the idea of anarchism scares me.”
Of course I’d welcome Bleicke’s demonstration that he/she isn’t really taking a dump on a comment thread.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to agree with Bleicke here (to a degree anyway).
First, though I'm sure KC realizes this, as it's rhetoric, the statement "You don't own other people" is demonstrably false. If you are one of the few who are represented by the government, then you DO own people. Where there is government, people are owned. That's the whole point.
Second, even if the assumption that "you don't own other people" is true, which I'd personally like to believe it is, that statement alone doesn't account for the effects actions have on others. Virtually all individual actions impose some kind of externality on others. So in a very real sense, the self-ownership of one often violates the self-ownership of others. Even if it may be as mundane as smoking a joint. Mind you, I don't support locking drug users or homosexuals in prison, but the statement "you don't own people" and the supporting argument don't seem to hold water when you take that stuff into consideration. I can actually think of a lot of ways in which certain behaviors could be prohibited/restricted given communist, georgist, and homesteading property arrangements. "You can't do that on this [acquired] property" affects a lot of behavior.
I'm just nit picking here though. I agree with you in a more general sense.
@CF Oxtrot
I’d like to see where I defecated on comments? I was merely pointing something out. Also, how do you reach the conclusion that anarchism scares me?
The problem with this style of argument is that Libertarians are imposing a positive duty onto others – a positive duty of non-interference. Hence Libertarians need to figure how they can create the negative right of how to successfully defend themselves against those who will dare to tell them what to do. Complaining it’s unfair is akin to the wimp who get robbed of his lunch money every school morning – it’s not like the wimp can do anything about it.
Chris, I'm not sure I'm convinced. "You don't own other people" is a normative claim, not a descriptive one. Even though the claim means roughly the same thing as "No one is your slave," it could have been uttered with equal truth at a slaveholding senator's dinner party in first-century Rome or eighteenth-century Richmond.
To the extent that what you do with your body or your property causes harms to the physical possessions or bodies of others, the principle Kevin articulates seems both quite compatible with requiring remedies for those harms. I don't see how providing remedies would amount to a restriction on people's rights with respect to their own bodies or their own physical possessions. It's early in the morning, and the effects of the Lunesta haven't worn off yet, so perhaps I'm missing something here.
Actually, Gill, I believe “non-interference” is a negative duty, if I’m not mistaken.
Gary, true. It is just a normative claim. I just wanted to clarify that.
The only thing I'm saying is that the societal recognition of self-ownership is ultimately hazy. So even when that normative value is agreed upon, it's still very vague as to what it means in practice and will vary from place to place and context to context.
I think I was in an argumentative mood yesterday. Now I'm more tired and I think I was just being unnecessarily difficult.
Gil, your comment “imposing a positive duty onto others…of non-interference” is an example of the most perverse logic and morality that I find common among those who defend slavery (statism). That somehow the declaration of one’s right to defend themselves against aggression is in actuality an infringement on the legitimate rights of others. If “non-interference” is an imposition, that implies that interference (euphemism in this case for aggression) is the natural, right and just way of things. Though it’s doubtful you (or others) would have the courage to publicly (not sure the anonymity of the internet truly qualifies) declare “the woman who defends herself against rape is a violator of the rapist”, logically, your nonsense is the same.
To say that “you may not enslave me” equates to an imposition on the intended-enslaver is to imply that only aggressors have rights and it is the resisting victim that somehow disturbs this equilibrium by refusing to simply comply with the predatory intent of the aggressor.
More simply “I can hit you but you can’t hit me”. Really? If you can defend that with words, then do so. If you rely not on words but simply force, then you are nothing but a brute, an animal to be put down (upon the actual commission of your aggression, should you have the balls to follow through your rhetoric with action).
Combating these kinds of laws should be the foremost legal issue for anti-state radicals. These kinds of laws are the closest thing American society has at present to more traditional or past forms of oppression like slavery, the religious subordination of women in the Islamic world, heresy trials, or the Nuremberg Laws. The paramilitary police systems and prison-industrial complex we have at present would not exist without these laws, and these laws also fuel much of the serious crime problem we have in America.
I would suggest forming legal and political defense organizations for victims of these laws modeled on relatively successful or influential groups who have defended other civil liberties or past victims of state persecution. We should have an ACLU, NRA, NAACP, or Gay Liberation Front for drug users, raw milk producers, home schoolers, prostitutes, ticket scalpers, etc., and we should demand full amnesty for victims of these laws and an end to any further arrests or prosecutions.
Question: Why do people feel the need to control other people? Because: Fear of death? Greed of life? Yo momma?
It's peaceful, voluntary behavior to hunt and gather all across the Great Spirit's Land, but aggressive people claiming they can "own" and destroy the Great Spirit's Land will shoot to kill, and be excused of their violence by the Black Robes in domed buildings who have granted them Land enTitlement papers.
Nowadays, you can't even roll out a sleeping bag on the soft grass by the pine tree at night, lest a Bigger Libertarian Gun be stuck in your sleeping face, being given commands to "get off my property." What aggression is a sleeping man committing?
City-lized man speak with forked tongue.