Excellent point about belonging in a college. Yes, you can't alienate the will. I say, "will, schmill." This has nothing to do with will. The sole issue is, if the slave master kills the slave, is he or is he not guilty of murder. I say he's innocent of this charge, since he now, properly, owns the slave, due to agreement of the latter in a contract. That's the only way to save his child's life. You would deny him that possibility. Best regards, Walter
One's motives for wanting to sell something are not relevant to the question of whether it is in fact alienable or not. If delivery of property as promised under a contract of sale is physically impossible, then the frustrated buyer is not in a position to vindicate ownership; they can only seek compensation for a breach of contract. The same sort of reasoning applies if the promised property doesn't exist (e.g. the desperate parent claims to own a parcel of land on Pluto, and attempts to sell that to you).
I would say that a buyer in this situation is at most entitled to recover the funds tendered and perhaps additional incidental and punitive damages from the seller, though the latter is not justifiable if it is patently obvious to everybody that delivery is impossible, so that there never could have been any genuine expectation of delivery on the buyer's part and thus no fraud involved. I would also say that killing the seller is not justifiable unless the seller refuses to arbitrate the dispute under libertarian law or refuses to honor the arbitrator's judgement; in which case reciprocity in the respect of individual rights has broken down and the seller has become an outlaw.
If you accept the premise that the exercise of ownership is fundamentally rooted in an owner's discretionary capacity to exclude non-owners from use or possession of one's property in the absence of consensual obligations to the contrary, then a transfer of ownership is possible only if a new would-be owner can in fact exclude the old owner from possession and use of the property. To the extent that the old owner's will still animates his own physical being, such exclusion is impossible. At most, an old owner can have himself killed or parts of his body chopped off so that the inanimate flesh can be sold; removal of one's will from such flesh is a prerequisite to the old owner ceasing to use it and being able to surrender possession of it to the new owner. Yes, the will does matter.
Maybe you reject my premise regarding the nature of ownership as stated above, but then you need to spell out how you conceive of ownership. If ownership isn't conceptualized in terms of exclusive possession and use as I have outlined here, then what do you mean by "ownership"?
The nub of your very thoughtful short essay (you really should add footnotes to it and publish it in a refereed journal) is this: "If you accept the premise that the exercise of ownership is fundamentally rooted in an owner's discretionary capacity to exclude non-owners from use or possession of one's property in the absence of consensual obligations to the contrary, then a transfer of ownership is possible only if a new would-be owner can in fact exclude the old owner from possession and use of the property. To the extent that the old owner's will still animates his own physical being, such exclusion is impossible."
I still say, "will schmill." that's not at all what's being sold in a voluntary slave contract. Rather, what is being sold is the denigration of the right not to be murdered. We all have that right. But it is alienable. It can be sold.
The problem with this formulation is that any alienable encumbrance on one's property presupposes that there must be some residual possession, uses, and/or fruits that are not covered by the grant which remain under the owner's control.
Destruction of the underlying property implies that there is no residuum of ownership benefits remaining with the owner or his estate, so a "license to kill" is a contradiction in terms. I suppose there might be interesting non-destructive forms of corporal punishment that could function as an equivalent of a performance bond when the master's orders are not obeyed, but the employment contract would have to expressly spell out what those punishments were, and there would undoubtedly be litigation associated with my "destructiveness" test (which is much narrower in scope than the gross negligence test that is frequently used to block application of liability waivers in the current system).
Fair enough. I enjoyed this discussion (too bad the students petitioning against you haven't learned about such pleasures), and and the good news regarding our differing views about self-ownership is that we do agree about evictionism.
America could have saved itself a lot of grief by repatriating every slave or indentured servant being held in captivity that wouldn't sign a release of all future rights to reparations.
There would be a lot less blacks named Jefferson if Sally Hemings hadn't accepted his offer to emancipate them in return for her serving him in France.
Reparitions, even from the descendants of slave owners to the descendants of slaves, would be disastrous and, I would argue, morally questionable. So is ex post facto defining something as a crime and then punishing people for doing it while it was legal.
We have a statute of limitations for a reason. But even more important, we do not hold descendants liable for the crimes of their ancestors. Yet you want to strip the property they have owned all their lives, and give it to someone else? And how many of your ancestors had to be slave owners for you to be liable? How many of your ancestors had to be slaves to be eligible? Will you hold to a 'one drop' rule about this? Should you be forced to give your land back to a native American?
The freed slaves deserved compensation. That they did not receive it was an injustice. But any attempt to counterbalance that injustice today could only be accomplished through more injustice. If we go down this road, we return to the days of the Capulets and Montagues, where any tiny wrong done by one person to another echoes down through the ages to their descendants.
Not to mention that many slave owning families lost everything during the civil war, while many descendants of slaves became very successful.
On the other topic, I can see the case for allowing voluntary slavery. On the other hand, I need to think about it more before I decide on it. It's certainly not the most repellent idea I've heard espoused by academics (it's not even the most repellent idea espoused in this article)!
Durinn: You write eloquently and reasonably. However, I disagree. Rather than specify why, let me send you what I have already published on these issues. Best regards, Walter
Suppose my grandfather stole a wristwatch from your grandfather. Then, my grandfather passed it down to my dad, who gave it to me. Posit, that had this theft not taken place, your granddad would have given the watch to your dad, and from him it would have passed on to you. Should I be compelled, by law, to hand over that watch to you? It still has your grandfathers initials, or picture, or both, on it.
You say I should keep it? You want to promote theft? I say, I owe you that watch. That’s the case for reparations
Here are my publications on this matter:
Alston and Block, 2007; Amos and Block, unpublished; Block, 1993, 2001, 2002, 2019, 2014, 2020A, 2020B; Block and Yeatts, 1999-2000; Crepelle and Block, 2017; Nouveau and Block, 2020.
Block, Walter E. and Guillermo Yeatts. 1999-2000. “The Economics and Ethics of Land Reform: A Critique of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s ‘Toward a Better Distribution of Land: The Challenge of Agrarian Reform,’” Journal of Natural Resources and Environmental Law, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 37-69; http://www.walterblock.com/publications/ethics_land_reform.pdf
Maybe the counterpetition should have called for the expulsion of the signatories of the petition. Surely a prerequisite to being considered "educated" (whatever one's field of study) is to be able to engage in independent thought and communicate one's ideas to others, not to prevent others from doing so. If a so-called "student" refuses to live up to that standard, one simply doesn't belong in an institution of higher education.
I don't agree with Walter's premise about the possibility of contractual slavery under libertarianism. Libertarians hold that one is at liberty to do anything that doesn't violate the peacefully-acquired ownership rights of others (i.e. it is wrong to initiate force against others). The essence of ownership is that an owner is able to exclude others from the use and disposition of his property.
Voluntary consent is not sufficient to effect a peaceful transfer of ownership; such a transfer is possible only if it is also the case that a new owner can exclude the old owner from the property. What makes self-ownership distinct from ownership of alienable forms of property is that you can't help but keep using your own mind, body, personal energy, etc. regardless of what you might consent to. No other person can in fact ever truly take possession of you and exclude you from yourself; the most they can do is to attempt to continually thwart your liberty to use yourself as you see fit via repeated acts of coercion or threats of coercion against you.
Dear Vonu:
Too true.
Best regards
Walter
Dear Vincent:
Excellent point about belonging in a college. Yes, you can't alienate the will. I say, "will, schmill." This has nothing to do with will. The sole issue is, if the slave master kills the slave, is he or is he not guilty of murder. I say he's innocent of this charge, since he now, properly, owns the slave, due to agreement of the latter in a contract. That's the only way to save his child's life. You would deny him that possibility. Best regards, Walter
Hi Walter:
One's motives for wanting to sell something are not relevant to the question of whether it is in fact alienable or not. If delivery of property as promised under a contract of sale is physically impossible, then the frustrated buyer is not in a position to vindicate ownership; they can only seek compensation for a breach of contract. The same sort of reasoning applies if the promised property doesn't exist (e.g. the desperate parent claims to own a parcel of land on Pluto, and attempts to sell that to you).
I would say that a buyer in this situation is at most entitled to recover the funds tendered and perhaps additional incidental and punitive damages from the seller, though the latter is not justifiable if it is patently obvious to everybody that delivery is impossible, so that there never could have been any genuine expectation of delivery on the buyer's part and thus no fraud involved. I would also say that killing the seller is not justifiable unless the seller refuses to arbitrate the dispute under libertarian law or refuses to honor the arbitrator's judgement; in which case reciprocity in the respect of individual rights has broken down and the seller has become an outlaw.
If you accept the premise that the exercise of ownership is fundamentally rooted in an owner's discretionary capacity to exclude non-owners from use or possession of one's property in the absence of consensual obligations to the contrary, then a transfer of ownership is possible only if a new would-be owner can in fact exclude the old owner from possession and use of the property. To the extent that the old owner's will still animates his own physical being, such exclusion is impossible. At most, an old owner can have himself killed or parts of his body chopped off so that the inanimate flesh can be sold; removal of one's will from such flesh is a prerequisite to the old owner ceasing to use it and being able to surrender possession of it to the new owner. Yes, the will does matter.
Maybe you reject my premise regarding the nature of ownership as stated above, but then you need to spell out how you conceive of ownership. If ownership isn't conceptualized in terms of exclusive possession and use as I have outlined here, then what do you mean by "ownership"?
Best regards,
Vince
Dear Vincent:
The nub of your very thoughtful short essay (you really should add footnotes to it and publish it in a refereed journal) is this: "If you accept the premise that the exercise of ownership is fundamentally rooted in an owner's discretionary capacity to exclude non-owners from use or possession of one's property in the absence of consensual obligations to the contrary, then a transfer of ownership is possible only if a new would-be owner can in fact exclude the old owner from possession and use of the property. To the extent that the old owner's will still animates his own physical being, such exclusion is impossible."
I still say, "will schmill." that's not at all what's being sold in a voluntary slave contract. Rather, what is being sold is the denigration of the right not to be murdered. We all have that right. But it is alienable. It can be sold.
Best regards,
Walter
Hi Walter:
The problem with this formulation is that any alienable encumbrance on one's property presupposes that there must be some residual possession, uses, and/or fruits that are not covered by the grant which remain under the owner's control.
Destruction of the underlying property implies that there is no residuum of ownership benefits remaining with the owner or his estate, so a "license to kill" is a contradiction in terms. I suppose there might be interesting non-destructive forms of corporal punishment that could function as an equivalent of a performance bond when the master's orders are not obeyed, but the employment contract would have to expressly spell out what those punishments were, and there would undoubtedly be litigation associated with my "destructiveness" test (which is much narrower in scope than the gross negligence test that is frequently used to block application of liability waivers in the current system).
Best regards,
Vince
Dear Vincent: I fear we'll have to agree to disagree. Best regards, Walter
Hi Walter:
Fair enough. I enjoyed this discussion (too bad the students petitioning against you haven't learned about such pleasures), and and the good news regarding our differing views about self-ownership is that we do agree about evictionism.
Best regards,
Vince
America could have saved itself a lot of grief by repatriating every slave or indentured servant being held in captivity that wouldn't sign a release of all future rights to reparations.
There would be a lot less blacks named Jefferson if Sally Hemings hadn't accepted his offer to emancipate them in return for her serving him in France.
Reparitions, even from the descendants of slave owners to the descendants of slaves, would be disastrous and, I would argue, morally questionable. So is ex post facto defining something as a crime and then punishing people for doing it while it was legal.
We have a statute of limitations for a reason. But even more important, we do not hold descendants liable for the crimes of their ancestors. Yet you want to strip the property they have owned all their lives, and give it to someone else? And how many of your ancestors had to be slave owners for you to be liable? How many of your ancestors had to be slaves to be eligible? Will you hold to a 'one drop' rule about this? Should you be forced to give your land back to a native American?
The freed slaves deserved compensation. That they did not receive it was an injustice. But any attempt to counterbalance that injustice today could only be accomplished through more injustice. If we go down this road, we return to the days of the Capulets and Montagues, where any tiny wrong done by one person to another echoes down through the ages to their descendants.
Not to mention that many slave owning families lost everything during the civil war, while many descendants of slaves became very successful.
On the other topic, I can see the case for allowing voluntary slavery. On the other hand, I need to think about it more before I decide on it. It's certainly not the most repellent idea I've heard espoused by academics (it's not even the most repellent idea espoused in this article)!
Durinn: You write eloquently and reasonably. However, I disagree. Rather than specify why, let me send you what I have already published on these issues. Best regards, Walter
Suppose my grandfather stole a wristwatch from your grandfather. Then, my grandfather passed it down to my dad, who gave it to me. Posit, that had this theft not taken place, your granddad would have given the watch to your dad, and from him it would have passed on to you. Should I be compelled, by law, to hand over that watch to you? It still has your grandfathers initials, or picture, or both, on it.
You say I should keep it? You want to promote theft? I say, I owe you that watch. That’s the case for reparations
Here are my publications on this matter:
Alston and Block, 2007; Amos and Block, unpublished; Block, 1993, 2001, 2002, 2019, 2014, 2020A, 2020B; Block and Yeatts, 1999-2000; Crepelle and Block, 2017; Nouveau and Block, 2020.
Alston, Wilton D. and Walter E. Block. 2007. “Reparations, Once Again.” Human Rights Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, September, pp. 379-392; http://tinyurl.com/2b75fl; https://philpapers.org/rec/ALSROA; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12142-007-0055-x
Amos, Jon-Paul and Walter E. Block. Unpublished. “Contra Horowitz: A Case for Reparations to Blacks for Slavery.”
Block, Walter E. 1993. “Malcolm X,” Fraser Forum, January, pp. 18-19; http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/5361.aspx
Block, Walter E. 2001. “The Moral Dimensions of Poverty, Entitlements and Theft,” The Journal of Markets and Morality, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 83-93; http://www.acton.org/publicat/m_and_m/2001_spring/block.html; http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=922087; http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marketsandmorality.com%2Findex.php%2Fmandm%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F587%2F577&ei=lBn9UuLIOtDOkQe1toHwBw&usg=AFQjCNF2MZ5XoFKKMF5UcOfOT5Kv-HQgZA&sig2=VVYWZhyl0ZmAWRAKXtkxWw; Search for “Walter Block" under "Authors" here: http://www.marketsandmorality.com/index.php/mandm/search
Block, Walter E. 2002A. “On Reparations to Blacks for Slavery,” Human Rights Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, July-September, pp. 53-73;
http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/reparations_slavery.pdf; https://link.springer.com/journal/12142/3/4/page/1; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12142-002-1003-4
(David Horowitz, Randall Robinson)
Block, Walter E. 2020B. “Return of Stolen Property: A Libertarian Case for Reparations.” December 18; https://www.theepochtimes.com/return-of-stolen-property-a-libertarian-case-for-reparations_3177301.html
Block, Walter E. 2019. “Return of Stolen Property: A Libertarian Case for Reparations.” December 23; https://www.theepochtimes.com/return-of-stolen-property-a-libertarian-case-for-reparations_3177301.html
Block, Walter E. 2020. “Reparations.” February 16;
https://www.unz.com/article/reparations/
Block, Walter E. and Guillermo Yeatts. 1999-2000. “The Economics and Ethics of Land Reform: A Critique of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s ‘Toward a Better Distribution of Land: The Challenge of Agrarian Reform,’” Journal of Natural Resources and Environmental Law, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 37-69; http://www.walterblock.com/publications/ethics_land_reform.pdf
Crepelle, Adam and Walter E. Block. 2017. “Property Rights and Freedom: The Keys to Improving Life in Indian Country.” Washington & Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice; Vol. 23, Issue 2, Article, 3, pp. 314-342; http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1435&context=crsj; http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol23/iss2/3/
Houma Indian
Nouveau, Lucas and Walter E. Block. 2020. “A comment on reparations for slavery.” Libertas: Segunda Epoca; http://www.journallibertas.com/online-first.html
Law enforcement incompetence and corruption are also being passed down through families.
Why is the right side of the text being truncated by inept software?
You couldn't remember "corruption of blood?"
Maybe the counterpetition should have called for the expulsion of the signatories of the petition. Surely a prerequisite to being considered "educated" (whatever one's field of study) is to be able to engage in independent thought and communicate one's ideas to others, not to prevent others from doing so. If a so-called "student" refuses to live up to that standard, one simply doesn't belong in an institution of higher education.
I don't agree with Walter's premise about the possibility of contractual slavery under libertarianism. Libertarians hold that one is at liberty to do anything that doesn't violate the peacefully-acquired ownership rights of others (i.e. it is wrong to initiate force against others). The essence of ownership is that an owner is able to exclude others from the use and disposition of his property.
Voluntary consent is not sufficient to effect a peaceful transfer of ownership; such a transfer is possible only if it is also the case that a new owner can exclude the old owner from the property. What makes self-ownership distinct from ownership of alienable forms of property is that you can't help but keep using your own mind, body, personal energy, etc. regardless of what you might consent to. No other person can in fact ever truly take possession of you and exclude you from yourself; the most they can do is to attempt to continually thwart your liberty to use yourself as you see fit via repeated acts of coercion or threats of coercion against you.
The elimination of "contractual slavery" would have prevented several wars by depriving them of conscripts.