Anonymous asked:

Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level

argumate answered:

That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.

Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).

In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.

[mitigatedchaos]

For these purposes, I was discussing property in the sense of land.

Either property is transcendent, in which case basically all the land in the United States is owed to descendants of various Native Americans - or it isn’t and property is subordinate to some other consideration.  The argument laid out by the anon is essentially trying to force the issue that many people who are very pro property have compartmentalized that position away from not tearing apart the bulk of North America.