I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously correct.
Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.
But, at that point, laws are no longer 'basic laws of society' but laws of the sovereign - to maintain their power and control. And, interestingly, the soverign is the only one allowed to steal. I'm suggesting that maybe those 'laws' are no longer useful or at least may need to be modified. And, I think it's a cop-out to not try to think beyond that.
But, let's go back before the king. Did people really own land then? Doubtful. Did they even have individual property rights? Probably not in the sense that we do today. Most 'property' was collective. And, people didn't own land, which was thought as sacred.
In fact, behavior within families and kin groups is not much different then it was 12,0000 years ago. And, of all families and kin groups that I know, I see young children taught to share within the group. Where that breaks down is when they encounter strangers or 'invading' groups. And, only then do they rely on the laws of the state to make transactions.
So, that's what I mean when I point out my neighbors' behavior. Their natural inclination is to share (at least with those of their kin group).
Again, I don't think capitalism or communism are the answer. I don't know what is. I just think we can imagine something better.
Maat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maat#42_Negative_Confessions_....
>42 Negative Confessions (Papyrus of Ani)[edit]
>1. I have not committed sin.
>2. I have not committed robbery with violence.
>3. I have not stolen.
>4. I have not slain men and women.
>5. I have not stolen grain.
Babylonian Law:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp
>8. If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold therefor; if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death.
>9. If any one lose an article, and find it in the possession of another: if the person in whose possession the thing is found say "A merchant sold it to me, I paid for it before witnesses," and if the owner of the thing say, "I will bring witnesses who know my property," then shall the purchaser bring the merchant who sold it to him, and the witnesses before whom he bought it, and the owner shall bring witnesses who can identify his property. The judge shall examine their testimony--both of the witnesses before whom the price was paid, and of the witnesses who identify the lost article on oath. The merchant is then proved to be a thief and shall be put to death. The owner of the lost article receives his property, and he who bought it receives the money he paid from the estate of the merchant.
Ancient Greek Law:
http://www.ancient-origins.net/history/brutal-draconian-laws...
>Plutarch, another ancient source for Draco, in his Life of Solon , claims that the penalty for the theft of an apple or a cabbage was death, and you could have someone made your personal slave if they owed you money. The writer also records that when Draco was asked the reason for making execution the punishment for most offences, the reply was that ‘Small ones deserve that (i.e. death), and I have no higher for the greater crimes.’
Biblical Law:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20%3A1%E...
>15 You shall not steal.
And pre-agricultural societies that we have accounts of universally prohibit theft as well. For example Australian Aborigine:
http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1124&contex...
>The process of the law was one of political negotiation that involved everyone in the community. When there was a dispute, the elders met to discuss the punishments: their word was LAW. Offences regarded as unlawful included the unauthorised killing of a person, sacrilege, incest, adultery, theft, unauthorised assault, insult and neglect of kinship obligations. Punishments could range from making compensation over an agreed period of time to having to face a squad of spearmen, with only a shield and that person's ability to protect himself.
The reason laws against theft are universally found is that theft creates harmful incentives. It doesn't matter what stage of civilization we reach: the fundamental dynamics of multiple parties co-existing make theft harmful to creating economic value.
This is something I would argue is self-evident. Not sure why you're so desperate to question the moral principle that theft is wrong.
>I just think we can imagine something better.
Moral principles are timeless. There is nothing "better" than not stealing, because it is a basic requirement for a functioning society. The only type of configuration better than 'not stealing' is 'not stealing' + doing something good. But not stealing, murdering, assaulting etc are the foundational principles that a functioning society has to build on top of.
First Possession at least has been shown in Game Theory simulations to lead to stable equilibriums, so it's not surprising that property rights are so widely observed. I think observance of the Homesteading principle naturally emerges from observance of the First Possession principle.
Where it gets fuzzy, in my opinion, is property rights over natural resources like land, which derive almost all of their value from their natural form, rather than the value done to them by their original appropriator.
Yes it is.
How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? What about if you're using a hose in your garden and you accidentally damage my laptop next door? What about if I sell you the laptop and it breaks a few days later?
There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
How do we determine that you assaulted me? It's your word against mine. We're not talking about the complexity of determining the true account of events, which is obviously great. We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all.
>What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case?
Then common law, which springs from the first principles of personal and property rights, would preside.
We'd have a similarly difficult time determining if a hockey fight classifies as assault. Or if in a traffic altercation, you stepping out of your car and aggressively approaching me justified my preemptive (or aggressive?) first punch.
>There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
The system of laws being complicated does not mean that it is not generally straightforward to determine what a person has property rights to. The complexity comes from the edge cases, but most cases are not edge cases.
Okay so what are they? What makes your claim to own the things you own correct and someone else's invalid?
Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?
Again, there are answers to these questions, but they are complicated and even within libertarian thought, people disagree about them.
The fact that I made it, or acquired it from someone else through trade.
>Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?
The homestead principle is based on the notion that if something is unclaimed, and someone adds value to it, they should be able to enjoy the full benefit of that value-added thing.
The only 'artificial' private property is scarce natural resources, most importantly land, and that is because much if not most of its value comes from its natural form, rather than anything added to it by its original homesteader, and it is this class of property which society has a moral right to create rules/taxes on.
With respect to this latter class of property, once the rules on its use have been established (say a rule asserting that a property title owner must pay a rent equal to 1% of the value of their land to the government each year) anything the title owner earns in accordance with the rules (e.g. anything they earn on top of the 1% tax) is theirs by right.
Regarding people disagreeing: people also didn't agree that ending ritual sacrifice and slavery were fair, but I don't believe many reasonable people would disagree on the general outlines of what private property is if the discussion is permitted to progress far enough.
I believe counter-notions are mostly a result of demagoguery and would dissipate in the face of reasoned inquiry.
As for outcomes, knowing what we know about incentives and how they affect the behavior of economic agents, and extrapolating the effect of the evolutionary processes of the market, it's inconceivable to me that violating private property rights would result in better outcomes in relation to increasing economic output over the long-run, than protecting them.
I think a Capitalist system needs to be paired with a wealth redistribution mechanism to damp that amplification, such that inequality can only ever be maintained by constant effort.
EDIT: And while you may be right, I think being unable to conceive of ways in which you may be wrong speaks poorly of your imagination.
I also don't believe that inequality is a natural outcome of a market economy. The market will favor efficiency above all things, because it is an iterative process that rewards good utilizers/investors of capital with greater allocations of capital, and it is not efficient for 5 people to own and direct as much capital as 150 million people. More individual owners of capital means much more attention being given in the management of each unit of capital, resulting in higher returns on it.
The sources of income inequality need to be found in the government either not fulfilling its responsibility to manage the commons in the interest of the public, or in authoritarian prohibitions that disproportionately harm the less wealthy and the poor.
Free-market inhibiting factors that could be contributing to income disparity:
* high fixed-costs for participating in business. Fixed costs, unlike variable costs, punish small businesses. Regulations are known in the economics field as a source of fixed costs. A very basic example: you can't offer stock in your company on a stock exchange without having millions of dollars to pay lawyers. This excludes millions of small businesses from one of the best sources of capital: the public stock market. More on regulations causing an upward distribution of income: Working Paper: The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?: http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...
* high market transaction costs as a result of regulations and taxes. Why do high market transaction costs contribute to income disparity? Because non-market transactions internal to an organization are not subject to the costs imposed by regulations and taxes. This will result in large corporations having a competitive advantage over small ones that rely on market transactions for a greater portion of their activity. For example, a large corporation doesn't need to pay a sales tax to have its accounting department do an accounting job for it. A small corporation that pays an external company to do it does.