There is no axiomatic proof of property rights

Uh, to avoid confusion, I'll preface this by saying that, um, I'm personally strongly in favor of property rights and their enforcement. So if you're new to my channel, please bear that in mind.

Uh, Stefan Molyneux made a video a while back attempting to offer an axiomatic proof of the existence of property rights. Recently, I made a video where I explained why the phrase "property is theft" is an example of the stolen concept fallacy. A couple of comments made to that video referenced Stefan Molyneux's arguments that a denial of property rights is, in his words, a self-detonating claim.

So the idea is that there is a performative inconsistency involved in expressing the claim "property rights don't exist." Um, so in Molyneux's video, a proof of property rights, Stefan lays out the steps involved in his argument. At one point, uh, he considers the claim "self-ownership is invalid," and his argument depends on rejecting this claim.

So he rejects the claim for the following reason. Um, talking about the person making a claim, he says he is exercising control over his own body to argue that it is impossible to exercise control over his body.

Now, this is a very, there's a very peculiar assumption behind this. Um, for that phrase to be a fair unpacking of the claim "self-ownership is invalid," we need to be defining legitimate ownership of thing X as the ability to exercise control over thing X. Um, and this is a very unusual way of defining property.

Nowhere that I've seen in libertarian writing, or in any other writing for that matter, have I seen property defined this way. If we were to define property in this way, it would have implications that I don't think Molyneux would accept. It would mean, for instance, that if a torturer, um, was able to induce a particular kind of movement in the arm of his victim, it would mean that the torturer was the legitimate owner of the arm.

After all, he would be controlling the arm. It would also mean that if a state official were to seize your laptop and look through your files against your will, then the official would be the legitimate owner of the laptop, uh, since he would be exercising control over it, while you, who had bought the laptop, were not. And the list goes on.

So the definition of property that Molyneux is implicitly depending on, or maybe even explicitly depending on, uh, makes no distinction between legitimate ownership and possession, which is a big blunder in my view. So I think Molyneux fails to demonstrate that the claim property rights exist is a claim that is schematically true. Uh, there's no performative inconsistency involved in the denial of property rights.