yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

There is no axiomatic proof of property rights


2m read
·Nov 8, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
Buffer capacity | Buffers, titrations, and solubility equilibria | Chemistry | Khan Academy
Let’s talk about buffer capacity. Buffer capacity is a property of a buffer, and it tells you how much acid or base you can add before the pH starts changing. Basically, as your buffer capacity goes up (which I’m going to abbreviate as BC), you can add m…
Who Will Win The Election?
Look, if Trump wins, we got to go long energy because the PS are the lowest of the all 11 sectors of the economy. It has been crushed by regulation, and I think it’ll be deregulated because of his idea of using lower energy prices to get inflation down. T…
The MILLIONAIRE MINDSET Explained (Become Successful Today!)| Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary
Things that interest you give you lots of energy. Things you don’t want to do, you keep procrastinating, which is horrible. Nobody says, “Hey, you’re doing a great job.” I just want to send you an email. They say, “Here’s five problems I’m having right no…
Warren Buffett Just Sold $100 Billion Worth of Stock.
Uh, this question is from Johan Halen, who writes, “You’re sitting on $168 billion of cash, which you told us today is now more than $182 billion.” His questions are: one, what is Buffett waiting for? And two, why not at least deploy some of it? Well, I …
Inside the Paris Climate Conference | Years of Living Dangerously
This is the Olympics of climate change. If you’re not here, you’re not in the game, and the game is to do something urgently. We have the political will to change, and it really is the seminal meeting of leaders to determine what we do to combat this prob…
You Can Always Leave
Imagine you have a friend called George… This story was misleading. George isn’t being threatened! He’s just being asked to pay his fair share like the rest of us. If he doesn’t like the arrangement, he can always leave. Let’s start with the question of …