Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:12:21 — 66.2MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 405.
This is my appearance on Robert Breedlove’s What Is Money podcast, Ep. WiM235 (Youtube channel). This is Ep. 5 of the “Stephan Kinsella Series” (released Nov. 9, 2022).
From Robert’s Episode notes:
Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author, and deontological anarcho-capitalist. He joins me for an in-depth conversation about the book “A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Around 7:30, the case is summarized that if we treat everyone as co-owners of everything, no one can do anything. This is a bit hasty.
We could declare everyone to be co-owners, and assume that everyone consents by default to everything. Then we could do things, so long as there was no disagreement about what is happening. Undisputed actions could proceed. Of course, that still doesn’t work, because anything of any significant value would inspire significant disagreement and dispute, unless we all become mental clones and agree about everything.
Or we could interact like ants. When ants disagree about what should happen, they just continue acting in their preferred fashion, until the chaos resolves into something they are all more or less happy with. This leads to some inefficiency, as one group will be busily undoing the work that another group is doing, on the opposite side of the thing being worked on.
Somehow, having them all be siblings allows them to do this without becoming so wasteful of resources that other non-social insects can outcompete them. And it depends a lot on external stimuli affecting the respons3s of the ants, so that when an ant from one faction wanders into the area dominated by the other faction, it changes its mind and becomes a member of the new faction.
While I doubt that anyone would actually advocate this for humans, it would not absolutely prevent persons from doing things. It just seems much more wasteful than the private property alternative. And it really just eliminates the idea of ownership, rather than making everyone co-owners.
My wife and I share a car. This doesn’t mean I can’t use it without asking her first. It means that if we disagree about how to use the car, we don’t have a predetermined method for resolving the conflict.
If the entire world shared ownership of my car, that wouldn’t mean no one could use it. It would mean that once someone else drove off in it, I would probably never see it again.