E.G.

At the end of my last post on this topic, I suggested a "working" version of the libertarian principle:

LP3: Persons have an absolute right to dispose of their property however they please — within their property.

In this post, I will discuss the meaning and extension of the term "property" as it appears in LP3.  This will enable us to identify the "supplement" to libertarianism which I have been promising to provide.

Recall that in post #2 that "property" was introduced merely as shorthand for "oneself and the fruits of one’s labor."  Only one part of that phrase requires clarification.  It’s clear (or clear enough for the present purposes) what "oneself" is supposed to be.  But what are the "fruits of one’s labor"?  I think the answer to this question raises an interesting problem.

Consider an example.  Suppose I chop down a tree (a tree which, suppose, grows wild in a forest somewhere) and make a chair out of the tree’s wood.  What is the fruit of my labor in that case?  The chair, obviously.  But the wood, out of which the chair in made, is not the fruit of my labor; it was there in the forest (in the form of a tree) before I did any work at all.  Since the wood is part of the chair, and is not a fruit of my labor, there seems to be something inaccurate, or at least misleading, about saying "the chair is the fruit of my labor."  When one says that, it may sound like one means to say that the whole chair, wood and all, is the fruit of my labor.  But that’s not so.

It would contradict physical laws of conservation for anyone’s labor to actually bring any new matter into existence.  We can’t make new stuff; all we can do is to rearrange the old stuff in order to give it a different and more useful shape.  This "shape" given to the material, I suggest, is what is really the fruit of my labor; the material which takes that shape is the fruit of nobody’s labor.  So, when I make a chair, my product will have a "shape" (or an "arrangement" — or, better yet, a form) which I can claim to be the fruit of my labor.  But it will also be made of some material which neither I have not made, and which is not the fruit of my labor.

This limits the scope of the right given in LP3.  LP3 gives me a right to dispose of myself and the fruits of my labor.  Typically, one would think that this means that if I’ve made, for example, a bunch of chairs, LP3 would give me a set of rights extending over myself and all the chairs.  But this, we’ve just seen, isn’t the case.  The "fruit of labor" which Lp3 gives me a right to dispose of is just a part of each chair — the part we’ve called its "shape" or "form."  LP3 has nothing interesting at all to say about my rights regarding the material each chair is made of, since that material (i.e. the wood) is not a fruit of my labor.

This limitation on the scope of LP3 provides breathing room for the "supplement" to libertarianism which I want to introduce.  LP3 grants exclusive rights to persons over two classes of things: themselves, and the fruits of their labor.  As we’ve seen, there is a third class of things: the material out of which things are made.  Let’s give a name to this class of things; let’s call it "land."  (This name may seem arbitrary now, but it will make more sense later.) 

It is armed with this term "land" that I want to introduce the following supplement to LP3:

LP Supplement: Land is "common" in the following sense: No one person or group has any exclusive right of disposal over any given bit of land.

LP Supplement is not logically inconsistent with LP3.  They each deal with different categories of things; LP Supplement deals with land, while LP3 deals with oneself and the fruits of one’s labor — neither of which are land (by definition). 

But there may be a practical inconsistency between LP3 and LP Supplement.  Consider that when I make a chair, I "mix" my labor with the wood.  LP3 gives me an exclusive right of disposal over the fruit of my labor, i.e. the "form" I’ve given the chair.  But to exercise this right, it appears I will have to dispose of the whole chair.  After all, it does not seem possible to dispose only of the chair’s form and to leave aside the material out of which it’s made.  Thus it appears that either I do not have a right to exercise the (exclusive) right granted by LP3, or I have an exclusive right which extends over a bit of land (i.e. the wood).  The former alternative makes it impossible to implement the right given by LP3; the latter alternative makes LP Supplement false. 

In my next post on this topic (which, hopefully, will be the final one), I’ll offer a solution to this problem — I will try to show that, despite appearances, there need be no practical inconsistency between LP3 and LP Supplemment.  The solution I will (try to) provide will have a number of uses.  Most importantly, I’ll argue that it can be used to create a variety of libertarianism which is more friendly to considerations about human well-being than most "typical" varieties of libertarianism have the reputation of being.