Mises vs Rothbard

Subject: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:34:52 +0100
From: Bruno Prior 
To: Walter Block

Dear Dr Block,

I apologise for contacting you out of the blue, particularly to rake
over the long-cold ashes of the debate between you and Pat Gunning on
Rothbard's criticism of Mises. But having discovered Mises late last
year and Rothbard shortly thereafter, and being hugely impressed by both
of them, this is still fresh to me. I am trying busily to educate myself
in their writings. I am currently reading Mises' Theory and History, and
having only yesterday, by accident, bumped into the debate between you
and Gunning, it seemed there were passages in that book to which neither
of you referred, which might allow at least a partial squaring of the
circle.

Firstly, let me say that I agree completely with your criticisms of
Gunning's criticisms of Rothbard. But I am wondering if it may
nevertheless be possible that Rothbard was being too harsh on Mises.
The relevant passages in Theory and History are in Chapter 3, The Quest
for Absolute Values, under the headings "The Idea of Justice" and "The
Utilitarian Doctrine Restated". Those sections, by the way, provide
explicit support, contrary to Gunning's denial, for your and Rothbard's
claim that Mises was a utilitarian. But they also suggest the
explanation for how Mises could claim to be a value-free advocate of
laissez-faire. The assumption everyone seems to be making is that ethics
cannot be value-free, from which it follows that, if Rothbard is right
(as seems to be the case) that political judgements require an ethical
basis, then Mises was in error claiming that support for laissez-faire
could be value-free. But, though it sounds counter-intuitive and
oxymoronic, if one could derive a value-free ethics, as Mises seems to
have been trying to do in those passages, then there is no contradiction
or error.

The test that you, Gunning and Rothbard apply is whether it is
conceivable that a praxeologically-informed group might nevertheless
prefer alternatives to laissez-faire. You and Rothbard are right, of
course, that they might. But I am not sure that this is the test that
Mises would have applied, or that ought to be applied. The question
should not be whether a policy fulfills the objectives of those who
propose it, but whether it is compatible with the interests of all those
who might be affected by it. If, on a value-free ethical basis, "the
ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation of
social cooperation", Mises could argue that unsustainable philosophies
were inimical to that social cooperation, and therefore bad. "Fitness
for purpose" (to use a phrase that is currently popular on this side of
the pond) becomes the basis for ethical but value-free judgement.

These issues are both new and foreign to me (I have no formal economic
or philosophical training), so perhaps my analysis is in error, or I am
overlooking something significant on which you will put me straight. But
I hope Mises' limited utilitarianism can be defended against Rothbard's
"intuitive ethics" (as Mises would call it), because, whilst I have yet
to read anything of Mises' with which I disagree, I do find some of
Rothbard's attempts to derive principles from "natural law" rather
difficult. For instance, his attempts (following Locke) to derive
property rights from homesteading (in "Law, Property Rights, and Air
Pollution") seem open to challenge, whereas it is relatively
straightforward to defend property rights on a Misesian basis that they
are conducive to the preservation of social cooperation.

One other detail is interesting. Theory and History was published the
year after Rothbard's seminal "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and
Welfare Economics". I wonder whether the book is, to some extent, an
oblique answer to some of the challenges in that paper? I find the
arguments in that paper absolutely compelling, and I would love to think
that Mises did too, and realised the necessity of squaring his advocacy
of laissez-faire with Rothbard's restatement of Pareto's unanimity rule,
hence Mises' restatement of utilitarian doctrine. Can this not all come
together into a limited utilitarian basis for laissez-faire as the best
and only way of maximising social utility?

By "limited utilitarian", I mean utilitarianism limited, as Rothbard and
Pareto require, to ordinal rather than cardinal measures of utility and
restrained from intrapersonal comparisons. It does not seem to me that
Mises makes either of these mistakes in the passages I refer to, and so
ends up with a limited but sufficient form of utilitarianism, sufficient
in the sense that it is adequate to provide the basis of ethical
judgements. Indeed, if Rothbard believed in demonstrated preference as
the only true indicator of individual utilities and recommended free
exchange as the only mechanism that allows individuals to demonstrate
their preferences without coercion, wasn't he a limited utilitarian too?

I look forward to being roundly disabused of my misapprehensions.

-- 
Yours,

Bruno Prior

Subject: 	RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: 	Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:58:42 -0500
From: 	Walter Block 
To: 	Bruno Prior 
CC: 	STEPHAN KINSELLA

Dear Bruno:
 
I cannot now give your letter the considered reply it deserves. I'm off
to Auburn to lecture at the Mises University for the entire next week.
However, I will reply, substantively, when I return.
 
In the meantime, I am taking the liberty of copying your excellent
letter to my friend Stephan Kinsella, who I've interested in your
perspective. I hope and trust you two will keep me posted on any
correspondence that develops between the two of you.
 
Best regards,
 
Walter

Subject: 	RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: 	Sat, 29 Jul 2006 00:10:54 -0500
From: 	Stephan Kinsella
To: 	Walter Block, Bruno Prior


Thanks Walter.
 
Bruno, very interesting post.
 
Have you seen Hoppe's comments -- on p. 208 of his Economics and Ethics
of Private Property book:

"Here the praxeological proof of libertarianism has the advantage of
offering a completely value-free justification of private property. It
remains entirely in the realm of is-statements, and nowhere tries to
derive an ought from an is. The structure of the argument is this: (a)
justification is propositional justification—a priori true is-statement;
(b) argumentation presupposes property in one's body and the
homesteading principle—a priori true is- statement; and (c) then, no
deviation from this ethic can be argumentatively justified—a priori true
is-statement."

see also footnote 38 of my review article on this book by Hoppe:
http://www.stephankinsella.com/publications/kinsella_hoppe_econ-ethics-review.pdf
 

"[A]s Rand maintains, all 'oughts' are hypothetical, based on valuing
one's life ....

The point is not that one has to be alive in order to act to achieve
anything. The point is that being pro-life is what makes end states
qualify as /values/. Only choosing to hold one's life as a value gives
one the stake in one's actions that is required for the whole issue of
evaluation to arise ....

Contrary to biological determinism, one does not /have/ to pursue any
goals or proclaim anything to be of value. But contrary to subjectivism,
if one does, the action or proclamation logically depends on implicitly
accepting one's life as one's ultimate value....

The issue of /justifying/ choices arises only in the context of having
already chosen to live. The choice to live is not extra-moral, but
pre-moral; it is a precondition of all moral evaluation. "

Harry Binswanger, /Life-Based Teleology and the Foundations of Ethics/,
The Monist 84, 99-100 (1992). As Ayn Rand states:

Life or death is man's only fundamental alternative. To live is his
basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell
him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If
he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

Id. at 100 (quoting Ayn Rand , Causality Versus Duty, in Philosophy: Who
Needs It 95, 99 (Signet 1984))."

 

SEe also this Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_philosophy

"Rather, she believes that values are "objective." By this she means
that there are values that should be pursued if one chooses to value his
life. For example, food would be an objective value; in other words, it
would be "objectively" true that food is required for survival. *For
Rand, all moral imperatives are hypothetical.* There are no "categorical
imperatives" as in Kantianism <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantianism>
which an individual must perform regardless of his desires. In
Objectivism, imperatives are conditioned on an individual choosing to
value his life. They do not exist for an individual unless he makes this
choice. Rand says, morality is a "code of values accepted by choice."
According to Leonard Peikoff, Rand holds that "man needs [morality] for
one reason only: he needs it in order to survive. Moral laws, in this
view, are principles that define how to nourish and sustain human life;
they are no more than this and no less."^[12]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_philosophy#_note-7>
Objectivism does not say there is moral requirement to choose to value
life. As Allan Gotthelf points out, for Rand, "Morality rests on a
fundamental, pre-moral choice."^[13]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_philosophy#_note-8>


Stephan

N. Stephan Kinsella

Subject: Re: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:27:38 +0100
From: Bruno Prior
To: Stephan Kinsella
CC: Walter Block

Stephan,

Thanks for your message, and sorry I haven't replied sooner. I needed to
do a bit of reading up in order to make any sort of worthwhile response,
and pressure of work makes it difficult to find the time.

I'm pretty new to all of this, so, although I have come across Hoppe
(more recently even than Mises and Rothbard), I only have his Democracy
book (and haven't read it) so far. Economics and Ethics of Private
Property will now be added to my Amazon order list, and to the even
longer list of books I need to read to catch up (several dozen are
currently sitting on my floor)!

From a brief familiarisation with the argument (I downloaded Chapter 10
of Economics and Ethics... from Hoppe's website), I'm afraid I find
argumentation ethics no easier to swallow than Rothbard's "wimpy"
natural law basis of property rights. I may well be misunderstanding
Hoppe's point, but I don't see that property rights in one's self or
property are necessary to argumentation. I can see no reason why a slave
could not make logical propositions.

Moreover, it seems that Hoppe's technique could be used to prove
whatever philosophy one wants - first argue that those views are
necessary to life, then argue that to deny them is to admit their
validity, for the denial could not have been made if the necessities of
life had not been satisfied, and the dictates of the philosophy in
question are necessary to life.

Hoppe seems to be wrong when he says (earlier in the same chapter, on p.
203) that "According to Mises there exists no ultimate justification for
ethical propositions in the same sense as there exists one for economic
propositions". As I pointed out to Walter, Mises seems to have provided
the basis for a value-free ethics in Theory and History where, for
example, he says "The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to
the preservation of social cooperation". As we know, he had demonstrated
that the alternatives to liberalism (socialism and interventionism) were
doomed to fail in their objectives, so by a process of elimination he
could conclude that liberalism was the system that was most conducive to
the preservation of social cooperation and therefore most just or moral.

I imagine he would also have accepted Rothbard's (to my mind)
irrefutable argument in "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare
Economics" that Pareto's unanimity rule means that voluntary exchanges
can be assumed to have increased welfare, whereas coerced exchanges
cannot, and that therefore a liberal system that minimised the incidence
of coerced exchanges was the most conducive to the preservation of
social cooperation, if the object of social cooperation is to maximise
the welfare of the members of the society, assuming a liberal (i.e.
broad, individualistic) definition of welfare. In fact, perhaps this is
making things too difficult, because one might argue, depending on one's
definition of cooperation, that coercion and cooperation are
antithetical, and that therefore coercion could never be conducive to
the preservation of social cooperation, in which case the system that
minimises coercion is, by definition, the most just. I think this is
actually a variation on the previous argument from elimination of the
alternatives. Either way, it feels to me that, whether Hoppe's
argumentation ethics holds water or not, it is making life more
difficult than need be.

My problem with homesteading is a very practical one (I have to admit, I
base this on Rothbard's "Law, Property Rights and Air Pollution",
because I have not yet been able to get hold of a copy of "Justice and
Property Rights", which may well have set me straight had I read it). To
what property rights are Native American entitled if we adopt the
homesteading principle? If picking acorns is mixing one's labour with
the property on which the oak tree is found, as seems to be (a
compressed version of) Rothbard's contention, didn't Native Americans
have property rights in most of America? Rothbard argues that once
property rights have been established, lapse in use does not revoke
those rights. Locke (on whose philosophy Rothbard's arguments are based)
seems to be interested in the increase in productivity derived from the
mixing of labour with land. But how do we define useful productivity,
and where do we draw the line on that? If you are just using your garden
to grow flowers, and I decide that I can double the productivity of your
land by planting food, am I entitled to take half your land, on the
basis that you are not deprived because I have shown how to increase the
productivity of your share, so you have as much now as you had before?
It's nonsense, of course. Homesteading fundamentally relies on some
arbitrary standard of what was productive and what was unproductive use
of the land, and if we believe in subjective valuation, we have no right
to apply our standards of utility to others.

In one sense, this doesn't matter, as we arrive by all of these routes
at an ethical basis for advocating liberalism. But in other senses it
does matter because other things, such as the approach to externalities,
intellectual property and reputation, flow from these principles, and
because the philosophy is only as strong (and therefore defensible) as
its weakest part. I prefer the value-free version to the one derived
from natural law or the argumentation approach because, whilst all are
contentious, to my mind the notion of natural law is difficult and I am
not convinced of the logical truth of the argumentation approach. But I
may well not have understood Hoppe properly, and further
time/study/explanation may persuade me of the merits of his approach.

Cheers,

Bruno

Subject: RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 10:37:42 -0500
From: Stephan Kinsella
To: Bruno Prior
CC: Walter Block

Bruno, I'll try to reply in more detail later, but let me say, there is a
ton of stuff on Hoppe's site for download; you don't need to buy Econ &
Ethc.

E.g., you can read my article Defending Argumentation Ethics; my New
Rationalist Justifications for Rights (both on
www.StephanKinsella.com/publications) and Hoppe's A Theory of Socialism and
Capitalism (chapter 7), also on his site, www.HansHoppe.com

It is not that you need to be a self-owner to argue. It is that you need to
have the right to control your body during the argument, to genuinely argue.
Sure a slaveowner could grant his slave the right to argue. But then this
presupposes the slaveowner has ownership; it still presupposes ownership. So
then the question is, what standards govern ownership? And I think it would
become clear in this disussion, that there has to be a fair, objective link
between the claimant and the resource. IF the slaveowner can show he has
such a link to the slave's body, fine--e.g. maybe the slave raped the
owner's daughter, so he was enslaved as punishment. But if not, then the
slave has a better link to his body than the slaveowner, so it shows that
the ownership calim by the slaveowner is unjustified. Etc.

Re homesteading I think you are talking abuot the extent of it; and how a
systme is implemented in practice. I think we have to realize any sysstem
has to be a real-world, workable one. If you claim ownership of a continent
by virtue of seizing an acorn--or ownership of the ocean by looking at
it--the question is, would this claim suffice in the minds of your fellow
people to be an objective and workable and fair link between you and those
resources, such that in a conflict over them you should win? Surely many
practical concerns enter into the jurors'/fellow citizens' minds when they
appraise competing claims. And then compromise, tradition, practice, etc.
enter the picture and gradually some concrete rules are fashioned and
developed.
 
Stephan 

N. Stephan Kinsella

Subject: Re: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:38:34 +0100
From: Bruno Prior 
To: Stephan Kinsella
CC: Walter Block

Stephan,

Wow, you're quicker at this than I am.

On the question of property rights in self-expression, I need to take
the advice in your "Defending Argumentation Ethics" article and read up
the various papers on the subject before making a judgment, so I will
limit my comments to an observation that occurred to me as I started
reading your article.

Do you not find that there is actually something slightly suspect about
first-use being the basis of one's property in oneself? The concept of
first-use as the basis of property rights derives from Locke's arguments
about the mixing of labour. It is hard to argue that the first person
who mixes their labour with a baby is the baby. Surely it is their
parents (particularly the mother), perhaps (in a reductio ad absurdam)
jointly with the doctor or midwife. Should they have property in the
baby? Assuming we restrict it to the parents, perhaps there is an
argument that they should. But at what point does property transfer from
the parents to the child and what happens if the parents are unwilling
to transfer that property? And does the parents' property in the child
eliminate the child's right to self-expression?

On the homesteading front, your argument seems to me to be a form of
utilitarianism. If property rights stem from "compromise, tradition,
practice, etc." and the judgment of jurors, rather than from absolute
standards derived from natural law, then you have not just undermined a
large part of Rothbard's argument on property rights, but also
contradicted the primacy of subjective valuation and the invalidity of
deriving social norms from cardinal valuations of individual utilities.
It seems to follow from your argument that our rights to property rely
on the judgment of society, which means we have to apply some sort of
aggregation of the subjective valuations of other members of society, to
the task of assessing our rights in property. I am not comfortable with
that.

Cheers,

Bruno

Subject: RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 13:54:30 -0500
From: Stephan Kinsella
To: Bruno Prior
CC: Walter Block

> Wow, you're quicker at this than I am.

On the question of property rights in self-expression, I need to take the
advice in your "Defending Argumentation Ethics" article and read up the
various papers on the subject before making a judgment, so I will limit my
comments to an observation that occurred to me as I started reading your
article.

> Do you not find that there is actually something slightly suspect about
> first-use being the basis of one's property in oneself? The concept of
> first-use as the basis of property rights derives from Locke's arguments
> about the mixing of labour.<

I can point you to other things I've written on this, but I have addressed
this before. My basic view is that when 2 people both want a given resource,
whoever has the *better claim* should win; that means, who has the best or
most objective link to the thing. In the case of homesteaded things that
were previously unowned, the first user has the best link.

With respect to bodies, there are several ways the person himself can show
he has a better link to his own body than the interloper. First, he has
possessed/used it first, vis-a-vis the other person. Second, of course there
is a natural link between a person and his body; and moreover, the
interloper himself has to admit this, because he asserts owenrship of his
own body in the attempt to control yours. Etc.

So I do agree they are different.

I have also argued that labor-mixing is irrelevant. We do not own our labor;
and we do not own something we homestead *because* we own our labor and mix
it with it. I say I own a thing I homestead because I have a better claim to
it; my labor-mixing is just an indication *that I have* possessed/used it.
But I don't own my labor.

> It is hard to argue that the first person who mixes their labour with a
> baby is the baby. Surely it is their parents (particularly the mother),
> perhaps (in a reductio ad absurdam) jointly with the doctor or midwife.
> Should they have property in the baby?

Yes, I have argued this before too. I think with respect to any outsider
other than the parents, any person clearly has a better claim to his body.
Vis-a-vis the parents, there are several possibilities. First, perhaps the
parents do own the kid. But, even if so, it could also be argued there is a
positive obligation of the parents to manumit the kid at a certain age. Why?
Because of several reasons. One, if you push someone in a lake you have an
obligation to save them; you created the position-of-peril. By similar
reasoning, I believe that parents do have positive obligations to their
children: they created the child-with-needs. I think libertarainism is only
against involuntarily acquired positive obligations; but your actions can
cause you to incur positive obligations, as in the lake case; or in the
"having a kid" case. And one of these positive obligations is to manumit the
kid. Second, as a practical matter, you could assume that one condition of
the parents' own manumission by their own parents is that the parent manumit
all of their children, and impose this obligation on descendants, and so on.

Second, it could be argued that the parent is free and has to assume he is
free from his parents' control, so cannot say that his kid is also not free.

> Assuming we restrict it to the parents, perhaps there is an argument that
> they should. But at what point does property transfer from the parents to
> the child and what happens if the parents are unwilling to transfer that
> property? And does the parents' property in the child eliminate the child's
> right to self-expression?<

I think you could argue children are owned by parents. Maybe this is so.
Personally I think there is a positive obligation to be a good parent, and
this includes the obligation to manumit the kid. Etc.

> On the homesteading front, your argument seems to me to be a form of
> utilitarianism. If property rights stem from "compromise, tradition,
> practice, etc." and the judgment of jurors,<

But how could it ever be otherwise in any real society? This is not
utilitarian; it is realism.

> rather than from absolute standards derived from natural law, then you
> have not just undermined a large part of Rothbard's argument on property
> rights, but also contradicted the primacy of subjective valuation and the
> invalidity of deriving social norms from cardinal valuations of individual
> utilities.<

NO; the libertarian is the one who urges that these principles be the ones
that are attemptd to be applied as consistently as possibly *by* the jurors.
But libertarianism does not mean we are omniscient or infallible.

> It seems to follow from your argument that our rights to property rely on
the judgment of society,<

Our positive legal rights do, surely. All we can seek to obtain is a legal
system that approaches or approximates some ideal.

> which means we have to apply some sort of aggregation of the subjective
> valuations of other members of society, to the task of assessing our rights
> in property. I am not comfortable with that.<

Welll, I don't see how that's relevant. :)

Stephan

Subject: Re: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 02:14:00 +0100
From: Bruno Prior
To: Stephan Kinsella
CC: Walter Block

Stephan,

I'm afraid I am leaving more of the points in your emails unanswered
than answered, but as a quick point before I go to bed, if preference is
given to the better claim, that begs the question of the philosophical
basis on which the validity of claims is to be measured. Is this
objective or subjective, and if the former, how are the objective
standards derived? I take it, if I look on your website, that I will
find this also amply covered?

Cheers,

Bruno

Subject: RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 20:28:56 -0500
From: Stephan Kinsella 
To: Bruno Prior
CC: Walter Block

No; allI have done is try to expose the framework that was already
implicitly there; to connect up the homesteading idea with property rights.

But I think the answer lies in the nature of the inquiry in which  the issue
arises. That is, what is going on? Certain people for wahtever reason value
civilized norms of peace, prosperity, cooperation. These people feel uneasy
in using violence as a commonplace means of achieving what they want. They
seek justification for violence. They seek ways of making it unnecessary.
They seek to avoid conflict. They also want to be able to use means in the
world, i.e. scarce resources. They realize therefore that there is a
possibilty of conflict over a given item. Because of the previously
mentioned goals, they therefore are in favor of rules that can let property
be used and that would reduce conflict. That means assigning each disputable
thing to one owner; and assigning it with a rule that everyone could agree
is "fair". If the rule is not fair then it is just arbitrary and it is
really just one person asserting his will; we are out of the property rights
situation. So that means any rule has to be universalizable, and has to be
compatible with other necessary presuppositions of discourse in general. All
these requirements constrain what rulues could possibly be selected. Given
all this, it is easy to see why the rule "first use" has to be the main one.
Any other rule adopts a latecomer ethic; which is the oppositi of property,
plus it is arbitrary. Thus, the homesteading rule.

A lot of this is sort of "meta" theory that incorporates a lot of Hoppe's
argumentation ethics.

 
Stephan 

Subject: Re: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 16:28:36 +0100
From: Bruno Prior
To: Stephan Kinsella
CC: Walter Block

Stephan,

There is no argument that property rights are the basis of social
cooperation (the argument that the first part of your paragraph sets out
very clearly). That applies not just to liberals in the classical sense
(I am trying to avoid the use of the term libertarian as it seems to
mean something very particular to each proponent of the philosophy), but
to the various flavours of liberal- and social-democracy and even to the
various flavours of socialism, in the sense that property rights,
whether in common rather than individually, or of the proletariat in the
means of production, or to each according to their needs, define their
notion of social cooperation.

The question is: how are property rights to be assigned and on what
(philosophical) basis?

In continental Europe, property rights (and indeed the liberty of the
individual more generally) are, in accordance with Napoleonic law, by
grant of the state. The basis of this view is the philosophy of the
thoroughly dangerous and misguided Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who has
received his share of the blame for The Terror in revolutionary France,
but has not yet been assigned sufficient responsibility for the
philosophies that led to the totalitarian governments of the 20th
century. It is sad how few Britons are aware of this fundamental
difference with our traditional view of the relationship between the
state and the individual, and of the threat posed to that relationship
by the extension of Napoleonic law and Rousseauian notions of governance
into British law and governance. (I consciously refrain from referring
here to European law and governance, because I do not believe that the
current systems are innate to Europe, but instead are the result of a
series of wrong turns in the evolution of European thought from the 18th
to the 20th centuries.)

Mises and Rothbard were concerned to overthrow that concept - to give
primacy to the rights of the individual. Mises, with his insistence that
praxeology as a science must be value-free, was content simply to accept
the status quo of property rights in the sense of effective "control of
the services that can be derived from the good" (Human Action, p.678),
not necessarily being the same thing as legal title, and probably not
derived from "first use" principles. "Virtually every owner is the
direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership
either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent
spoliation of their predecessor. However, the fact that legal formalism
can trace back every title either to arbitrary appropriation or to
violent expropriation has no significance whatever for the conditions of
a market society" (ibid, p.679). It was enough for Mises that private
ownership served consumers and would change in relation to the extent to
which owners deployed their property to the satisfaction of consumers'
wants. Some have suggested that this meant Mises' view was not only
value-free but unethical, but my point to Walter was that Mises seemed
to construe his approach as ethical but value-free, on the basis (to
paraphrase) that something that works is better than something that doesn't.

Rothbard felt this was inadequate, and that there had to be a
fundamental basis of justice on which property rights were assigned:

"It is ironic that, in these numerous cases, the only response of
utilitarian free-market advocates is to defend existing land titles,
regardless of their injustice, and to tell the peasants to keep quiet
and 'respect private property'. Since the peasants are convinced that
the property is their private title, it is no wonder that they fail to
be impressed: but since they find the supposed champions of property
rights and free-market capitalism to be their staunch enemies, they
generally are forced to turn to the only organized groups that at least
rhetorically champion their claims and are willing to carry out the
required rectification of property titles—the socialists and communists.
In short, from simply a utilitarian consideration of consequences, the
utilitarian free-marketeers have done very badly in the undeveloped
world, the result of their ignoring the fact that others than
themselves, however inconveniently, do have a passion for justice",
(Justice and Property Rights).

It was important to him, therefore, that property rights were not based
on "compromise, tradition, practice, etc." (on which you are closer to
Mises), but on absolute notions of justice derived from ethical
principles. His concept of "first use", consequently, was different to
yours: following Locke, he started from a right of self-ownership and
derived from that property rights in those goods in which one had mixed
one's own labour; you, on the other hand, give primacy to "first use"
(and little significance to mixing one's labour) and derive from that
one's right (or otherwise) to self-ownership.

So you can see, perhaps, why I say that your perspective is different to
that of both Mises and Rothbard. Mises had no use for the concept of
"first use" as the origin of property rights, though he was closer to
agreeing with you on "better claim" as the basis of present-day rights.
And Rothbard's concept of the principles of self-ownership and "first
use" were very different (almost inverse) to yours.

For my part, I find Mises' approach easiest. Rothbard seems to have been
seeking an impossible goal in looking for absolute standards of justice.
As I said in a previous email, there are problems with the concept of
homesteading, although I ought to modify that now by recognising that
there is more than one concept of what homesteading means. My previous
criticisms refer more to Rothbard's concept than yours.

I might add, as another reservation on Rothbard's concept, that I do not
follow how the mixing of one's labour in the produce of land becomes
property rights in the land. To use the earlier example, I can follow
the concept that mixing one's labour with acorns by collecting them for
consumption entitles one to property rights in the acorns, but I don't
see that that necessarily extends to the oak, let alone the land that
the oak stands on. Perhaps if one plants the oak, one could be said to
have mixed one's labour with it, but that still does not extend to the
land. And as for the oak, so for anything else that one might grow on
the land. By Locke's logic, the property rights seem to me only to
extend to the produce, not the land itself. Perhaps he would refer to
the tilling of the land, but if property rights are dependent on actual
physical input into the land itself, then many of our established rights
are invalid. Do we (and should we) not recognise ownership based on
established possession, regardless of use? I think, with your reliance
on tradition and practice, that you would agree with this.

But I am no more comfortable with your version of homesteading. As we
have agreed, taking first-use as a starting point leads to the
unsatisfactory conclusion that parents own their children upto some
point. You introduce circumstances in which that right ought to be
revoked, but I think a philosophy that suggests one person might have
ownership of another in any circumstances is unsatisfactory. And if you
rely on first-use as a basis in its own right, rather than as a
derivation from the right of self-ownership through the mixing of
labour, what you are talking about is really no more than Mises'
"arbitrary appropriation". I don't know if you have it in America, but
over here, children often claim to be able to "bags" something because
they claimed it first. That may work as a rough and ready tool for
childhood play (though even in those circumstances, it tends to end in
tears), but it is unsatisfactory as the basis of property rights in the
adult world. I return to my earlier question: what degree of use
constitutes a valid claim? What is its extent, geographically and
temporally? You have already answered this with reference to
"compromise, tradition, practice, etc." But if those are to be the
standards by which the validity of first-use is assessed, then you are
really not saying much more than Mises' bald and limited utilitarianism.
If first-use does not endow an absolute right, a-la-Rothbard, it doesn't
serve much function other than to become simply one amongst many factors
that may be taken into consideration when assessing claims.

I have sympathy, in principle, with Rothbard's criticisms of the moral
weakness of Mises' approach. But in practice, history has tended to
support Mises' view and refute Rothbard's (in a rare example where the
latter was more pessimistic than the former). When Rothbard was writing
on property rights, it must have seemed like there was a real, immediate
danger that those rights might be overturned by a jealous proletariat.
It turned out, as Mises judged, that there was no unity of purpose and
class-interest amongst the proletariat, and that they were not as
attracted to socialism and communism as many people feared. It was a
close-run thing for a while, but with the prudent expansion of private
ownership of recent times, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the
introduction of free(er) markets and private property into Communist
China, a utilitarian approach that simply recognises the status quo does
not seem to threaten the possibility of the overturn of the capitalist
system that it once did. The ethical test was which system worked, and
as Heilbronner admitted "Mises was right".

The threat now is not from communism and socialism, but from the equally
invidious interventionism and egalitarianism (leaving aside the separate
threat of Islamism). Those philosophies claim to respect property rights
whilst in practice undermining them. The question now, as Mises
recognised all that time ago, is not who has title, but who has control?
The debate about property rights needs now to focus less on the ethical
basis, and more on the degree of control that title endows. That control
is very significantly under threat. I suppose I should never have
restarted an old debate that detracts from the more important issue. But
I feel a strong affinity for Mises, and it seemed that the debate about
"Rothbard vs Mises" had ended very much to his disadvantage, and I just
wanted to suggest a way of righting the balance, without pouring scorn
on Rothbard as Pat Gunning had done.

Cheers,

Bruno

Subject: RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 12:30:47 -0500
From: Stephan Kinsella 
To: Bruno Prior
CC: Walter Block

Bruno, a few comments for: 

> The question is: how are property rights to be assigned and on what
> (philosophical) basis?<

Yes. And I do think Rothbard (and Mises, I would think) and I would agree
basically on the property-assignment rule being homesteading. The basis for
it... Well. Look. I think Rothbard would basically agree with a lot of my
explication of it; and I bet Mises would too: they would agree, I think that
any property system's purpose is to allocate ownership to scarce resources
in a fair way; and that by and large, the first possessor of a resource
ought to be the one with the ownership. 

Notice also: my approach is definitely consistent with Hoppe; and he argues
that Rothbard already had a "proto" version of Hoppe's theory: see the first
quotd paragraph by Hoppe here: http://blog.mises.org/archives/005407.asp :
Hoppe wrote:

"[T]his defense of private property is essentially also Rothbard's. In spite
of his formal allegiance to the natural rights tradition Rothbard, in what I
consider his most crucial argument in defense of a private property ethic,
not only chooses essentially the same starting point-argumentation-but also
gives a justification by means of a priori reasoning almost identical to the
one just developed. To prove the point I can do no better than simply quote:
"Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on
values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if
he were really opposed to life he would have no business continuing to be
alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the
very process of discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of
one's life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom.""

> In continental Europe, property rights (and indeed the liberty of the
> individual more generally) are, in accordance with Napoleonic law, by grant
> of the state.

I find this interesting--I'm from Louisiana, the only Napoleonic state. I
studied civil law. I wrote on this before in Legislation and the Discovery
of law in a Free Society, http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/11_2/11_2_5.pdf

> Mises and Rothbard were concerned to overthrow that concept - to give
> primacy to the rights of the individual. Mises, with his insistence that
> praxeology as a science must be value-free, was content simply to accept the
> status quo of property rights in the sense of effective "control of the
> services that can be derived from the good" (Human Action, p.678), not
> necessarily being the same thing as legal title, and probably not derived
> from "first use" principles."

Well, I think Mises personally favored liberalism because he himself favored
prosperity, cooperation, etc. and he realized that liberalism is the means
of achieving these things. I don't think this is incompatible with what I'm
arguing; although Mises might have said it is not possible to scientifically
validate any ethical presuppositions, what Hoppe and I do is to try to show
that such presuppositions are *unavoidable* in a given relevant
argumentative or justificatory context. So they are "effecively"
categorical.

But are you saying that Mises accepted the status quo, i.e. the "current
assignment of titles"? If so, I just find that to be a detail. I am talking
about principles, not about the particular application.

> Rothbard felt this was inadequate, and that there had to be a fundamental
> basis of justice on which property rights were assigned:"

Well... Yes. And I don't disagree either. I think of it more as an
incrementalist approach; that real justice is only possible in any real
world by being implemented by real, fallible humans who hopefully try as
hard as possible to be as just as possible. And I think the most consistent
would tend to advocate norms or values, and to judge cases, based on the
libertarian ideal of the non-aggression principle, which is really just a
re-statement of the first-possession = better-claim ownership assignment
view.

> "It is ironic that, in these numerous cases, the only response of
> utilitarian free-market advocates is to defend existing land titles,
> regardless of their injustice, and to tell the peasants to keep quiet and
> 'respect private property'. Since the peasants are convinced that the
> property is their private title, it is no wonder that they fail to be
> impressed: but since they find the supposed champions of property rights and
> free-market capitalism to be their staunch enemies, they generally are
> forced to turn to the only organized groups that at least rhetorically
> champion their claims and are willing to carry out the required
> rectification of property titles-the socialists and communists. In short,
> from simply a utilitarian consideration of consequences, the utilitarian
> free-marketeers have done very badly in the undeveloped world, the result of
> their ignoring the fact that others than themselves, however inconveniently,
> do have a passion for justice", (Justice and Property Rights).<

Well. I would tend to agree, that one consideration of justice is that
stolen property should be returned to the owner, if and wehre possible. But
I also can see that in a free society something like a "statute of
limitations" would be implemented; that, at a certain point, a compromise
solution would be reached and we would start from where we are rather than
always re-hashing things.

> It was important to him, therefore, that property rights were not based on
> "compromise, tradition, practice, etc." (on which you are closer to Mises),
> but on absolute notions of justice derived from ethical principles. His
> concept of "first use", consequently, was different to
> yours: following Locke, he started from a right of self-ownership and
> derived from that property rights in those goods in which one had mixed
> one's own labour; you, on the other hand, give primacy to "first use" (and
> little significance to mixing one's labour) and derive from that one's right
> (or otherwise) to self-ownership.<

Well. I view Rothbard's "armchair philosopher" principles (and see on this
my post, The Limits of Armchair Theorizing: The case of Threats
(http://blog.mises.org/archives/2006_07.asp) -- as either useful general
principles that would be taken into consideration by any sincere libertarian
in a position to made a judgment or decision (eg., as a juror); OR as
predictions as to what the likely application of general/abstract principles
to a given concrete situation would likely be, or ought to be--but since you
can only assume so many facts, it has to be a "ceteris paribus" type
tentative judgment. Maybe R would not have said some of his rules are
"provisional" ones... But I think they have to be (lke his
two-teeth-for-a-tooth rule).

> So you can see, perhaps, why I say that your perspective is different to
> that of both Mises and Rothbard. Mises had no use for the concept of "first
> use" as the origin of property rights, though he was closer to agreeing with
> you on "better claim" as the basis of present-day rights. And Rothbard's
> concept of the principles of self-ownership and "first use" were very
> different (almost inverse) to yours."

Well. I would think Mises would think the first-use is the way property
titles should be assigned (I don't have a reference); but that does not mean
he doesn't think that we should move forward with the second-best situation
we have. And I think my view is not that different from Rothbard's; as I
said above, his was compatible with Hoppe which is compatible with mine.
While he may have fixated on some fictional view that we "own" our labor,
and "therefore" own things we mix with it; I say that we own things we
possess (which is a type of labor-mixing) because this possession gives rise
to embordering, appropriation--a better claim. I think R's focus on the
Lockean labor thing is just his way of or reason for favoring the first-use
principle; but favor it, he does, and I have no doubt he'd say the person
who appropriates an (unowned) thing has a better claim to it than any
latecomer. Don't you agree?

> For my part, I find Mises' approach easiest. Rothbard seems to have been
> seeking an impossible goal in looking for absolute standards of justice.<

Yes; but again, I view him more as a like the libertarian analogue to
learned law professors (like a Blackstone) who codify disparate common-law
developedp principles in an attempt to coherently set them forth, provide a
mor sound basis for htem, and correct some missteps, and in the hopes of
influencing lawmakers in the future.

> As I said in a previous email, there are problems with the concept of
> homesteading, although I ought to modify that now by recognising that there
> is more than one concept of what homesteading means. My previous criticisms
> refer more to Rothbard's concept than yours.<

Welll, I think R and I would both agree with the basic idea of homesteading:
that the person who appropriates an unowned resource, thereby becomes its
owners. I think he mistakenly believes that you need "labor ownership" and
"self-ownership" to *justify* this homesteading view; I think that is
confusing and not needed. But we all agree with homesteading. I think even
Mises would. Mises might however say that in a given society where property
was stolen in the distant past, that the current posessor has better claim
than some distant descendent of someone else. So he would modify the ideal
case. (I think--I have not read him on this, I am taking your formulation of
Mises' view on this for granted here for sake of argument.)

> I might add, as another reservation on Rothbard's concept, that I do not
> follow how the mixing of one's labour in the produce of land becomes
> property rights in the land. To use the earlier example, I can follow the
> concept that mixing one's labour with acorns by collecting them for
> consumption entitles one to property rights in the acorns, but I don't see
> that that necessarily extends to the oak, let alone the land that the oak
> stands on. Perhaps if one plants the oak, one could be said to have mixed
> one's labour with it, but that still does not extend to the land. And as for
> the oak, so for anything else that one might grow on the land.<

I am personally not that interested in deducing from my armchair the exact
standards for how one would go about embordering (Hoppe's term--see my
discussion of Hoppe's terminology here:
http://www.stephankinsella.com/archive/2005_11_01_archive.php#11332121275143
5927 )particular resources.  But the point is: suppose at some point there
is a conflict over the use of this tree, between A and B. There is and can
be a real conflict. The only way to avoid this is to assign ownership of it
to one of them; and for the assignment-rule to be of the type that is seen
as fair and is universalizable (thus it serves to help avoid conflict), then
obviously you have to assign it to the one with the best claim; and the one
with the best claim is the one who in some relevant sense (related to the
nature of the very dispute in question--the mode of use of the thing that
gives rise to the conflict, an the type of conflict--these are all relevant
to what kind of possession would count for ownership of it!) possessed it
first. Let's say they just ignore civilized rules of dispute settlemetn,a nd
each tries to use the tree. This is being done in some physical way; *it's a
type of possession*. To the extent that conflict is possible, then it's done
by some physical means; this is a type of possession; it is use or
possession that is in conflict. However this conflict could or would occur
indicates the mode of possessing it in the first place, in the act of
appropriation. This is a more general approach; how it would play out in any
given community or society, is hard to predict--though the real common law
rules that did develop in history can be some guide.

> By Locke's logic, the property rights seem to me only to extend to the
> produce, not the land itself. Perhaps he would refer to the tilling of the
> land, but if property rights are dependent on actual physical input into the
> land itself, then many of our established rights are invalid.<

I don't think so. See above. When and if there is a dispute about a given
piece of land, this is a dispute about possession/use of it. That implies
use of it in some practical mode is possible; this mode informs the rule of
appropriation appropriate to that resource, for purposes of appropriation.

> Do we (and should we) not recognise ownership based on established
> possession, regardless of use? I think, with your reliance on tradition and
> practice, that you would agree with this.<

I don't see a difference between "use" and "possession". They are ways of
stating the same thing: embordering, appropriating, labor-mixing, use,
possession.

> But I am no more comfortable with your version of homesteading. As we have
> agreed, taking first-use as a starting point leads to the unsatisfactory
> conclusion that parents own their children upto some point. You introduce
> circumstances in which that right ought to be revoked, but I think a
> philosophy that suggests one person might have ownership of another in any
> circumstances is unsatisfactory.<

Well, I suppose you can approach it that way: that you somehow "know" some
things ahead of time; so if an approach yields results contrary to this, it
must be wrong. I prefer to pursue truth itself, and go where an argument
takes me. I.e., you can *say* it's unsatisfactory, but that is no argument.

> And if you rely on first-use as a basis in its own right, rather than as a
> derivation from the right of self-ownership through the mixing of labour,
> what you are talking about is really no more than Mises' "arbitrary
> appropriation".<

What exactly is this--did he write on this?

> I don't know if you have it in America, but over here, children often
> claim to be able to "bags" something because they claimed it first.<

Sure; finders' keepers. This is a universal rule of justice, IMO; and the
root of all our rights.

> That may work as a rough and ready tool for childhood play (though even in
> those circumstances, it tends to end in tears), but it is unsatisfactory as
> the basis of property rights in the adult world.<

"unsatisfactory"? What does this mean, exactly; what is this standard? And
why is it unsatisfactory? All it means is that as to a given resource, among
multiple contestants or claimants, if you want peaceful use of things to be
possible, then you have to assign it to the one with the best claim, which
is the one who possessed it first.

> I return to my earlier question: what degree of use constitutes a valid
> claim? What is its extent, geographically and temporally? You have already
> answered this with reference to "compromise, tradition, practice, etc." But
> if those are to be the standards by which the validity of first-use is
> assessed, then you are really not saying much more than Mises' bald and
> limited utilitarianism. If first-use does not endow an absolute right,
> a-la-Rothbard, it doesn't serve much function other than to become simply
> one amongst many factors that may be taken into consideration when assessing
> claims.<

To have a workable system of justice you have to have most people in society
be civilized, and agree to voluntarily respect rights, which means
voluntarily acquiesce in common standards. Civilized society is just not
possible without this. The best the libertarian can hope for is that as many
people as possible are as libertarian as possible in this respect. And all
reasonable people who seek goodwill with each other and commonly value peace
and prosperity, and therefore who value property rights based on original
appropriation (homesteading), will also also realize the possibility of
disagreement and fallibility or error... therefore one of the core values
that accompanies any workable system of justice will be a bias towards
compromise, and to submitting disputes to neutral third parties whose
decision is more or less binding. No justice system is conceivable without
these characteristics. So of course any claimants are going to try to appeal
to the decision-makers' sense of justice, and will resort to and take into
account more or less established principles of justice that have developed
over time.

> I have sympathy, in principle, with Rothbard's criticisms of the moral
> weakness of Mises' approach. But in practice, history has tended to support
> Mises' view and refute Rothbard's (in a rare example where the latter was
> more pessimistic than the former).<

I must confess I am not quite clear what you mean when you sharply oppose R
and M here. You seem to assume this common knowledge or obvious; I am not
sure where you are getting this from.

> But I feel a strong affinity for Mises, and it seemed that the debate about
> "Rothbard vs Mises" had ended very much to his disadvantage, and I just
> wanted to suggest a way of righting the balance, without pouring scorn on
> Rothbard as Pat Gunning had done.<

Again-where is this debate? What am I missing?
 
Stephan 

Subject: Re: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 19:57:40 +0100
From: Bruno Prior
To: Stephan Kinsella
CC: Walter Block 

Stephan,

I'll reply on points of detail later, but there seem to have been a few
places where I haven't made myself clear and therefore you have been
unable to follow me. So I thought I'd clarify those immediately. To take
the last point first:

>> But I feel a strong affinity for Mises, and it seemed that the debate
>> about "Rothbard vs Mises" had ended very much to his disadvantage,
>> and I just wanted to suggest a way of righting the balance, without
>> pouring scorn on Rothbard as Pat Gunning had done.<
>
> Again-where is this debate? What am I missing?

I am referring to the criticism of Mises by Rothbard, which was the
basis of the dispute between Walter and Pat Gunning, which in turn was
the subject of my email to Walter. Of course, because my first email was
to Walter, I assumed he'd know what I was referring to, but I shouldn't
have assumed the same for you. You can find the exchanges between Walter
and Gunning at http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/exchange.htm,
though for all I know Walter may have made a further reply that Gunning
does not list.

> what you are talking about is really no more than Mises' "arbitrary
> appropriation".<
>
> What exactly is this--did he write on this?

It was from the quote from Mises (Human Action, p.679) earlier in the
email (4th para, beginning "Virtually every owner..."). If you re-read
that quote, it seems to me that he did disagree with you on first-use as
a basis for property rights and was, as Rothbard pointed out, a plain
utilitarian in this regard.

>> I have sympathy, in principle, with Rothbard's criticisms of the
>> moral weakness of Mises' approach. But in practice, history has
>> tended to support Mises' view and refute Rothbard's (in a rare
>> example where the latter was more pessimistic than the former).<
>
> I must confess I am not quite clear what you mean when you sharply
> oppose R and M here. You seem to assume this common knowledge or
> obvious; I am not sure where you are getting this from.

This is also from a quote earlier in the email, this time from
Rothbard's article "Justice and Property Rights" (6th para of my email,
beginning "It is ironic that, in these numerous cases..."). I'm not sure
you picked up that I was quoting Rothbard on that one, though I am
flattered if you thought those were my own words. Rothbard was
criticising, in that quote, exactly the approach Mises had taken in
Human Action. He doesn't name Mises in this context, but he did take him
specifically to task in other papers (see the debate between Walter and
Gunning).

Cheers,

Bruno

Subject: RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 14:09:41 -0500
From: Stephan Kinsella
To: Bruno Prior
CC: Walter Block

Right, I think I read all thata lont time ago, but it's faded from memory
and I didn't revisit it. IfI recall, I"ve never taken Gunning that
seriously. Maybe confusing him w/ someone else but I thoguht he was more of
a gadfly dilettante.

> It was from the quote from Mises (Human Action, p.679) earlier in the email
> (4th para, beginning "Virtually every owner..."). If you re-read that quote,
> it seems to me that he did disagree with you on first-use as a basis for
> property rights and was, as Rothbard pointed out, a plain utilitarian in
> this regard.<

I'll have to chck this out. 

> This is also from a quote earlier in the email, this time from Rothbard's
> article "Justice and Property Rights" (6th para of my email, beginning "It
> is ironic that, in these numerous cases..."). I'm not sure you picked up
> that I was quoting Rothbard on that one, though I am flattered if you
> thought those were my own words. Rothbard was criticising, in that quote,
> exactly the approach Mises had taken in Human Action. He doesn't name Mises
> in this context, but he did take him specifically to task in other papers
> (see the debate between Walter and Gunning).<

Yeah, I knew that was R but was not clear that it was obvious he was
critiqueing Mises.

 
Stephan       

Subject: 	RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: 	Mon, 7 Aug 2006 15:19:55 -0500
From: 	Walter Block 
To: 	Bruno Prior 
CC: 	Stephan Kinsella


Dear Stephan and Bruno:
 
Sorry for not getting back in on this until now. I have spent the past
week at the Mises U, and I was way too busy to read this material.
 
Now that I have glanced at it, I have a proposal: that the three of us
co author a reply to Gunning's rejoinder to this article of mine:
 
Block, Walter. 2005. “Value Freedom, Laissez Faire, Mises and Rothbard:
A comment on Prof. Gunning,” /American Journal of Economics and
Sociology/, Vol. 64, No. 3, July, pp. 919-938
 
Anyone interested?
 
Best regards,
 
Walter

Subject: 	RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: 	Mon, 7 Aug 2006 15:29:06 -0500
From: 	Stephan Kinsella 
To: 	'Walter Block', 'Bruno Prior'



Walter, I think probably Bruno and I don't agree enough to be co-authors
on this--though he's very smart and nice! :)
 
 
 
Stephan

N. Stephan Kinsella

Subject: Re: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2006 12:03:19 +0100
From: Bruno Prior 
To: Stephan Kinsella
CC: 'Walter Block' 

Stephan/Walter,

I have started a reply several times, each time reversing my position. I
cannot decide whether the gap between Stephan and I is significant or
not. In that regard, I found this article by Wendy McElroy illuminating:

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/natlaw.htm

Very roughly, I seem to be playing the role of the egoists and Stephan
the role of the natural rights advocates, although we are not repeating
the mistake of making this personal, and our positions are not the same
as the respective parties in that dispute, just perhaps at similar ends
of the spectrum. So perhaps we should remind ourselves that what we have
in common is more significant than what divides us. But then again,
perhaps we also need to continue a "full and dispassionate debate" to
see where it will take us, in which case Stephan is right that we need
to resolve our differences, however amicable, before we could consider
working together.

I think my uncertainty about the significance of the differences is
caused in part by the fact that the more you look at the question of
utilitarianism vs natural rights, the more blurred the distinction
becomes. It seems that many systems of natural rights deduce their laws
in accordance with the test of whether they enhance human welfare, which
is a very utilitarian principle. To use a modern analogy, natural rights
in one sense look like middleware, interposed between the server of
utilitarian "ends" and the client of policy "means". Those utilitarians
like Mises who do without the middleware in a simpler client-server
model going direct from utilitarian "ends" to policy "means" are
pointing out in one sense that natural rights are simply an abstraction
from utilitarian principles. In that sense, natural rights cannot be
said to be any more absolute than the principles from which the laws
were derived.

On the other hand, middleware can be a very important tool in allowing
two complex systems to interface. The errors of interventionism and
socialism and the myriad supporting economic theories that were
developed during the 19th and 20th centuries are, to a great extent, a
result of the failure to correctly match the means and the ends, errors
that would have been much more evident if means and ends had been forced
to interface through the medium of natural laws. Like some philosophical
ubergeek programming in Assembly (to amend the analogy slightly), a
genius like Mises could do without the interface, but the vast majority
who tried to do the same produced unintelligible, unworkable systems. In
that sense, Rothbard was right to insist that natural law ethics were an
essential requirement for the assessment of policy by the vast majority,
but perhaps wrong to criticise a man who really could manage without.

This view brings Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe and Rand into closer alignment
than I had previously understood, which supports the case that Stephan
has been trying to make to me, although perhaps for a different reason
(or a different nuance of the same reason). They are all utilitarians,
even if Rothbard didn't realise it.

About Mises, there is no doubt that this is true - for instance, Human
Action, p.716 (very helpfully signposted by Wendy McElroy):

"There is, however, no such thing as natural law and a perennial
standard of what is just and what is unjust."

But on the other hand, to take the quote that led me to contact Walter
in the first place (Theory and History, p. 36):

"The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation
of social cooperation."

So there is no "perennial standard" of justice, but there is a
"yardstick" to measure it (roughly) by. This is not an oxymoron, if
justice is determined by relative (better/worse) rather than absolute
(good/bad) assessments. Mises is entitled to say that, judged by their
conduciveness to the preservation of social cooperation, some measures
are more effective (better) than others. If he recommends a system, it
is because he can demonstrate that it is more effective than the others
- in other words it is the best that we can currently devise and
therefore ethically right for governments to implement, without
maintaining that it is "good" in an absolute sense.

It is probably barely worth the effort to align Hoppe and Rand with this
sort of view. Their writings quoted in Stephan's original email are
effectively a restatement of Mises' limited utilitarian ethic. Hoppe
himself felt that he was following Mises' approach. Hoppe's and Rand's
arguments follow the same logic. Whether the touchstone is the choice to
argue or the choice to live, both maintain that the test of a philosophy
is its consistency with that choice. They are both saying that man, in
choosing to act, should act in accordance with his recognition of men as
acting beings. If we recognise that in ourselves and others, and we
follow the logic of Mises' deduction of economic laws from praxeological
principles, we must agree with Mises that working in accordance with
those laws is the most sensible way for individuals and governments to act.

There are differences with Mises. Rand includes within the field of
morality ("rational ethics") those individual actions necessary to the
preservation of life that do not affect other individuals, which Mises
categorises separately as hygiene. But if the objective of social
interaction is to achieve something that cannot be achieved alone, then
a test of fitness to "nourish and sustain" in a social context is
equivalent to a test of "conduciveness to social cooperation".

As for Hoppe, to acknowledge that I must be "capable of argumentation"
in order to discuss notions of justice or validity does not mean that I
accept that all propositions can be "validated by propositional or
argumentative means" (Economics and Ethics..., p. 205). I may propose
other notions of justice or validity that I believe to be absolute
(perhaps because of my faith, for instance) and not subject to
validation by debate. In that case, I make the proposition not to be
validated but for others to be aware of them. I do not necessarily
expect others to be persuaded, and the proposition is not undermined for
me if they are not. In fact, Hoppe himself, in expounding his
argumentation ethic, relies on an ethical proposition (property in
oneself and homesteading) that he takes as a given and does not seek to
validate in the course of the argument. I imagine he either made the
case for this ethic somewhere else or relied on a case that others had
made, but (a) in this context it is considered an absolute (or the
argument would no longer rely purely on is-statements), and (b) when one
looks at the justifications for the homesteading principle (for
instance, Stephan's arguments in previous emails), they are largely
utilitarian. So Hoppe's position holds only insofar as people accept (a)
rational argument as the basis of truth, and (b) utilitarian tests such
as "fitness for purpose" and "probability of being accepted" as being
decisive in argumentation. There is more "ought" in his position than he
acknowledges.

That same logic explains how Rothbard is effectively a utilitarian as
well. Homesteading is fundamental to Rothbard's ethical model, and
homesteading has to be justified on utilitarian grounds. There is no
inevitability about our adoption of homesteading as a basic principle.
It is conceivable that we might adopt the alternative "law of the
jungle" (or "dog eat dog") approach to allocating property. That, after
all, is the true natural law. But most rational people accept that such
a principle is not conducive to social cooperation, and we usually do
better through social cooperation than acting individually. If we adopt
homesteading or any other alternative to the "law of the jungle", we do
it for the utilitarian reason that we judge it to be more conducive to
social cooperation. We cannot, then, think of homesteading as a basis
for moral judgments, unless we hold that utility is a sound "yardstick"
for ethical principles.

If we are all utilitarians, then we can come to the happy conclusion,
like the cast of the Mikado, that "I am right and you are right and all
is right as right can be". Mises' limited utilitarian ethic stands, but
this does not undermine Rothbard's reliance on natural law. Hoppe's
argumentation ethic and Rand's objectivism sit firmly between them,
justified by their accordance with the utilitarian principles that flow
from valuing life and cooperation. Stephan's first-use and better-claim
principles of property rights can fit with any of these philosophies, as
he claims. And I, like Mises, can advocate laissez-faire as the best
policy for government without having to accept homesteading as an
absolute (rather than a guiding) principle. Only the insistence that
natural law (and particularly homesteading) provides an absolute basis
for ethics (and with it Rothbard's criticism of Mises) need be discarded.

Am I being too optimistic that differences can be minimised? Does it
matter if natural law and homesteading are downgraded to utilitarian
rather than absolute propositions? Am I misinterpreting Rothbard and co?
Or does this approach allow Misesian Austrians of all varieties to
forget about internecine differences and work together against the
greater threat of the various alternative economic models and
interventionist philosophies?

Cheers,

Bruno

Subject: RE: Mises vs Rothbard
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 23:24:08 -0500
From: Stephan Kinsella 
To: 'Bruno Prior' 
CC: 'Walter Block' 

Bruno, this is interesting. I need to think about this more before replying
in detail. I have been increasingly skeptical about natural law because it
is based on irrational bases (religion), human nature is too diffuse to pin
down as they say, and because of the is-ought gap. I think any ethic has to
recognize that there is a "leap" where those enquiring into the matter have
valued (for whatever reason) general "civilized" norms like peace,
prosperity, conflict-avoidance. *Given* these (shared) values, you can then
show that certain norms are justified. This is where Mises means-ends point
about economics would kick in. And yes, that is why I show that Rand's ethic
was hypothetical, as is Hoppe's and Rothbard's in a sense. I think this does
not mean one can do without the middleware (the analogy is stretched; and
hey, I've programmed in assembler before :) . Also not sure I'm comfortble
w/ our conclusion that natural law is not "absolute"; I just am not sure
this is the right way to look at it.

More later--

 
Stephan 

N. Stephan Kinsella