mcm

Assertions, assertions, how you do let them fly, But so sad you can't show us that they actually apply.

Shayne, Without the time right now to walk you line by line through your quotes of the Founding Fathers waxing eloquent over their discovery of the power and profundity of individual rights, precious little of what they said in those quotes could contradict anything I have said. The only significant difference is that without the benefits of Ayn Rand's contributions they were ethically naive. It is actually they who for the most part relied on magical incantations cobbled together from random snippets of incoherent and often contradictory edicts gleaned from religious texts subject to centuries of agenda-driven editing to validate their own sound reasoning they exercised independent of and significantly contradictory to them. And reasoning is what happens to be missing from your present replies as well. Your quotes, assertions, and characterizations here are seldom if ever accompanied by a demonstration of how one could integrate your positions into a cogent philosophical system. These immediate comments are nothing more than pure, intrinsicist right-wing conservatism that is perpetually skeptical of man's ability to recognize and define objective truths and must rely on "truths" anchored in either long-standing institutions, distant history, or supernatural realms. This thread itself appears to have been initiated by you because your inability to validate the explanations of Peikoff or commenters here awaits a specific concrete historical quote from Ayn Rand before you can take contextuality seriously. It is no value to anyone to know that you think this until and unless you can explain why you think it—why is it more accurate?—why are the requirements I explained non-objective?—what "magical incantations"?—what relationship to the contrary do you think ethics has to politics?—what, if any, are the different meanings in different contexts of "moral rights" and "political rights"?—what are the specific differences between the Founding Father's view of rights and Ayn Rand's, Leonard Peikoff's, or mine?—etc., etc., etc. Piss on the ideas, or get off the pot.

"... magical incantation"? Time to reread Ch 19 of the Virtue of Selfishness. In several of my comments and from various points of view I (and others) have tried to explain why and in what way political rights are contextual and not, as you view them, concrete entities or attributes with a fixed intrinsic nature. Now, once again you seek to invalidate the explanation I related of the minimum conditions necessary for the question of political rights to arise if I cannot give you a single concrete minimum number of human beings in a society to be able to establish a government that defends individual rights. But there is no such number. There are many different numbers that could fulfill the prerequisite condition of the principle depending on the particular group of people, the place, the time, the infrastructure, the technology, etc. at hand. I have already cited the source of this principle [see OPAR ch.10 "Government - Individual Rights as Absolutes" p.351 ppb] and I regard that as one of the most important pieces of knowledge I have gleaned from Objectivism—the line between ethical rights and political rights that precious few commenters can grasp or apply without conflating them. The principle is simply that political rights are exclusive to politics, and politics only exists when it is necessary to extend and apply ethics to a social context—objectively. The moral imperative for individual autonomy necessitates in turn a neutral third party institution to remove force from social interaction in ordert to enable every individual to pursue his own life by his own moral code. In other words, the sole purpose of government is to enable individual ethics to be universally exercised unimpeded. Two men on a desert island cannot institute a neutral third party institution for the defense of rights, hence no political rights can exist in that context. When I explain this in conversational debate, I like to say that the minimum requirement would be a population large enough to have a judge, a sheriff, a posse, a few shopkeepers, farmers, and usually, a bartender a hangmen and several pretty ladies living in a big house on the edge of town. The actual number is only, in any given situation, that which is sufficient to sustain neutrality in the system of justice and checks and balances thereto. To request a specific number is to not understand the principle of contextual political rights—even though you did touch on it when you used the phrase earlier, "contextual absolutes." The principle of right to life is absolute. The application of that principle is contextual.

Re questions on ownership of property and its duration raised earlier ... The standards for claiming ownership of property are also contextual. The principle is absolute, but its application can result in different procedures in different times and circumstances. The principle is that while anyone can physically possess land (and things—and matter), the moral relationship of "ownership" is applicable solely to the product of human reason and physical action that is the source of an object's value. Since no one created matter, no one can own it. Moral ownership is a relationship between a person and the product of his reason and effort that justifies his claim to exclusively possess, use, and dispose of its embodiment in physical matter (physical property) or capacity to be embodied in physical matter (intellectual property). There is no intrinsic measure of reason and effort required to establish property. It would be a task of any society to define it objectively per the context in which values exist in that society. Not only could a simple fence suffice in some contexts it could just as well be much less or much more. Justifying ownership of property across generations requires a continuing embodiment of some added amount of reason/effort that contributes to the maintenance of its value. Since intellectual property represents a finite product of reason/effort, IP rights must expire after the life of the creator plus a sufficient period of time to sustain their value to someone who would acquire them on the day of the creator's death

Both. Justifiably. Keeping our rights contextual, it should be noted that the conflict between the two survivors must be considered in the context of individual ethics, not social politics, use of the term "property rights" notwithstanding. On an island inhabited by only one person, there is no society, no politics and no political rights. There are only moral rights and wrongs. So the man on the island can only claim that it is morally necessary and right that he kill all intruders. The survivor who swims to shore will have to be maintaining that it is morally necessary and right to kill the person threatening him with the immediate loss of his "metaphysical existence." One would need to know more details to ascertain their actual relative rationality, but in no case are there any political rights at stake.

Now a little more on contextuality ... Individual political rights are moral principles necessitated by moral rights (as in rights and wrongs) and are both absolute and contextual. That is, within the context that gives rise to them (the social context), their definition and sanction of universal individual autonomy is absolute. That the validity of an individual's political rights is absolute in that sense does not preclude them from being contextual—limited to the conditions in which their necessity arises and limited to definitions and sanctions of actions that result in the protection of one's life. ------------ and on life and death emergencies ... In the case of an emergency requiring an action that would otherwise be regarded as a violation of a right, I am still in favor of the qualification on the definition and applicability of the right rather than mitigating the recourse in the name of justice. I agree with Rand that there is only one fundamental right—the right to life—and that the right to property is a consequence thereof that serves to establish all of the other rights that implement that right. Thus, the necessity to sustain one's "metaphysical existence" (in Peikoff's terms) is of infinitely greater importance than the sustaining a particular traditional definition of the subordinate rights that implement the right to life in normal situations. For instance: an important right implementing the right to life is the right to be free from any arbitrary exercise of defensive force. The free exercise of one's autonomy not only requires that initiated force be prevented, stopped, and punished, but also that the exercise of defensive force be objectified—that is, not only objective in its specification, but also objectified by being known or knowable to all subject to its exercise in advance. I usually illustrate this with the statement that over half the value of liberty is in the justifiable expectation of it. It is this necessary prohibition of any unilaterally, arbitrary exercise of defensive force that is the Achilles' heel of the anarchists. It is already a long understood and practiced principle that one may unilaterally exercise defensive force in emergency situations where the objectified forces and procedures of government cannot intervene in time to counter a threat to one's life. The public's individual rights to objectified force still obtain, but those are satisfied by making such an act subject to an investigation and determination immediately after the fact. But that kind of arbitrary force is not regarded as a violation of the prohibition against arbitrary force that is merely alleviated by justice. There is simply no right of anyone to prohibit it at all. Identical to my example of the lost hiker and Peikoff's example of the shipwreck survivors, emergency actions of self-defense are straightforward act-or-perish situations. There are no grounds to define a right of anyone that would restrain the actions taken to preserve life in those contexts, and so no such rights exist. While I agree that concretely there is little or no difference in the end result compared to the proposal to rather mitigate recourse, that appears to be a hierarchical inversion of the principles. The preservation of life is the central component of the reason for the existence of individual rights in the first place. An imminent threat to one's existence threatens the very necessity for all of one's rights. The value of acting to preserve one's life in an emergency act-or-perish situation inherently supersedes the value of defining and sustaining a corollary right such as the right to property to conflict with it. In other words, the validity of property rights is limited to contexts in which they do not conflict with the right to life they are designed to implement. That said, Yes it is. The ethical imperative as well as its extension into a social context is in principle identical for every individual human being. The standard is always that which is good for the individual's own life in the long run (the context). The extension of one's ethical mandates into a social context necessitates the radical capitalist government described by Rand that subordinates both the populace and the government to objective definitions of the rights to be enforced and the specification of procedures by which they will be defended. The stated disagreement therefore is actually one over whether the right to life in these emergency situations will be protected by definition of the implementing rights or by specification of the implementing procedures. Should a post facto adjudication be "no violation, so no charges filed"? Or should it be, "you violated his right in mitigating circumstances." (Both could be separate from the issue of restitution.) Given the knowledge that rights are extensions of individual ethics to a social context, I cannot accept that rights should be defined such that a patently moral action could qualify as a violation, even if subsequent procedures of enforcement would be defined to excuse it. In a perfectly rational government, a moral action may not be a crime—define accordingly! Not that this conclusion will make the task a simple cut and dried process. Lines must still be drawn within a continuum like the stages between the fetus and the adult with a full set of rights. It is moral to break into the cabin and take the owner's food to save yourself from immediate death, but it is not moral to break into the pharmacy to take the medicine you cannot afford that will prolong your life for months. The task of a rational, moral individual is to define rights for the sake of his own life with the consideration that he could be either one of the parties involved in these examples.

Re: the distinction between metaphysical existence and physical existence: Issues of moral and political rights obtain in the context of a human being's metaphysical existence—existing as what he is by nature—but not in the context of mere physical existence. A brain dead person on life support still exists physically, but is without the metaphysical existence that warrants any consideration of his moral or political rights. Peikoff's point would be that it is a contradiction to sustain a principle that derives from and only exists contingent on the survivor's metaphysical existence if it would immediately result in the destruction of that very state of existence that gives rise to the principle in the first place. Since physical existence alone does not give rise to rights, his word choice is more precise.

Political rights only exist to objectify the proscription of force the members of a society must refrain from and the prescription of force an independent third party institution charged with guaranteeing them (government) may and/or must use to stop, prevent or punish such force. They are necessitated as a means to preserve individual autonomy in the application of reason to effort in the service of life in a society. In the absence of a choice by a sufficient population to systematically guarantee individual autonomy through a third party institution, there are no political rights. Thus one sense in which rights are contextual results from the prerequisite conditions for their ethical necessity and possibility of enforcement. [see OPAR ch.10 "Government - Individual Rights as Absolutes" p.351 ppb] A second sense in which rights are contextual results from the nature of the ethical necessity itself—the fact that they are necessary to the pursuit of life. As such, no right may be defined in such a way that an act of sustaining it would cause or result in one's own death [or, in Peikoff's terms, end one's metaphysical survival]. This contextual limitaion excludes the applicability of rights to emergency situations, as Peikoff explained with the conflict between shipwreck survivors. Personally, I prefer the more palatable example of a hiker lost and starving in a blizzard on a mountain who comes upon a locked cabin. His only option is to break in and eat the owner's food or face certain death. The right to property may not be so defined as to require him to remain outside and die. It can only require him to contact the owner later and reimburse him.

This is not the starting point. Every government, legitimate or not, competes against other governments on the planet to be the defense agency of choice. The earth is a partial anarchy that has separate, exclusive, geographically defined jurisdictions for each agency, rather than the anarchy that has overlapping geographical jurisdictions and in which multiple agencies could legitimately operate in one location. I am not arguing that there is any difference in the ability of any of these agencies to define and enforce a rational set of standards. My argument is that liberty requires that in any given region (=jurisdiction), only one constitution shall be enforced, and that no matter how many agencies or sub-jurisdictions there may be, ultimately there must be one body of oversight to certify compliance with that constitution. That is what objectifies (enables to be a certainly known fact) the principles and standards that opt in that given region. It is what makes the laws and their enforcement known and therefore predictable to all subject to them. It does not guarantee that the laws will be rational, but only that they will be known. We are discussing the proper system to govern when the founders and sustainers of the government are rational. That those men can be irrational is not relevant. To the contrary, that is not a different issue. It is precisely the issue at hand. And it is over the very difference between bad agencies and bad governments. Bad governments come one to each particular geographic region. And one needs only one rational government to take hold in one single region to effect full liberty. And one needs to persuade only a majority of the citizens in that region to attain it. Bad agencies, on the other hand, can multiply spontaneously, secretly and infinitely within one particular geographic region. For full liberty in a region under anarchy, all of the agencies would have to be as good as that one rational government in a crowd of bad governments. Or, the rational agencies would have to outnumber the irrational ones and act in league to subordinate them to rational law, which would make said league a third party institution with a monopoly on the standards for using force — a government. Yes: Over half the value of liberty is in the justifiable expectation of it. So far, nothing you or other anarchists have said have dissuaded me from the notion that this sentence is the Achilles heel of anarchy. I discovered it while trying to answer your next question when someone else asked it awhile back. It is the only question any anarchist ever asked me to which the answer was not obvious on the face of it. Any institution or agency of defensive force that allows other agencies to exercise defensive force that is not subject to oversight to objectify their compliance with the standards (constitution) of that institution/agency, effectively enables the arbitrary use of force in its jurisdiction. The uncertainty and anxiety that results from living in a region subject to arbitrary force is as destructive of liberty as is initiated force. It cripples the ability to project one's actions into the future. It undermines thereby one's ability to be productive and to achieve contentment. It is, therefore, a contradiction to advocate the exercise of defensive force arbitrarily to protect or preserve the benefits of liberty. It appears to be a paradox at first glance, but at the fundament it is clearly a contradiction. The specific contradiction is that "free market anarchism" demands a right to the arbitrary exercise of objective force — i.e., the irrational exercise of rational force.

Why would this not be possible under anarchy? Because, by definition, there could be as many different sets of standards for using force as there are agencies up to as many as there are inhabitants. There would also be no obligation by the exercisers of force to make those standards known to the populace at large. Consequently, law and its enforcement would not be objectified. That does not mean that some or all of the standards would not be objectively defined, but rather that they cannot be objectively known to the populace. Additionally, even if one could discover all of the standards in effect and where they are at any given point in time, one would not know if or when new agencies or inhabitants would begin implementing other sets of standards. This is mere blind assertion. There's no reason why security or law, which are goods like any other, can't be provided competitively. You do not yet understand the point I am making. It has nothing to do with providing security competitively or not. We have private agencies providing security who compete in the market today. In the government Rand envisioned, all defensive force could be provided by private agencies and contractors if subject to one set of standards. But anarchists advocate that a free, competitive market should provide not only all defensive force but the principles, laws, definitions of rights and procedures as well. My point is that the position relies on a logical fallacy, namely a stolen concept. A "market" is a place where values are exchanged voluntarily. A "free market" is a market where there is no interference at all from other parties in those exchanges. "Competition" is the struggle among parties exchanging values in a market to entice the most favorable result from the other parties. Where there is coercion by physical force or the threat of force to alter the terms of any value exchange, there cannot be a market nor a free market nor competition. Therefore, a viable system providing defensive force to one set of standards must already be operative before a free, competitive market can exist. Advocating that the free market should provide us with defense agencies and their various standards begs the question of what institution of defense will provide the free market itself in which the those agencies would compete. Presently our government provides an imperfectly free market in which private security firms compete. Its imperfection is not a product of its monopoly on the standards by which force may be used, but rather of the philosophy of the overwhelming majority of the governed who authorize it to be what it is.

Loaded Question – a question that carries an assumption, and is worded in such a way so that the respondent who answers the question directly admits to accepting that assumption. The assumption on your part is that there is in principle enough difference between a tyranny and anarchy that I could have a preference. There isn't and I don't. I cannot name either one without confirming your erroneous assumption.

You don't understand it. Men do not determine what is moral, they discover it. For that reason, it is nonsense to ask "who decides what is moral." Likewise the morality of a government. A government is moral when those who form and sustain it enact moral laws and enforce them with moral procedures. In stating my position I have used the word "legitimacy" strictly in the moral context. You are using it in a legal context while implying that they are one and the same. Example: Citizens can give a government authority by delegating powers to it, but it will be moral authority only if those powers derive from moral laws and procedures objectively defined and proven for the protection of valid rights. The right to tax you is not wrong because you did not consent to it, it is wrong because the threat of force required to collect it is not moral. Here is Rand's statement: The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose. "The Nature of Government" VOS, 110 Note that this means only that the government has no authority that the governed do not give it. It neither says nor implies anything about that consent giving the government moral legitimacy. It also does not say or imply that the consent of the governed need be unanimous. When a majority of a population gains control of a government and rewrites its constitution and laws to be moral, it does not need the consent of the rest of the populace and visitors who will be governed. Moral laws do not need consent to be morally legitimate. To the degree those in control drift from moral law and enact laws that are not moral, the government will be tyrannical. But again, enforcing immoral laws against you is not wrong because you did not give your consent, but rather because the laws are immoral.

Yes. I am only concerned with the goal, which I express as, the guarantee that no person shall initiate the use of force or threat thereof to take, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value owned by another person who created it or acquired it in a voluntary exchange. and the means to that goal, the subordination of force to objectively verifiable moral laws and procedures of enforcement, adjudication, restitution and/or punishment that are knowable and understandable to all in any area where they obtain.

What makes you think that there would not be defined jurisdictions in a system of competing justice agencies? You dropped half ... it is not about jurisdictions alone, but rather about the combination of jurisdiction with a hierarchy of oversight. I have never found much to object to in the multitude of competing defense agency schemes put forth by anarchists nor the notion of overlapping jurisdictions. We have the latter now with city, county, state, and federal governments. Monopoly government means only that however many providers of defense there would be, there must be a hierarchy of oversight ultimately answerable to one set of principles and responsible for making all laws and procedures compliant and publicly known. I faintly remember Rand or Peikoff answering a question about the size of government with "the smaller and more local the better." It remains a loaded (and invalid) question. 1. it is irrelevant to the subject at hand, because no answer to it could have any bearing on the morality of anarchy in principle, and 2. it excludes the moral alternative, namely the monopoly government in which rational men define rational laws and exercise just enforcement. The alternative you present is between a monopoly government in which evil men define evil laws and exercise force for their own benefit and anarchy in which some men may do likewise while others may be rational, but the governed have no way to know for sure which is which and when or if they will act given any particular circumstance nor can they know when or where new agencies of a different mind can spontaneously appear. That is the uncertainty that precludes the confident, justifiable expectation of liberty in everyday life.

Every tax, regardless of its purpose, constitutes a confiscation of a value under threat of force. So no tax can ever be justified. If a society cannot figure out how to defend itself from force without resorting to it itself, then it cannot have a moral government. But it can have a 99% moral government. You are attempting to justify the politics of statism and the morality of thieves by a need. How would you argue that that should be the 1% worth sacrificing morality to as opposed to someone else's 1% choice to kill you to get your wallet. Rand is on record saying that voluntary financing of government would be the last step in achieving a moral government, not the first one. I concur, and would add that the due to the likely size and wealth of free-market corporations and the enormous advertising and good will benefits that could accrue, long before it would become a serious concern, corporate America would be competing over the opportunity to pay for it all. Then, just like the internet, the little guy would get way more government defense than he would pay for in the microscopic additions to the prices he would pay for products and services.

Every tax, regardless of its purpose, constitutes a confiscation of a value under threat of force. So no tax can ever be justified. If a society cannot figure out how to defend itself from force without resorting to it itself, then it cannot have a moral government.

You assume that the "set of standards" enforced by the government in question will be "objective." (By this, I assume you mean "just.") And you assume that the standards enforced by private agencies will be nonobjective (unjust). No, George, I do not assume either of those. Rand's view and my own is that a government will be only as perfect as it is objective in everything it does. But the degree to which a government or anarchist agencies are rational and objective in the design and execution of their duties is not relevant to the point I am making. I am saying that whatever the form of third party institution one concocts and however rational and objective they are in executing it, if there is not a defined jurisdiction in which one set of laws and procedures of enforcement obtains that is readily knowable and understandable by all subject to it, then the populace will be subjected to arbitrary force, the consequences of which, in the context of liberty, are indistinguishable from run-of-the-mill initiated force. The necessity for a government monopoly over the standards for defensive action arises in part from the fact that acts of initiated force, at the point of occurrence, can seldom be distinguished by the populace from acts of defensive force. Confidence that the security of their liberty obtains rests on their knowledge that parties to violent or fraudulent acts will be processed by the justice system they know in a manner that they know. Again: over half the value of liberty lies in the justifiable expectation of it. And anarchy cannot provide that essential value. This is a loaded question. What could anarchy possibly gain in validity from my preferring it over living under Hitler? No more than an absolute monarchy could gain from the same comparison. Zero. Since politics is an extension of ethics in the context of an individual into a social context, the legitimacy of a government or its jurisdiction means moral legitimacy. So the question "who decides?" is invalid. A government or its jurisdiction is legitimate simply to the extent that it is moral. The phrase "consent of the governed" refers to the concept that the government is a body of employees who may only do what they are told they may do by the Constitution, laws, the legislature, the courts, and the voters, just as the existence and actions of a corporation require the consent of the stockholders.

Quick reply. I don't think he means exactly "objectivist government" as "objective law." I mean a government consistent with the politics of Ayn Rand that monopolizes force in a specific jurisdiction. That obviously means that the laws shall be objectively defined and explicitly demonstrated to be valid. Pertinent to the difference between that government and anarchy, however, is that there may be only one set of principles, procedures, and enforcement practices in its jurisdiction, and knowledge of them must be readily available and easily understandable to all who live or visit there. These are the necessary prerequisites to preventing the arbitrary exercise of force that diminishes liberty. Arbitrary force diminishes liberty by undermining everyone's justifiable expectations not only that it exists, but how it will be sustained in the entire range of possible circumstances one could face as one walks out the door each day to interact with the rest of the society. And there is the error again — the one I pointed out at the end of my previous comment. You are trying to treat defensive force as a commodity that would become better and more abundant if created and distributed by a competitive market and would be harmed by a force wielding monopoly. To repeat the point: there cannot be a competitive market in force. A competitive market can only exist after an effective institution monopolizing defensive force is already a fait accompli. If the institution in charge of exercising defensive force and/or verifying that its sub-agencies, subcontractors, private security forces, or individuals acting in self-defense are complying with that single objectified set of standards is not a monopoly in its jurisdiction, then no market there can be fully free or competitive, because it would be subject to arbitrary acts of force by whatever extraneous agencies of force were being tolerated in addition to it.

Dan, You conclude that "... by showing some of the problems inherent in even the best form of government, it might be found that anarchism, in some form, is as least as appealing if not more so." The ultimate problem with anarchism as a way to manage force that keeps it from being appealing in the long run is that liberty requires more than pursuit of the goal of eliminating the initiation of force. Over half of the value of achieving that goal lies in the resulting justifiable expectation of freedom from force in one's everyday life. And the same is true for the means by which that goal is pursued. Note that in explanations of the Objectivist politics, Rand et al consistently recognized as an essential component that the exercise of defensive force must be objectified — the principles, laws, procedures and execution must be objectively defined, accompanied by proofs, and must be knowable to all in advance. Consequently, regardless of how many different agencies of defensive force, both government and private, might exist in any given region, or how they would be organized, the ultimate difference between an anarchy existing there or an Objectivist government would be the absence or presence of a political entity charged with the task of securing the compliance of all such agencies, with a single, objectively defined set of principles, laws, and procedures known to all. In an anarchy, the use of force cannot be publicly objectified. The principles, laws, procedures and execution are inherently open ended. No expectation of any particular state of liberty could ever be justified. Acts of justifiable defense would be impossible to distinguish from initiated force, and so, in effect, they would be equally arbitrary. Thus, while an Objectivist government with a monopoly on force and an anarchy of capitalist sympathizers might each seek to eliminate initiated force, only the monopoly government could provide the component of liberty that requires the objectification of the process. And there would be nothing appealing about living in a region where the arbitrary exercise of physical force is condoned. ----------------------- Note also that the phrase, "free-market anarchy" is a fallacy that relies on a stolen concept. It entails the establishment of a "free-market" source of defensive force. However, before any market can be said to be free, there must already exist a system that sufficiently monopolizes the use of force to be able to guarantee the freedom of economic action in that market.

In general, a standard for the nature of the minimum improvement necessary to establish a claim to objects like land must be defined if, when, and wherever possible. Whatever might be beyond immediate possibility would have to be regulated by the market. In a society of all private property, such regulation would be potentially as effective as a government wielding force. Persons, groups, or companies that would alienate any large bloc of the public would risk being cut off from food, water, electricity and roadways by the producers of those products and services acting without coercion in sympathy with or for the sheer good will of their customers, the public. Your phrase, "social establishment" is chilling in the absence of any indication of what you envision. I would not say that air, space, and the seas cannot be owned, because I cannot predict future technologies that might enable it and/or give rise to a need for it. Presently, however, one could easily make the world's whale populations private property, which would instantly guarantee they would never be extinct. I can see all kinds of animals that follow regular patterns of location being definable as property, even as they traverse the property of others. The only land that is not property nowadays is that controlled by the government. It could be homesteaded in the usual manner. I don't understand your mention of squatters. The standard that justifies perpetual ownership of land does not require development, but rather that ideas and actions are required to maintain the value of the improvements. This is contrary to intellectual property that requires no further effort and therefore must expire after the creator's lifetime benefit has been received. The property rights to objects generally would never expire, because they almost always require some maintenance of their value. Re employer restrictions, note that that employers and employees do not have rights, human beings have rights, and they are identical for each and every one of them. Rights pertain solely to the use of physical force in exchanges of values. Employees may not use government to coerce which particular set of terms will be offered just as employers may not use government to coerce which terms employees will accept. The most concise statement I have been able to fashion, so far, of the sole task of government is that it must guarantee that: No person shall initiate the use of physical force to gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value created by or acquired in a voluntary exchange by any other person. In my view, that is the only restriction there is on both employers and employees.

Anti-trust and employer restrictions are closed topics in my book. Both require the fabrication of victimless crimes. The task of defining the scope of property rights, on the other hand, I have not taken the time to fully resolve, and is a most interesting topic. I am in agreement with Rand's explanation that — as I understand it — one may claim to own only the product of one's own mind and/or actions. Consequently, matter cannot be owned, because it cannot be a human product. Therefore the justification for the exclusive control of a plot of land is that, while it cannot be owned solely as an object per se, it can be owned as property because it is the otherwise unowned by anyone else embodiment of the improvements that are a human product. This principle establishes up front the basis for property rights of both the physical and intangible kind, in principle, leaving open the concrete details that must be defined by what you refer to as "accepted social rules". I hope that does not mean arbitrary social conventions. These details seem to me to be more akin to logistical methods required to fulfill the mandate of the principle. An example would be Rand's recommendation that intellectual property rights be protected for 50 years beyond the creator's death in order to secure their value by guaranteeing to any purchaser of the rights that they can be monetized even if the creator dies immediately after signing the bill of sale. The specific number of years is not as important as that the time is sufficient under anticipated conditions to profit from their purchase. A century from now, the advance or decline of technologies could alter that number without altering the fulfillment of the principle. I don't see any issue in stock shares that would differ from common contractual questions. Riparian rights and rights to the seas along with airspace rights do raise new questions. Smaller bodies of water surrounded and managed by private property could easily and justifiably be owned in condominium as could airspace surrounding buildings (the original Pan Am building was constructed under separate ownership in the airspace over Grand Central Station). Ultimately, by the principle for claiming ownership above, much of the atmosphere and space, as well as the seas, would likely be not improvable and therefore not ownable. This is most pertinent to the issue of pollution. But I can already see those rights divided into two parts. Pollution that can be verified to have caused specific damages could be dealt with as any other aggression. Less definable or inadequately defined or enforced rights to be free from pollution could be regulated in the market by boycott and shunning. As for neighborhood problems, I can't think of one that cannot be resolved by deed restrictions and the markets ability to reward and punish their rationality or irrationality.