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Title: Contra Reisman
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: December 14, 2006
Language: en
Topics: debate, a response, critique, right libertarianism
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/12/contra-reisman-compendium-of-posts.html

Kevin Carson

Contra Reisman

There He Goes Again!

Well, George Reisman (or should I say Herr Doktor Doktor Reisman) is on

a roll with what appears to be an anti-Carson theme, so it looks like

I’ll be getting some more free publicity.

I should mention that after seeing so many of Reisman’s almost comically

bowdlerized misreadings of my work (and worse, his continuing

reassetions of them in the face of my corrections), I begin to wonder

whether his obtuseness is just a pose: whether he’s not instead

following a deliberate strategy of counting on the far greater

readership of his venues, and knowingly repeating arguments that have

been shown to be erroneous, in the confidence that most of his readers

will be familiar only with his own assertions and not my responses.

Certainly anyone willing to take the trouble to read both Reisman’s

review of my book in JLS and my own rejoinder to Reisman will have ample

reason to doubt either his reading comprehension skills or his

sincerity, and never to accept his characterization of anyone else’s

work without seeing it firsthand for themselves.

I have some hope that this strategy of Reisman’s, if it is indeed his

strategy, will backfire. The people who accept his grossly distorted

version of my positions, as presented in his review article, without

bothering to read even my rejoinder, are likely to be firmly in

Reisman’s camp anyway. On the other hand, anyone who out of curiosity

follows up a Reisman’s bizarre misreadings with a reading of my

rejoinder will never trust him again.

Quasibill’s comment on an earlier thread seem to bear this out:

To be honest, it was the utter vapidity of Dr. Resiman’s critique of

your book that convinced me that there was something to be learned from

your arguments.

Not that Reisman makes many good arguments (I think he takes Rothbard’s

prediction about experts specializing where they are weakest as a

challenge to live up to), but his inability to address your arguments on

the merits combined with his resort to ad hominems and vitriol were

telling indicators of where the truth in the debate lay.

I’m still not a fan of mutualist property and banking theory, but I’ve

learned a lot by reading your critiques of the standard Misesian

position.

So despair not, your exchange with Reisman has at least one partial

convert to show for it!

Reisman’s criticisms do more to promote my ideas among thinking people

than anything I could possibly write. So bring it on!

I spent a lot of time in my rejoinder pointing out as many of Reisman’s

errors and mischaracterizations as my space constraints would permit,

and I don’t have the time or energy to repeat all of them. All I can say

is, if you’re interested it’s easy to click on the links above and read

both Reisman’s review and my rejoinder in their entirety and see for

yourself. And if you can’t be bothered to do that, please don’t pretend

that you know jack shit about my position on anything.

This time, in any case, Reisman’s target is mutualist property theory

(his remarks are also crossposted on his personal blog). He’s no longer

calling me a “Marxist,” as he did by my count ten times in his review

for JLS. So I guess that in itself is a marked improvement in his

historical literacy in recent months.

Now he’s attacking my positions under the label “mutualism,” although he

apparently has at best a weak grasp on the existence of individualist

anarchism in the nineteenth century, its actual tenets, or the extent to

which it has been addressed (often somewhat positively) by Rothbard and

many of his followers. After reading Reisman’s reference to “what

[Carson] calls ‘individualist anarchism,’” I can’t help but think of a

befuddled Montgomery Burns’ encountering some (to him) newfangled

phenomenon: “I’m beginning to like this so-called ‘iced-cream.’” Or:

“Ahoy! Ahoy!... I suspect you need more practice working your telephone

machine.”

But what strikes me most about Reisman’s attacks is less their substance

than their tone. As I say, he acts as though the history of

individualist anarchism is something that just recently dropped into his

lap. And in confronting it, he distances himself not only from

Rothbard’s halfway friendly treatment of it, but from the Rothbardians’

entire critique of historical capitalism and from all of their points of

agreement with New Left historiography.

What we’re left with is pure right-wing Mises, without any admixture of

Rothbardian leaven. The degree to which he has become a self-parody of

the extreme Austrian right can be illustrated by these quotes from his

review article, in which he takes extreme umbrage at any suggestion that

workers might possess Hayek’s “distributed idiosyncratic knowledge,” or

be capable of significant innovation in an economy of cooperatively

owned enterprises:

Here Carson, the “individualist” anarchist shows himself to be quite the

collectivist, attributing to the average person qualities of independent

thought and judgment that are found only in exceptional individuals....

Carson is simply unaware that innovation is the product of exceptional,

dedicated individuals who must overcome the uncomprehending dullness of

most of their fellows, and often their hostility as well.

Egad! Maybe he should write a book of management theory entitled My

Struggle Against Stupidity, Lies, and Ignorance. Austrian economics,

indeed!

Of course, this last bit of frothy-mouthed rug chewing comes less from

Austrianism, even its far right fringe, than from the outer fringes of

Randroidism. The source of Reisman’s antipathy to the Untermenschen

outside Galt’s Gulch is suggested by the fact that he lists Rand ahead

of the Austrians in his intellectual influences. That’s not to say that

Rand fits in the intellectual box constructed for her by right-wing

Randroids like Reisman; some Objectivists like Chris Sciabarra have

refined aspects of her thought into indispensible tools of libertarian

analysis, and some Austrians like Roderick Long are appreciative of her

genuine contributions. In any case, the aspects of Randianism that

Reisman stresses don’t mesh very well with the mainstream of

contemporary Austrian thought, and only imperfectly with the Old Man

himself.

Reisman, interestingly, expresses a suspicion of me....

I cannot help but suspect that what Carson is actually opposed to is not

at all force, fraud, or actual injustice in the history of mankind but

the existence of large inequalities of wealth and income, whatever their

basis.

...that mirror-images my own suspicions of him. I cannot help but

suspect that what Reisman actually supports is not free market

principles as such, but “the existence of large inequalities of wealth

and income, whatever their basis.”

As I wrote in my rejoinder to Reisman’s review, I suspect he is forced

for tactical reasons to distance himself from the last forty years of

Rothbardian critiques of state capitalism. I was struck by the parallel

between Friedrich Engels and George Reisman, in the extent to which they

found it necessary to retreat stragetically from so many of the

positions of their own respective sides, in order to maintain some

defensible ground. I quote at length:

On the matter of primitive accumulation, there is an amazing parallel

between Reisman and that most vulgar of vulgar Marxists, Friedrich

Engels. Engels, in Anti-Dühring, argued that the process of primitive

accumulation would have taken place in exactly the same way without any

state expropriation whatsoever, solely through the effects of success

and failure in the free market. Essentially, Engels retreated from

Marx’s entire body of work on primitive accumulation, in which he

described the massive expropriation of the peasantry, “written in fire

and blood.” Engels, in effect, embraced the “bourgeois nursery tale” of

primitive accumulation, ridiculed by Marx and Oppenheimer alike, in

which the present distribution of property reflects an endless series of

victories by the industrious ant over the lazy grasshopper. Marx

himself, for that matter, was on the defensive about the logical

implications of his history of primitive accumulation. Why? There was an

entire school of radical classical liberals and market-oriented

Ricardian socialists who argued that state robbery and state-enforced

unequal exchange were the causes of economic exploitation. As Maurice

Dobb wrote in his introduction to Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy:

”...the school of writers to whom the name of the Ricardian Socialists

has been given ... who can be said to have held a “primitive” theory of

exploitation, explained profit on capital as the product of superior

bargaining power, lack of competition and “unequal exchanges between

Capital and Labour.”... This was the kind of explanation that Marx was

avoiding rather than seeking. It did not make exploitation consistent

with the law of value and with market competition, but explained it by

departures from, or imperfections in, the latter. To it there was an

easy answer from the liberal economists and free traders: namely, “join

with us in demanding really free trade and then there can be no ‘unequal

exchanges’ and exploitation.” (Marx 1970, p. 13)”

And as I commented in my book, this “easy answer” was exactly the

approach taken by Thomas Hodgskin and the individualist anarchists of

America. The greatest of the latter, Benjamin Tucker, reproached as

merely a “consistent Manchester man,” wore that label as a badge of

honor. Engels was facing something similar, in Eugen Dühring’s “force

theory” of economic exploitation. He was forced to retreat from Marx’s

history of primitive accumulation, because he found the implications of

that history politically and strategically intolerable. I suspect

Reisman is forced to repudiate it for similar reasons.

I suspect, furthermore, that Reisman is forced to repudiate all of

Rothbard’s insights, especially his points of agreement with the New

Left, on the history of state capitalism, for the same tactical reasons.

Acknowledging the role of the state in creating the present corporate

economy would destroy his romantic Galt’s Gulch fantasy of big business

as an “oppressed minority.” In short, Reisman is forced to destroy much

of Austrianism in order to save it.

At times, my suspicions go so far as doubting the genuineness of his

ostensible lack of reading comprehension or ability to grasp unfamiliar

arguments. Reisman’s critiques of my work follow a rather disturbing

pattern. He originally makes a criticism of my book that displays a

seemingly total lack of reading comprehension or a total unwillingness

to respond to what I actually said. But after I rub his nose in his

bowdlerized misreading, he continues to talk past me, making the same

assertions over and over as if I’d never said a word.

I’ve seen some past material of Reisman’s that displays a considerable

capacity for following nuanced thoughts and appreciating fine

distinctions (i.e., his contrast of the “esoteric” and “exoteric”

doctrines of Bohm-Bawerk), so I have reason to suspect that his pose of

intellectual ham-handedness is just that: a pose.

Anyway, now to his substantive points.

First, Reisman quotes from his original review article:

Thus, for example, if I, a legitimate owner of a piece of property,

legitimate even by Carson’s standards, decide to rent it out to a tenant

who agrees to pay the rent, the property, according to Carson, becomes

that of the tenant, and my attempt to collect the mutually-agreed-upon

rent is regarded as a violent invasion of his [the tenant’s] “absolute

right of property.” In effect, Carson considers as government

intervention the government’s upholding the rights of a landlord against

a thief.

This is question-begging. What constitutes agression or theft depends on

the prior definition of property rights. I have argued that no system of

property rights rules, whether Lockean, mutualist, or Georgist, can be

logically deduced from the axiom of self-ownership. According to the

arguments of “Hogeye” Bill Orton, from which I have borrowed

extensively, such property rights rules are conventional. And as I have

argued myself in elaborating this principle, the choice between such

rival sets of rules can only be made on consequentialist grounds: on the

extent to which they tend to promote other values that we consider

fundamental. This was the point of contention between Roderick Long and

myself in his review article (in which he argued with far more

effectiveness and less pissiness than Reisman) and my rejoinder.

Reisman continued, in his review:

He believes he has the right to prohibit me and the tenant from entering

into an enforceable contract respecting the payment of rent and that

such action is somehow not a violation of our freedom of contract and

not government intervention.

The term “enforceable” is the crux of the matter. The enforceability of

a contract, in any society, stateless or otherwise, depends on the

willingness of third parties to accept its validity. In a local

community where the majority consensus is for title based on occupancy

and use, any attempt to enforce title based on Lockean principles will

ultimately cost more than it’s worth. For that reason, the mutual

defense associations and free juries in a Tuckerite or Warrenite

community would likely have exclusionary clauses for occupants seeking

aid against landlords in Lockean communities, and anarcho-capitalist

defense agencies would likewise exclude enforcement of landlord claims

against occupants in mutualist communities. Both would refuse to defend

property owners against rental collection in Georgist communities. And

in sparsely settled areas, the default position would likely be some

form of de facto occupancy and use, since the costs of excluding

squatters from vacant land would likely exceed any return on its value.

Following in the same vein in his blog post, Reisman attempts to portray

the Ingalls-Tucker property doctrine in the context of a simple breach

of contract:

Here there is a mutually and voluntarily agreed upon rental contract,

but after taking possession, the new occupant decides that he is the

owner of the land and will not pay any “absentee landlord rent,” which

Carson believes it is his absolute right to decide. Has he not obtained

another’s legitimate property and is now refusing to pay for it? And,

having taken it, and both refusing to pay for it and refusing to give it

back, is he thus not stealing that property?

Would he have been able to obtain the use and occupancy of the land if

it had been known or suspected that this is how he would behave, once

having obtained it? Obviously, he would not have been able to, and the

assurance of his not behaving in this way is a written and signed

enforceable rental contract.

In a society where property is established by occupancy and use,

obviously, it would be a pretty obtuse would-be landlord who did not

“know or suspect” that something like this would occur. Reisman

considers the hypothetical operation of occupancy and use tenure not in

the context of a legal system organized on that principle, but in an

atomistic fashion, with individual cases operating in the context of a

larger society based on the present rules.

He ignores my repeated stress on the principle that no system of

property rights rules can survive without a local consensus on those

rules, reflected in some body of law, which the local population is

willing to enforce in civil disputes. Owner-occupancy, like Lockean

absentee landlordism, would only be viable in a community where a

majority of people were agreed on those rules. So any landowner who

entered into a rental agreement with a tenant, like an employer entering

a contract by which his employee agreed to sell himself into slavery,

would do so knowing that the contract would be considered null and void

on its face. By the very fundamentals of mutualist property laws, a

contract to treat someone else as the real owner of a property which one

occupies oneself would be considered repugnant.

I don’t, however, dispute the possibility that a person might make

contractual agreement to quit a piece of land on certain terms. I have

raised that possibility myself in the case of mortgaging real property

to a mutual bank. The question is by what civil remedies the contract

would be enforced. A parallel case is that of bankruptcy, as Lysander

Spooner considered it. Certain remedies are allowed the creditor (i.e.,

seizure of existing assets), while others are denied (i.e., debtor’s

prison or any claim on the future income of the defaulting debtor). In a

libertarian society, bank accounts and moveable assets might be forfeit

in the event of a default on an agreement to quit one’s property, and

assorted sanctions by third parties (including a refusal to enter into

further agreements with the party in default) would be likely; the

sanctions and universal shunning of those who defaulted on their “obs”

in Eric Frank Russell’s “And Then There Were None” is a pretty good

illustration of the principle. In short, the injured party would have

access to many remedies short of being treated as actual owner of a

property which he did not occupy.

And I have also repeatedly stressed, in quite conciliatory terms, the

possibility for peaceful coexistence between such rival systems of

property rights rules. In a panarchy or “anarchy without adjectives,”

there would have to be some sort of meta-agreement between communities

based on different systems of property, in which each one agreed not to

attempt to enforce property rights claims in another community that were

at odds with the local rules. David Friedman has envisioned similar

meta-agreements on questions other than property, in which (say) a

protection agency in the Jerry Garcia People’s Collective refused to

defend members against prosecution for adultery against members of the

Sword of Jehovah Covenant Community.

Reisman also ignores the fact that the boundary between Ingalls-Tucker

and Lockean rules is fairly blurry. As I’ve pointed out before, the

thought of Tucker himself underwent some evolution on just how he

imagined his usufructory property system operating. At times, he made a

simple equation of rent to taxation, and argued that tenants should

simply stop paying rent en masse. At others, he seemed to view building

rent as legitimate, and to believe that free access to vacant land would

drive rents down the level of building rent alone, while mutual banking

would drive building rent down to simple amortization costs. But in the

latter case, arguably most vacant land would likewise be consider

unowned under a radical application of Lockean rules.

All of Reisman’s arguments on property so far can at least be plausibly

written off as legitimate misunderstandings of a topic with which he

isn’t very familiar. But he proceeds to an argument which puts the

needle on my disingenuousness meter off the end of the dial:

Non-use is alleged justification for legitimate property being seized,

and, as I’ve shown, not just land but also homes and apartments, and by

implication, automobiles, clothing, and everything else that is not

being used by its owner.

Huh?!! Surely anyone even vaguely acquainted with the history of

political economy should be aware that philosophies that treat property

in land as fundamentally different do so for a reason: the almost

totally inelastic supply of sites. That state of affairs has led not

only mutualists and Georgists to see land as different, but even Locke

himself--ever heard of the Lockean Proviso, Herr Doktor? If Reisman

wants to reject such arguments for treating property in land

differently, that’s fine. Rothbard made some pretty good efforts at

countering the Georgist argument from scarcity, although I don’t think

he succeeded. But I have a hard time believing that Reisman is

addle-brained enough to sincerely believe that there’s a danger of

Tuckerites or Georgists applying their scarcity-based theories of

property in land to moveable property. Anyone making such an argument in

a freshman Great Ideas paper would justifiably earn a big red “F.”

Others in the comments thread have raised questions about the difficulty

of determining how much of a tract was “used,” how much labor must be

mixed with a given amount of land to establish ownership, and the

potential difficulties encountered by those going on extended vacations

or letting land lie fallow in a crop-rotation system. The proper answer,

of course, is that such questions would be settled by convention in a

local community where the juries setting the rules would be motivated by

a desire to minimize inconvenience. And the reliance on convention in

working out the practical application of mutualist doctrine is no

greater than is the case with Lockean doctrine; one could just as easily

question just what constitutes sufficient admixture of labor for Lockean

homesteading, or what is necessary to construe abandonment or

relinquishment of claim on a piece of property. In fact David Heinrich,

the same commenter who raises questions about an extended vacation,

discusses constructive abandonment of apartment buildings in terms that

considerably undermine Reisman’s moral indignation about “sqatters” in

the main post.

George Reisman’s Double Standard

One man’s “neighbors” is another man’s “armed gang”--to George Reisman,

anyway (he crossposts it to his personal blog, as well).

To get the superficial stuff out of the way first, I can’t help noticing

Reisman is putting “iced-cream”--er, “mutualism”--in quotes, as though

it were something I just invented. I’d like to take credit for it, I

really would, but I don’t think I’d get away with it. Reisman ought to

do a Google on Proudhon, Warren, Tucker, et al. It’s a good thing I’m

not a Galambosian, or I’d be paying royalties on the “philosophy of

thieves.”

Reisman makes enough allusions, however distorted, to arguments I made

in my last response, and to arguments I and others made in the comments

at his Mises Blog post, to indicate that he at least attempted to follow

the debate.

But he seems to have gotten fixated on the idea that the main

application of mutualist property theory would be by cuckoos in the

Lockean nest, waiting to surprise unsuspecting landlords after they sign

a lease. He still doesn’t grasp the idea that it’s a rival, internally

consistent set of private property rules that could only exist in a

society where majority consensus backed it up. He assumes most of the

present system into existence in his hypothetical scenario, with

mutualist property relations being introduced only through individual

perversity. He changes one little thing in a system that, in every other

particular, is the present one. Ever see that episode of The

Honeymooners where Ralph imagined how he’d live as a rich man? “And I’d

put a telephone on the fire escape, so I could handle my big business

deals if I had to sleep out there when it was hot.” I suspect Reisman of

a similar lack of imagination.

He presents a hypothetical case:

Thus, to elaborate on the case I presented in my last post, “Mutualism:

A Philosophy for Thieves,” let us imagine that our legitimate land

owner—legitimate even by Carson’s standards—has spent several years

clearing or draining his land, pulling out stumps, removing rocks and

boulders, digging a well, building a barn and a house, and putting up

fences to keep in his livestock. It is this land that he agrees to rent

to a tenant, or, what is not too different, sell on a thirty-year

mortgage, which he himself will carry, on the understanding that every

year for thirty years he will receive a payment of interest and

principal.

The tenant or mortgagee signs a contractual agreement promising to pay

rent, or interest and principal, and takes possession of the property.

Being a secret mutualist, however, he thereupon proclaims that the

property is now his, on the basis of the mutualist doctrine that, in

Carson’s words, “occupancy and use is the only legitimate standard for

establishing ownership of land.”

This is a clear theft not only of the land, but also of the product of

labor. A worker has toiled for years and is now arbitrarily deprived of

the benefit of his labor, and this in the name of the protection of the

rights of workers!

Of course, this case is irrelevant. Mutualist property rules could only

exist on a stable basis if there were a local consensus on them,

embodied in some code of libertarian common law. And under those

circumstances, it would be a singularly obtuse would-be landlord who

entered into such an agreement knowing the local legal system. It would

make about as much sense as somebody in Canada, around 1850, making a

contract in which somebody else sold himself into slavery for $10,000.

He’d be laughed out of court if he attempted to enforce the contract; if

he pleaded hardship for losing his money, the likely response would be

that life is necessarily hard for someone that stupid.

On the other hand, a closeted mutualist tenant who attempted to surprise

his landlord in such a manner, in a Lockean-consensus community, would

fare about as well as an absentee landlord attempting to collect rent in

a Tuckerite-consensus community.

Here’s an opposing case for you: Imagine I’m renting a house under a

Lockean property system, and get permission to plant a garden on it. I

invest a lot of effort in composting and green manuring, and even spend

money on granite dust, greensand, rock phosphate and the like to improve

the soil. When I get done with it, what was hardpan clay has been

transformed into rich, black, friable soil. And when I cease renting, I

lose the value of all the improvements I made. That’s the sort of thing

that happens all the time under Lockeanism. But I suspect that Reisman

would say that I made the improvements with my eyes open, and am

entitled to no sympathy because I knew what the rules were. I certainly

doubt that he’s shedding any tears over the invested labor that the

South Central Farmers are in danger of losing.

The difference is, when it happens under the system he’s defending, it’s

just life; when it happens under the system he’s demonizing, it’s an

outrage.

Here’s another example of the same double-standard:

Mutualists pretend that there will be communities in which such behavior

is accepted and routine, and chide opponents for their lack of knowledge

of anthropology for not understanding this. They do not care to admit

that the only thing which can enforce such a practice is the threat of

physical force against those who would put an end to it, i.e., for all

practical purposes, the existence of some form of tyrannical state. Yes,

mutualists are “anarchists” who turn out to be statists!

And just how could Lockean practice persist unless it was enforced by

similar threats against those who would put an end to it (what Reisman

calls a “state”)? To put it in more neutral language, neither the

Lockean nor the mutualist property system could function without the

willingness of the majority of one’s neighbors to recognize one’s rights

claims under that system and to back them up with what they perceive as

defensive force, if necessary. If such a consensus, backed up by the

power of the community, is a “state” under mutualism, then it’s also a

“state” under Lockeanism.

Reisman continues:

It is possible to see why this must be so by starting with a condition

in which there is no government. In this state of affairs, our exploited

worker-victim easily proves to his neighbors that a “lying, thieving

mutualist” has stolen his land and deprived him of the benefit of years

of work. If his neighbors have neither been lobotomized nor castrated,

they will probably contemplate lynching this “mutualist.” In any case,

they proceed with our victim to his land and are ready forcibly to evict

the “mutualist.” What will stop them from doing so and thus putting an

end to any practice of Mutualism’s depraved concept of “property

rights”?

The only thing that will stop them is the threat or actuality of greater

force exerted by mutualists, i.e., by a mutualist armed gang. If the

mutualist gang has its way, it constitutes a de facto mutualist state,

which must continue in existence indefinitely in order to uphold the

mutualist concept of “property rights.”

See, when there’s a consensus on Lockean rules, and neighbors band

together to enforce each other’s rights under those rules, it’s a

defensive action on behalf of all that’s right and holy. When neighbors

band together to enforce a consensus on mutualist rules, on the other

hand, it’s a band of thugs.

But any system of property rules requires a majority consensus of people

willing to enforce each other’s rights under that system, and such a

majority will tend to view attempts to enforce any rival system as

“aggression.” In the one case, Reisman calls it a “state” or “armed

gang.” In the other, he doesn’t. All Reisman proves, in so doing, is

that he likes one system and hates the other--something we already knew.

Refusing to admit any parallel in the cases just demonstrates a

tribalistic emotional attachment to his own set of rules; it certainly

does nothing to validate those rules.

Reisman simply starts from the assumption that the system of rules he

favors is right and proper, and that other systems of rules are

pernicious. He then uses loaded terminology, both god-terms and

devil-terms, to describe analogous phenomena in the respective systems.

I believe it’s called begging the question.

Perhaps I’m overpsychologizing things, but Reisman seems almost

pathologically deficient in the empathy or imagination, or whatever it

takes to put oneself in someone else’s place sufficiently to be able to

understand, on its own terms, an argument he disagrees with.

But at least he seems to be attempting to engage, however feebly,

arguments that have been made in response to his last statement--and not

just reasserting his original statements. That’s a definite improvement.

Addendum. George Reisman isn’t the only person who has attempted to

challenge me with hypothetical scenarios. I’ve been asked more than

once, in various discussion threads at Mises Blog and here, how a

mutualist property system would handle this or that case. The short

answer, in many cases, is “I don’t know.”

Manuel Lora, an anarcho-capitalist, put it quite well in reference to

his own system:

I cannot provide an answer for every conceivable question regarding the

organization of society. At best, one can offer opinions but not

guarantees. And that does not mean that an answer would not exist, it’s

just that right now, it’s impossible to know what it is. Furthermore, we

could have several answers and even overlapping answers. With

government, there is only one way to do things. Freedom is unknown, yet

no less valid if we’re today unable to answer questions about a reality

that does not exist. [via iceberg]

I can, however, put forth certain principles that would likely govern

its practical application. Most importantly, any libertarian common law

code based on mutualist property rules would be worked out in a

mutualist community, the community being one made up overwhelmingly of

small property owners who see their own property as the basis of

security and independence, and see the distributive ownership of

property in general as a bulwark of social stability against polarizing

inequality and class conflict. The main evil to be prevented by their

law code, accordingly, would be the concentration of large amounts of

property in a few hands (particularly exclusion of homesteaders from

large tracts of vacant land, or large-scale ownership of many rental

properties by a single landlord).

For situations short of this, such as the one Reisman brings up in his

latest post, the practical application of mutualist principle would be

worked out by the local community in such a way as to avoid stepping on

their own toes; and the majority of people in a community of small

property owners would hardly wish to live in fear that their property

might be seized by a squatter as soon as they went on vacation or let

some of it lie fallow for a year. In other words, their application of

mutualist law would be on the principle that the law is made for man,

rather than the reverse.

For hard cases like the one Reisman presents, there is a variety of ways

a jury of sympathetic neighbors might deal with it in a mutualist legal

system, without undermining the central values of mutualist property

law. I already discussed one possible way: the community might be

willing to enforce a contractual agreement for a post-transfer payment

for transfer of possession, by all means short of dispossessing the new

owner: the remedies of the injuried party might extend to seizure of

movable assets, shunning or exclusion from mutually organized social

services, and the like (for a picture of how this might work, recall the

story about the lazy guy who repeatedly skipped out on his “obs” in

Russell’s “And Then There Were None,” and wound up starving because

nobody would do business with him). This would be no more an impairment

of the specifics of such a contract than the absence of debt slavery for

bankruptcy is an impairment of debtors’ obligations in our society.

On the other hand, the community might be willing to evict an occupant

and restore the land to the original owner in cases where fraud was

involved in the transfer of possession, on the grounds that the

transaction was rendered null and void. Such fraud would be equivalent

to violent dispossession, in which case the community would be justified

in the use of force to restore the original owner. (I got this

suggestion from Joshua Holmes, aka Wild Pegasus, in the comments to

Reisman’s post).

I can also imagine, consistent with mutualist principle, a local jury

enforcing a contract to pay amortization costs of labor and improvements

in return for a transfer of possession. There’s no reason they could not

do this, consistent with mutualist principle, and still refuse to

enforce an extended rental agreement.

A mutualist community might do any, or all, or none of these things, or

some that I haven’t thought of. I just don’t know.

It’s interesting that critics portray such practical discretion as

backtracking or inconsistency, when no system could exist without it.

Lockean systems, for example, involve largely conventional provisions

for constructive abandonment and salvage, adverse possession, etc., none

of which can be derived in all its specifics from the basic principles

of Lockean theory. As Sheldon Richman commented, any system, for its

practical application, requires large elements of seemingly arbitrary

convention.

Mutualism, on the other hand, is judged in the worst possible light, on

the assumptions that neighbors either would be looking for the first

opportunity to screw each other over, or would apply some cartoonish

version of pure mutualist principle with no discretion or common sense

whatever.

As I pointed out above, in a mutualist community any landowner who

sought to negotiate payment for a transfer of possession would do so in

the awareness of what the legal code allowed and did not allow. It would

be decidedly odd, in such a community of small landowners, if the common

law did not make some provision for the transfer of possession and

recouping of improvement outlays (perhaps one of the expedients I listed

above, or perhaps some other) other than a thirty year mortgage or an

extended rental. I also wonder about the specifics of the hardship case

that motivated the owner to dispossess himself of the property he had

worked so hard to develop; whatever the specifics, I find it unlikely

that a community of congenial neighbors with a vigorous tradition of

mutual aid would fail to provide any means of hardship relief short of

the alternatives Reisman mentions. Shawn Wilbur, for example, said this

in a comment on an earlier post:

It’s not hard to imagine a mutualism that includes summer homes and

caretaking arrangements. On the other hand, i live in a town where

something like half of the real estate is in the hands of a handful of

folks, who live off the needs of a much larger group of folks for a

place to live. that’s a very different situation. The concentration of

real property here has consequences that make certain kinds of basic

personal security and justice much harder to attain. A mutualist society

would undoubtedly attempt to reorganize itself along other lines.

More Howlers from Reisman

George Reisman was interviewed on his article “Mutualism: A Philosophy

for Thieves” on FMNN eRadio with John St. George (“Chemical Ali” Massoud

tipped me off to this). The website’s blurb about the interview has the

campy feel of Reefer Madness, or a 1950s FBI propaganda film on

“International Communism”: “THE MUTUALIST: Ever lurking, ever searching

to simply ‘squat’ and take your land. Is this the next step from Eminent

Domain?”

Of course, Reisman gives mutualist property rights theory the same

clueless overall treatment as he did in “Mutualism’s Support for

Exploitation of Labor and State Coercion.” His hypothetical scenarios

all involve, not mutualism as a coherent set of property rules enforced

by majority social consensus in a locality, but as the private

philosophy of some individual con artist attempting to scam an

unsuspecting landlord in a Lockean society. And the need for mutualist

owner-occupiers to appeal to the consensus of their neighbors for

enforcement of their property rights is characterized as dependence on a

state or “band of thugs” for enforcement--even at the same time Reisman

shows Lockeans enforcing their property rights by the very same sort of

appeal to their neighbors. I’ve already dealt with his ham-handed

treatment, at length (see the synopsis of links to the debate at the

bottom of this post).

But here are some more howlers you might enjoy:

Q. Does mutualism have its roots in socialism or communism?

A. I’d say it’s about eighty percent Marxism. It accepts Marx’s theory

of how wages and profits are determined. See, Marx claimed that profit

income is stolen from the workers, that property... that workers should

have all the income that results. They are the producers, allegedly, and

the businessmen aren’t.

This is the level of knowledge of nineteenth century political

philosophy I’d expect from a B- student in an undergrad Western Civ

class. It would be a lot more accurate to say that the entire socialist

movement, including Marx, Proudhon, and free market radicals like

Hodgskin and the American individualists, all accepted the radical

Ricardian theory of how wages and profits were determined.

The mutualists say you don’t need socialism, the problem [of profits]

would be addressed if the government... didn’t do anything that stood in

the way of banks being formed that would create a flood of new and

additional money that would drive interest rates down close to zero. The

mutualists think that expanding the quantity of money can permanently

reduce the rate of interest and then indirectly the rate of profit

pretty close to zero, and they think the only reason that this doesn’t

happen is the government is restricting the ability of the banking

system to create money.

OK, breathe deeply now. Take a look at this passage from my rejoinder

article, made directly in response to the sort of misreading Reisman

makes above:

On money and banking issues, Rothbard made the mistake of interpreting

the Greene-Tucker system of mutual banking as an attempt at inflationary

expansion of the money supply. Although the Greene-Tucker doctrine is

often casually lumped together (in a broader category of “money cranks”)

with social crediters, bimetallists, etc., it is actually quite

different. Greene and Tucker did not propose inflating the money supply,

but rather eliminating the monopoly price of credit made possible by the

state’s entry barriers: licensing of banks, and large capitalization

requirements for institutions engaged in providing only secured loans.

Most libertarians are familiar with such criticisms of professional

licensing as a way of ensuring monopoly income for the providers of

medical, legal and other services. Licensing and capitalization

requirements, likewise, enable providers of credit to charge a monopoly

price for their services.

In fact, Rothbard himself made a similar analysis of the life insurance

industry, in which state reserve requirements served as market entry

barriers and thus inflated the cost of insurance far above the levels

necessary for purely actuarial requirements.

Now, as I see it, there are only three possibilities: 1) Reisman just

goes on repeating his assertion without ever having bothered to read my

response to it; 2) he read my response but is unable to understand how

it contradicts what he wrote; or 3) he’s deliberately persisting in a

conscious mischaracterization. So he’s either lazy, lacking in reading

comprehension, or a liar. I’d really prefer to believe #1 or #2 because,

despite all my online wrangling with him, he doesn’t seem like a bad

guy--more clueless than malicious.

But for crying out loud, before you criticize something, make sure

you’ve got a clue about what you’re criticizing! I’ve been criticized by

Lockeans who actually understand my position (see Roderick Long’s review

article in JLS), and believe me, they’re a lot more effective than

Reisman. It takes a lot less work for me to make fun of a critic who

comes up with howlers like these, than to put the effort into answering

effective criticisms by someone who understands what he’s criticizing.

And some people who never heard of mutualism before they saw Reisman’s

article have followed the trackbacks to my responses, compared what I

actually said to his clownish mischaracterizations of it, and wound up

thinking the worse of him. Frequent commenter quasibill, who still

disagrees with me on the nature of property rights, learned in that very

way never to trust Reisman’s account of anything. I’m just afraid people

will suspect I’m paying Reisman to write this stuff. He’s certainly not

doing himself any favors.

I feel like I’ve lifted up a rock and seen what’s crawling under it.

My immediate reaction was to say “likewise”; but I thought better of it,

because I don’t really see Reisman that way. More than anything, I’m a

little taken aback by his utter revulsion, his delenda est,

root-and-branch attitude. It’s as though he just suddenly discovered the

broad segment of free market libertarian thought in this country that

has taken a radical view of land. He’s not only writing off me (big

deal) and Warren and Tucker; he’s writing off Henry George, Bolton Hall,

Oppenheimer, Nock, Frank Chodorov, Spencer Heath, etc., etc. It’s not

just that he disagrees with me on the nature of property rights in land

(that’s entirely legitimate), it’s that he’s entirely incapable of

seeing the Lockean and other more radical strands of classical

liberalism as common members of a larger category. There have been

plenty of radical Lockeans in the Rothbardian camp (including Rothbard

himself) who’ve seen these “land cranks” as fellow travellers (if

misguided ones) in the free market movement, and appreciated their

contributions in areas where they agreed. Reisman, on the other hand,

really does act like he’s turned a rock over. But I don’t see how a

“professor emeritus” who’s a prominent libertarian figure can be so

abysmally ignorant about the history of his own movement.