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Title: Are Hotels Immoral?
Author: Shawn P. Wilbur
Date: October 27, 2012
Language: en
Topics: mutualism; occupany and use; rent
Source: Retrieved on November 8, 2022 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/contrun/are-hotels-immoral/

Shawn P. Wilbur

Are Hotels Immoral?

Q: Are Hotels Immoral?

A: No. If someone is actively maintaining a hotel, then they are

obviously occupying and using it. A large hotel is likely to be a

collectively owned affair, like most large enterprises under usufructory

ownership.

Q: Can that somebody hire people to help him or her occupy it and

maintain it?

A: Well, not without leaving the regime of occupancy and use property.

It is possible that there might be reasons to respect such an

arrangement in the midst of an occupancy-and-use-based community, but at

the point where it looks like there is rent-seeking and exploitation of

labor going on in a mutualist community, I suspect both the labor force

and the customers are likely to start looking elsewhere. Mutualists

markets are most likely to manifest profits in the form of a general

reduction in costs, and capitalist profits will probably stick out like

a sore thumb in that context.

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Contracts can solve many underlying problems, and there are plenty of

other ways to establish rules for human interaction. Mutualist markets

would have their particular character, and forms of profit, precisely

because the rules for interaction within them are governed by norms of

reciprocity, “cost the limit of price,” etc., rather than the norms

dominant within capitalist markets.

Most uses of natural resources or real property have a basic cycle to

them. For example, it is expected that we will be out of our homes as

much as we are in them. A home is, in part, a fixed place where we keep

the stuff we don’t want or need to carry around all day — just as it is,

in part, a place where we sleep, a potentially private space, etc. If

we’re talking about agriculture, then it is expected that the land we

are using will lie fallow sometimes, because of seasonal cycles or crop

rotation. The folks running a hotel will be there, day in and day out,

while guests will come and go, and staff will maintain the hotel for

themselves and the guests alike.

Q: Doesn’t that seem somewhat arbitrary, especially for things that have

multiple uses?

A: Not particularly, since all we need to establish is that something is

being used according the natural patterns of someform of use.

These use cycles are determined by the usual demands and conditions of

particular kinds of resource use.

The argument against mutualist hotels depends on an understanding of

“occupancy and use” which I’ve never seen a mutualist advance, and which

also appears very different from the ways we customarily think about

these issues now.

Presumably, though, any new process will also have its logical cycles.

And, of course, experimentation is something we’ve done before, and

should have no trouble recognizing as a use.

Actually, I’ve already given a number of examples. Cycles for

agricultural use are determined by a mix of seasonal factors and

developing conventions regarding “best practices” for crop rotation,

fallow periods, etc. Our mutualist hotel will have guests who come and

go, primarily for short stays, and hosts who are relatively stable. Etc.

If I’m experimenting with a different agricultural method, then the

nature of the experiment will determine how long I put resources to that

use, and how much of the time during the experiment some or all of the

resources might be idle. If I’m brewing small-batch beer, each

experimental cycle will tend to be considerably shorter than an

agricultural cycle — unless perhaps I’m aging a batch.

It’s a simple standard, easily adaptable to a range of resources and

uses.

This all started because somebody thought mutualists thought hotels were

“immoral.” That’s just a version of the “mutualists will take your house

when you nip out for a quart of milk” claim, and both seem to fall

rather decisively before the fact that occupancy and use always seems to

involve some pattern of absence and presence, fairly predictably tied to

the particular resources and the particular uses. Now, in some cases,

that means that knowing whether or not a resource is currently in use

might take a little research, but we expect that with all property

regimes, so that can’t really be a very serious objection.

Now, the “why” of occupancy and use comes from the proudhonian critique

of property theories. Nothing stronger seems to hold up to scrutiny.