in defense of property rights as foundational social contract

property is civilizational bedrock: without property, there can be neither liberty nor safety

i stand, as ever, in unmitigated awe of the simple things that people seem able to not only forget but outright abnegate in their ongoing search for civilizational dissolution. of all such takes, this one has a special place in my heart as a near flawless platonic-form shibboleth for the venn intersect of ethical (and personal) cowardice and the inability to think in second or third order systems.

if one’s desire is to loudly proclaim “i am a moral failure as a human, unfit to support the social contract, and easy pickings for any who would prey upon me,” well, this would be a difficult set of utterances upon which to improve.

wow.

just wow.

let’s create a framework here by which we can assess this.

“The notion that people should use violence to defend their property is INSANE.”

this is fundamentally indefensible.

golden rules make golden ages and the idea of doing unto others as one would have done unto oneself has been the singular societal idea ever to drive large scale human flourishing.

this necessitates a social contract rooted in negative rights and obviates attempts to add positive rights to such a list.

in essence, it’s very simple:

the social contract has two aspects: bound and protected.

• bound means constrained by the rules.

• protected means defended by the system those rules create.

it's a bargain where both sides must be upheld for either to be valid because these two ideas are the reciprocals of one another.

one man’s “bound” is the other’s “protected” and this only works by mutual adherence.

i agree to respect your rights to property, peaceful agency, and sanctity of person because you in turn agree to respect mine.

the midwit rejoinder of “but i never signed any contract!” is common but carries no real water.

the whole point of a negative rights structured social contract is that so long as you do not trespass upon such things as my liberty or property, this contract may be assumed between us and need not be overt. it's just mutual respect expressed as non-interference. each offers this to all others and honors it so long as it is, in turn, honored.

this simple set of choices gives rise to incredibly rich, self-organizing emergent structures of culture, economics, civilization, and safety.

but, if you violate this contract by taking my things, you have shown that you are no longer bound. you are now outside the contract. as such, you are no longer protected. this includes from violence.

and sometimes violence (or its threat) is necessary.

a society in which things cannot be protected by violence is a society in which no one can really have things. someone can just come and take them and if you say "stop" and they do not, what then?

so "property" literally cannot exist without "defended by violence." it just becomes communal stuff that anyone could pick up and walk off with, your land becomes a community flophouse open to anyone who does not leave if you ask them.

note that "call the police" is using violence, it's just someone else's and not yours which is an even lamer solution and no more (and arguably less) ethical. it also runs the risk of outcomes like the ones we saw in canada, the UK, the EU, and in so many US cities:

the police serve you up like a trussed goose and the wolves grow fat upon it.

imagine trying to live within a society such as this and under such advice and diktat. imgaine facing arrest and censure for self defense.

imagine how rapidly this undermines and destroys a high trust civilization and the confidence and safety of a people.

without property and the benefits that arise therefrom, life remains cold and dark; nasty, brutish, and short. so lacking property massively degrades life. the idea of property rights is intrinsic to any high functioning system of human flourishing, and that is far more important than some individual's selfish desire to steal.

when such people steal, it’s not just one piece of property that is being so stolen, it’s the whole of the emergent societal structure of golden rule civilization.

no such civilization may exist without the protection of its members, and no member of such a civilization may be protected if some are allowed to run amok among them unbound.

so those who step outside the contract and go outlaw cannot be left to prosper without the ruination of the prosperity of others. it debases their liberty and renders perverse their incentives. (this has especially intense implications for state sanctioned crony corporatism, btw)

so the stakes are far higher than “some stuff they just grabbed from you.”

an entire way of life is at stake.

more that just a bicycle is lost here.

i susept that the intersection of “you cannot use violence to defend property” and “communism/socialism/collectivism” is so large because both belief sets hinge upon a common trait:

inability to think past first order effects.

that person needs food. you have food. he should be able to take it from you. food is a human right!

this is a common refrain, but one of uncommon danger.

to claim a right to food is a “positive” right and all positive rights ultimately come down to coercion and slavery. a “right” to healthcare implies that a doctor can be made to provide it. but what if the doctor does not want to? do we force them at gunpoint? that’s slavery. shall we pay them? with whose money? where did you get it? did you take it by force or threat of force? was the person “taxed” at risk of loss of life or liberty if they said “no”? yup, there’s slavery again.

a positive right to “food” underpinned by being able to take the food of others without asking alienatins them from the fruits of their own labor by force. again, that’s slavery. it is forcing another to work for you by threat of violence. abstracting that threat to “the state” just makes it more cowardly and leaves everyone vulnerable to the next turn of the tyrannical screw.

utopian visions are civilizational polonium. even those handling them generally wind up sick or dead.

it’s a form of reality denial.

the world will always have violence and the potential for violence. this cannot be changed. some will always choose to fight and to take and compel by force. and the minute you outsource “your protection” to leviathan, that “some” will pretty much always be “the state” or those wrangling to control it.

because of this, to claim one has no right to use violence to protect themselves or their property is to destroy the idea of personal agency and property entirely. it’s how you become a subject rather than a citizen. it’s how you lose incentive and agency.

and when you do that, everything collapses.

a state powerful enough to give you everything you want will always and inevitably be a state capable of taking everything you have.

and invariably and inexorably, by degrees and inches, it will.

owning nothing is pure misery because it means that in very short order, nothing will be produced. all incentive has been destroyed and socialist “better guys this time” twaddle notwithstanding, human nature is not malleable in this regard.

collectivism is cancer.

“you’ll own nothing and be happy” is a toddler fairytale for the hard of thinking foisted upon the credulous and naive by those who would rather rule over ashes than participate in plenty and actually have to build something with their lives.

property rights are the cornerstone upon which human flourishing is founded.

this is no more optional than gravity and just as perilous to ignore.

it’s essentiually “comply with depredations, play the defenseless frail and hope the attackers have mercy on you so that you can live to tattle to mom and dad.”

it’s right up there with the advice of toronto police to “just leave your car keys by the front door so they are easy for home invaders to find and steal.”

“just show the alpha your belly and let him take your food.”

(video here)

now, obviously, this is desperately stupid advice in any sort of large scale framework. in a basic economic sense, it’s reducing the price of trying to steal cars and thus will cause more people to choose it. in a basic signaling sense, it signals submission and that the victim accepts the attacker’s dominance. this also begets more aggression especially from cultures and groups who have no respect for rights and see government as the biggest gang on the block who gets to decide which groups get to plunder and rape the others and “just wait for the police to handle it” is the worst advice possible in such a situation. they will come late, if at all, and they will rarely if ever catch the people who did this.

as a result, low trust humans with high time preference (high value of now, little value or even conception of future) fail to even experience deterrence. “i break into a home, the people there do not resist me, and police might at some distant, amorphous future time which i do not value or even consider, try to find me but they will probably fail and even if they do, little will happen” is functionally the same as “there are no consequences for this action except i get free stuff.”

anyone who cannot see how this is ringing the dinner bell for predators is frankly so incapable of second or third order thinking that it’s small wonder that they cannot grasp ideas like “social contract” or rights and property as the cornerstone of systems of human advancement and flourishing.

and this is why social contract must be underpinned by ideas of immediate, violent self-defense. there is no other language this sort of predator speaks or respects.

the great hilarity of this is the manner in which such zero move look ahead players mistake their position for one of morality, even moral imperative and cast those who can actually see what the board will look like several moves from now once incentives have been applied as troglodytes.

they experience ideas like “you loot, we shoot” and advice like “if they come in your home, shoot them dead and save us a trip” as sensless savagry, but it’s not. it’s sensible savagery, self defense as both right and righteousness to stand as omnipresent, always on deterrent to depredation.

and it takes a special form of fool beset by a special kind of willful blindness to fail to see that this is so.

but even leaving aside the incentives and plain as day captain obviousness effects of armed citizens to deter home invasion (odd how you never see this in utah or even on puerto rico - both populations armed to the teeth) there stands a moral dimension here that will always stand paramount to this sort of constant troll bait of ethical inversion:

“so you’d kill a robber to protect your things? your wallet is more important than his life?”

they act like this is some lay down hand of moral superiority, but it’s nothing of the sort. in fact, it’s just plain wrong.

you’re not the one making that decision, the robber is.

and they are not just “taking things” they are destroying a way of life.

they are the one deciding how to value such things and when they try to steal from you, they have made this plain.

they have shown you that they are someoe whith whom you cannot share a social contract.

and this idea that those who refuse to be bound by social contract should be afforded its ongoing protection are inconsistent with high trust civilizational integrity.

and if others want to play for blood, well…

“enjoy your holiday.”