So this chapter is pretty good, it discusses what freedom/liberty actually is, broadly speaking, and starts essentially making the case for why property rights don't necessarily give people freedom. The authors point out that freedom in the context of property rights is like establishing traffic lights. A green means go, and gives people freedom. A red means don't go, and takes away freedom. But sometimes giving people that red means giving other people a green, so that people are more free to go than they would be in an anarchistic system in which traffic lights wouldn't exist.
This actually is a good analogy and seems to make an argument I've been trying to make for a while, but I feel like I've been failing to actually do so. Sometimes establishing rules gives people more freedom than they would have in an anarchistic society. A society that has prohibitions against rape might put an inhibition on a would be rapist, but in doing so people have much more freedom to not worry about being raped as much. Sometimes a small sacrifice of nominal negative freedom gives people more freedom overall.
The problem with property rights is that they are a significant loss of freedom for many in society. Where people were free to forage like they were prior to the imposition of such rights, now people are forced to work for others in order to secure their basic needs. This does NOT make people free, but actually represents having significantly less freedom than they would in a more anarchistic society. People might claim that you have "opportunity" in this new system, but an "opportunity" does not directly translate to freedom, if anything, it is the imposition of a positive duty on people that would otherwise not exist. The idea that we start out poor and with nothing and have to bootstrap our way to "freedom" isn't freedom at all.
In a lot of ways, Widerquist (I assume it's him as he's the philosopher) argues that having a system of rights to guarantee freedom in this way is tautological. Freedom should be a lack of coercion, but property rights imposes coercion. So what it's saying is that people are free to live within the property rights system and abide by its rules more or less. He then points out that in an monarchistic society, kings have a right to be kings, and peasants have a right to be peasants. This starts sounding like orwellian double speak to some extent. Kinda like the "freedom" you get in Christ when you're a Christian. Even though the christian conception of god is literally based on the authoritarian strong man ideas of what rulers were like at the time (keep in mind the Bible was written during statism's worst era just about).
Widerquist ultimately forces propertarians into a dilemma pointing out that "either the rights based conception of liberty is important or the freedom to control your own life is important---not both." (p. 66). I would largely agree with this. The right is a social convention created by the state with the imposition of force, and it tends to rob people of their ability to be free to live as they want, as people are subjected to it. I know libertarians like to act like no one owes you a living and that they should be free to live as they want, but they seem to forget they are robbing others of their liberty by claiming exclusive access to certain land or resources. We did not need to make the system this way, and I would argue personally that this system does present problems in providing people liberty. Property doesn't really give people freedom unless it's distributed widely enough to ensure that people are not forced to rely on each other to survive.
Finally, Widerquist mentions that they will be comparing the freedom in a propertied society with that of hunter gatherers in the next chapter, and establishes a metric by which to measure freedom. These metrics are:
"• They would be coerced less often or in less important ways.
• They would be less constrained over all.
• They would be freer from taking orders if they didn’t want to.
• They would be less likely to have labor extracted from them.
• They would have fewer non-contractual obligations.
• They would be less often sacrificed to achieve the ends of others.
• They would have more control over the decisions that are important in their lives." (p. 71)
As you can probably tell, Widerquist is setting up a bloodbath for propertarianism here. Because we all know what he's going to conclude from this. Property rights do not make people more free than they would be in the state of nature.
I mean, you guys probably also know where I come from too on this. I'm not against property rights altogether (to be fair i don't think he is either), but let's face it, we all know in a modern society that people are coerced by propertylessness to work for those with property, it's unfair, it's unjust, it's a violation of their liberty, and we should seek a conception of liberty roughly based on Widerquist's indepentarianism in which we seek to give people the freedom to say no to others. I'm just mentioning the metrics exactly because I think they're solid metrics worth mentioning, and I literally would have needed to spend hours to come up with something remotely as good as what he came up with in this one bullet point list.
As you can tell, I like this book, a lot, I might have mild disagreements with widerquist and mccall in times and do think they romanticize prestate times sometimes, but these books are invaluable in organizing and guiding my own thoughts on these subjects, as this was arguably the biggest gap/inconsistency in my own worldview previous to this. Leave it to the experts to help me fill in the gaps here.
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