And, who is this “Brent” fellow?

What right you currently have is being taken away here?

If you want to live in a society of people, especially one where those at the bottom do not necessarily die of cholera all over your manicured lawn or storm your palace with pitchforks, some compromises are necessary. This is unfortunate, but the “natural” way of things, so I am led to understand by documentaries on the Discovery Channel, will just fucking outright kill you in the face with a big lion. So, y’know, I’ve personally decided that taxes are better than lions.

This may well be true, but I would wager that there are a lot of things that have a much bigger impact on African capitalism than ‘red tape’. To take some examples off the top of my head:

1: Debt repayment

2: International tariffs and subsidies (which, remaining under the control of politicians, are always open to manipulation and special interest prejudice….the only way you can get round this would be to make it ILLEGAL for countries to subsidise their firms or set tariffs but who would have the power to do that in libertarianland?)

3: Corruption which, however it starts is facilitated by external powers (in Saudi Arabia, for example, most weapons deals are ‘facilitated’ by drugs and prostitutes).

My feeling about libertarianism is that libertarians are onto something, but it’s not what they think they are onto. Libertarians have stumbled upon some important facts about ‘bottom up’ organisation (what Hayek called a catallaxy, I used to think although Wikipedia tells me I’m wrong) and they are almost certainly on the money about central planning. But my question remains: who believes in central planning any more? Like socialists, therefore, I am very much against what libertarians are against, in the abstract. It’s just when I hear what they are FOR that I start to have my doubts (like socialism again, perhaps).

You might well be right that most people don’t share the belief that there is no moral claim to private property – I only expressed that view myself as a fairly provisional answer to your question. As I indicated, the Marxist idea that workers are entitled to the fruit of their labour, that this should not be appropriated by others (i.e. employers) is attractive to me. But it poses obvious problems given that many people won’t be able to work for their living – hence there’s a contradiction with another Marxist idea: “to each according to needs, from each according to ability”.

But surely the implication of the rejection by the vast majority of people of libertarianism (particularly of the idea that taxation/redistribution is morally wrong) is that they do not in fact really think that the property relations produced by the capitalist economy are of themselves just, that people have a moral claim to (all) the wealth that accrues to them in that system.

As for “the idea that people’s entitlements to material resources are based on what societies they live in(!)”, this is obvious. I specified that such entitlements ought, in my opinion, to satisfy not merely basic material needs but also some minimal standard of human dignity. The standard of living required to meet the latter requirement would clearly be different in, say, 21st century America than it would in, say, 13th century Britain. Poverty is always relative to the time and place in which it exists.

Brendan in #12 makes the sort of argument that markets exist in a social context so they are never really independent and free. I guess we are to infer from this that as long as this is true there is really no difference between social context and government regulation. But I don’t agree. I think there is a way you can measure more or less government involvement in a market, and although that involvement may be aimed at a generating a positive social result, there is also a cost associated w/ that involvement. Further, the institution you create to effect that involvement may work against your initial aim anyhow.

Studies of administrative barriers to investment in Africa have shown that red tape like approvals and licensing can signficantly affect business and economic growth. Its a simple and clear example, but surely not the only one.

A government is at least nominally directed toward the benefit of its citizens, and if enough of its citizens see a benefit in unbundling government goods and services for purchase, it will happen. (Yeah, right. But we’re talking utopian ideals here.) Businesses, on the other hand, are dedicated to maximizing shareholder and management return, something that is best done under circumstances of asymmetrical power between business and customer. Under those circumstances, it’s almost a given that customers will pay for a variety of things they don’t want—including some items that actively disserve them—in order to maintain access to the things they do want. And since it’s more profitable to act that way than to unbundle (economies of scale, cross-subsidy and all that), there’s no reason to think that some competing firm will want to act differently.

I sort of don’t feel there’s as much need for me to answer the question (“What moral claim does a person have to their property?”) as there is for someone who sees taxation as theft.

But actually I would probably say that people don’t have any moral claim, as such, to private property. They have a moral claim to the material resources adequate for the satisfaction of basic needs and human dignity in the society in which they live. This is the standard by which I would judge property rights and relations, rather than any deontological entitlement, such as advocated by libertarians as well as Lockeans and Marxists. (Though I certainly prefer the Marxist principle to the libertarian one.)

That the law currently sanctions property relations entailing shameful inequalities, including flagrant violations of the above standard shows that the law does not furnish moral claims to property. The laws in relation to property rights can (and should) thus be justly changed to bring about a better arrangement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm”

Actually, Coase did NOT do the basic work. He laid out a theory….and left it there, without satisfactory empirical proof. In fact, there are still no good empirical proofs indicating what actual levels of transaction costs would drive the creation of internal markets (i.e. firms) rather than external markets.

The reality is that the transaction costs would really need to be quite large and easily observable for the Coase theory of the firm to be viable. The difficulty with which any empirical proof of the Coase theorem has been achieved would indicate that it’s not a valid explanation.

Specifically, I can very well imagine a purely libertarian society where private property does not exist, simply because individuals have all freely decided that they rather had their properties in common (a society of lovers maybe?).

To make crystal clear my position, though I agree with the general libertarian state of mind (I even think it is trivial), I disagree that a libertarian society would have, say, less taxes than actual societies, or stronger property rights, or no welfare. These are usually the preferred social choices of vocal libertarians, but, surely, it is among them that one would expect to find people who understand that their individual preferences are just that, and that other individuals have different ones.