Aug. 6, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:59
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Feed the Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. Welcome to your daily argument. | |
| Today we are going to talk about property. | |
| Let's jawbone about self-ownership and owning the effects of one's actions. | |
| Now people often dive into property rights without understanding that the basis of morality is essentially property as well. | |
| And let me sort of give you an example. | |
| Let's say you know a guy named Bob and you catch a video of him out there kicking over your garbage cans. | |
| The garbage spills all over, the eggshells roll down your driveway and it creates a big giant mess. | |
| So, you know, you're probably going to go over to Bob and say, listen man, you just kicked over my garbage cans. | |
| What's up with that? You're going to clean up this mess. | |
| I didn't make it. You made the mess. | |
| And he says, well man, they're your garbage cans. | |
| It's your garbage. I mean, what would you say? | |
| You'd say, well, yes, it's my garbage cans and my garbage. | |
| I put the garbage in the garbage cans, put the garbage cans on the curb, you came over, kicked them over, and they went spilling down my driveway. | |
| You created the mess. | |
| Now, this is sort of an interesting question, because who owns the mess? | |
| Well, who owns the mess is who created the mess. | |
| And who created the mess is Bob through the actions of his body. | |
| Now, if Bob were to say to you, it was a remote control UFO that made me do it, or something like that, then either he's lying, in which case he's pretending that someone else had control over his body when he kicked over your garbage cans, or he's telling the truth, in which case he's just playing crazy. | |
| And he may not be responsible for the effects of his actions because he's not in control of his body. | |
| Let's give another scenario, which is that Bob, walking by, it turns out that he's epileptic. | |
| He just had his first seizure, and as he had a seizure, he knocked over your garbage cans. | |
| Now, if that was the case, if he had some kind of seizure, then you wouldn't say, well, Bob, it's your fault, your responsibility, you damn well clean up the garbage that's on my driveway and on the street. | |
| Because you'd say, well, this guy is a victim of something wherein he no longer had control of his body, And therefore, to punish him would make no sense. | |
| To punish is partly to help prevent a recurrence of the behavior, and there's no amount of punishment that will prevent a recurrence of an epileptic attack, and therefore there are other situations. | |
| Now, on the other hand, if Bob does have epilepsy and there's medication to control his epilepsy, which he failed to take or didn't take, then we're back into more foggy but still somewhat causality when it comes to why there's such a mess on your driveway. | |
| So this is where I think it's important to talk about property rights to begin with, which is the first question is, well, what do you own? | |
| And own means control over, and property rights means sole control over. | |
| You know, if you buy a lawnmower in conjunction with your neighbors, you each go in a fifth, and you can each use it, you know, once in a while. | |
| Neither of you own it because you all have partial ownership, like a timeshare or something. | |
| You have partial ownership. So full sole single control over property is the first criterion for property rights. | |
| And of course, what's the first thing you have control over is your own body. | |
| It's your words. | |
| It's the movements of your hands, the movements of your body. | |
| You have direct hardwired, no Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, no remote control. | |
| You have direct hardwired through the brainstem, through the nervous system, through the spinal cord. | |
| You have direct hardwired control over your own body. | |
| So you own your body and nobody else can directly control your body. | |
| Again, I know everyone has this point, so I'll mention it here briefly. | |
| Sure, I get it. | |
| People can force you to do something. | |
| Absolutely. But they still cannot directly compel you to do something. | |
| Like somebody can torture you until you tell them something, but they can't get into your brainstem and directly see what it is that you want, that you're wanting to hide. | |
| Someone can force you to pick your nose in public, and they can even grab your hand and move it around, but they can't directly control it. | |
| That is you. | |
| And of course, if someone's being forced to do something, we don't hold that person to be morally responsible for what they do, because morality requires choice, and if you have external compulsion, a gun to your head. | |
| Then you don't have choice and therefore you don't have free will in this situation and therefore whoever is forcing you holds the moral culpability for what it is that you have done. | |
| And this can occur in somewhat indirect ways. | |
| There's a famous common law example of causality in murder. | |
| A guy comes into a convenience store with a gun and says to the guy, you know, hand over whatever's in the till, and the guy behind the till takes out a gun and shoots at him. | |
| It misses, bounces off a paint can, hits another customer, and the customer dies. | |
| Well, who gets charged for the murder? | |
| Why, the thief does, because the thief set the events in motion that resulted in the death of the customer, even though the thief did not pull the trigger on a gun. | |
| So these are all sort of causalities, very, very interesting. | |
| You can't have morality. | |
| If you don't own your own body and you don't own the effects of your actions, right? | |
| So if someone does something bad, they own that bad thing because they own the effects of their actions. | |
| So you can't have you're good, you're bad. | |
| Like if someone says something racist and horrible or something like that, they own that statement. | |
| You know, if somebody has posted something on Twitter that is egregious or nasty... | |
| Let's say they falsely accused Trump of not touching a boy in a wheelchair or something. | |
| Well, that person is responsible. They typed that tweet. | |
| Now, of course, everybody understands that you own the effects of your actions, which is why so often when people have something bad show up in their Twitter feed, they may say, I was hacked or someone gained control and it wasn't me. | |
| Somebody else typed that, whatever it is, right? | |
| So, if you own yourself and you own the effects of your actions, that is the essence and basis of morality, and that is the essence and basis of property rights. | |
| Because we think property rights are around a shed you build in the woods or something like that. | |
| And it's not, though. | |
| I mean, the foundation of property rights is morality. | |
| Now, it's not like we have to have property rights in order that we can have morality. | |
| It's just that the two are one and the same. | |
| And think about this when you have kids, right? | |
| You will start bringing moral considerations to children at about 18 months to two years, two and a half years of age, depending on the child's development. | |
| And that's appropriate to what children can process. | |
| So in other words, you bring, you own yourself, you own the effects of your actions. | |
| You bring that to bear on children long before they have property rights and anything else, fundamentally, right? | |
| And so even before they understand the concept of mine and yours, you will have probably some sense of don't do this, don't do that. | |
| Now there is like don't take and stuff like that, but generally with kids we say not this is your exclusive property. | |
| If there's a toy that two kids are fighting over, we'll say you take a turn, then you take a turn, share and so on. | |
| That's seeding the way to massive socialist tendencies later on, but that may be a bit heavy for that particular interaction. | |
| So, but we will put morality on children before we put abstract property rights on them, and I think that's really important, that we have to understand owning oneself, owning the effects of one's actions. | |
| Now, property rights fundamentally is not about what you grab, it's about what you create. | |
| So the essence of property rights, like if I said, I'm going to sell you a square acre of property in Florida, but I'm never going to tell you where it is. | |
| It's going to be somewhere in a swamp, but I'm never going to tell you where it is. | |
| You wouldn't pay anything for that, because even if you got that title, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it. | |
| So property is not about what you claim. | |
| It's not about what you own. | |
| It's what you create. So if you go out and enclose like some unowned area of the world, you go out and you enclose a field and you plant a crop and you grow a crop, Then the property rights fundamentally are not about the land. | |
| The property rights are around the crop. | |
| Because the crop would not exist without the ownership. | |
| Like, nobody digs a mine unless they have ownership of the land and its mineral rights. | |
| So, people mistake the sort of claiming of land. | |
| Well, that's the property right. | |
| And it's like, well, that's the precondition for the property right of building the house on it, of building a theme park on it, of sowing crops, or of keeping it in its natural state so that people can hike through it and take photographs because they love it or whatever, or digging a mine. | |
| The enclosure property rights aren't the real issue. | |
| That's the necessary but not sufficient condition for the actual property rights which are whatever you do with the land that you will only do because you got to enclose it. | |
| Like nobody's going to build a house on a piece of property or a piece of land that is hotly contested or that there's five different claims on it or that no one will ever say. | |
| I mean, nobody's going to spend millions to dig a gold mine down into the ground unless they can get a certain claim or property rights over the gold that they extract. | |
| And you see this sometimes when people go digging for old treasure or sunken ships and so on, then they can get into a lot of hot water about who owns it, the government takes a claim and... | |
| All these kinds of complications can occur, which is one of the reasons why it's not quite as common. | |
| So I think that's important to remember. | |
| If you want to deny property rights, then you are denying self-ownership and you're denying ethics. | |
| And of course, if you're denying self-ownership and you're denying ethics, what are you doing having a debate about rights anyway? | |
| It's just one of these things you kind of have to be interested and accept the concepts of rights and ethics in order to be able to even talk about it. | |
| These things. So I hope this clarifies at least the beginning of a discussion about property rights. | |
| And if you ever want to really confuse someone, have them argue against property rights and reply to someone else. | |
| And they'll say, wait, I said something. | |
| It's like, well, then you're accepting that you own yourself and the effects of your actions. | |
| It's a great trick to help people understand this. | |
| Thank you so much for listening and for watching. | |
| Please surrender a few property rights to me over at freedomainradio.com. |
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