Tomasz Kaye asks a few questions that he thinks can't be answered with the NAP alone and concludes that therefore the NAP isn't sufficient.
My first question is sufficient for what?
I think it's sufficient philosophy because we get human instinct along with it. The total package is enough to form society. I'll answer the questions asked in the article, but hope we can all agree that even if there are questions we don't have a (satisfactory) answer to, we can still agree life would be better to without government.
As a basis we should derive the NAP from first principles. Chase Rachels does that in his book A spontaneous order. My disagreement with this book is the word spontaneous in the title, the order is human organized. What he means with spontaneous is that it hasn't been designed and imposed from top down. So I think it's a great book and succeeds in proving that the NAP is valid.
So from that philosophical basis we continue with human instinct. A core element of human instinct is to be selfish. People often think this is a negative, but it isn't. Because cooperation is very beneficial for all life forms. Which is why we have instincts to guide cooperation and deal with cheaters which are way better than the golden rule:
- By default treat others well.
- If they treat you badly, treat them badly in return.
- Forgive them to get back into cooperating and benefiting in case of errors.
- More complicated stuff, watch the video if you want to know more.
From this we can derive that almost everyone will be cooperative and reasonable almost all of the time. Cooperative because they benefit from it and reasonable because otherwise others won't cooperate with them.
On the issue of human instinct there's a basis we all share and then most people either have progressive or conservative instincts on top:
Video:
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511645659&sr=8-1&keywords=r%2FK
Humans don't have predators keeping their population under control. So conservative values will serve us much better than progressive values. In a free society the vast majority of people would likely be conservative, because there's no government pushing progressive values and people suffer the consequences of their actions. I have another reason to think this, but that requires more research to back up and another article.
On to the questions asked:
- The first three questions are on the details of what determines property:
- Exactly how visible must a property boundary be? How should its visibility be tested?
- How long must a property be vacant, and under what circumstances, in order to be considered abandoned?
- How much 'labour’, and of what kind, must be 'mixed with the land' in order for it to be considered homesteaded?
The answers to these questions will be determined as a result of negotiations between reasonable cooperating individuals. They will change over time as technology changes and they will be different for different locations because there will be different people. The myth of equality applies here in the sense that there is none. All people are different and so the outcomes of their negotiations will be different. Just as prices change over time and place, so will the details on how to determine what's who's property. There's no need or benefit to have the details hashed out beforehand.
"Carbon dioxide is a pollutant."
Before government meddled people would pay restitution if they damaged someone else's property through pollution. We can simply go back to that system.
And CO2 isn't a pollutant. It's plant food and beneficial too plant life and therefore all other life on the planet. Global warming alarm-ism is completely ridiculous and has two main causes:
- Good news isn't news at all, panic and fear mongering sells media, so that's what journalists focus on, totally misrepresenting the science.
- Progressives live in densely populated area's triggering an instinct that there's over population and we need less of ourselves. And CO2 is a symptom of human activity. So through reducing CO2 production is akin to reducing the human population. This worked great for the Dodo's, until their islands where found by humans. But through human ingenuity we can access new resources, making our supply of resources practically unlimited. So we don't need a mechanism to reduce our population, like what would be necessary in nature to avoid starvation.
"Suppose I decide to play Russian roulette"
People will do a combination of defending themselves and reducing their cooperation with you until you stop such insanity or starve in the streets.
"Does the NAP forbid taxation at least?"
If an organization owned a piece of land and demanded payment for use of that land, we'd call it a business, not a government. It's specifically called taxation because the demands of taxes are based on threats of violence INSTEAD of property ownership.
Three of the four last questions can again be answered through cooperating humans negotiating and resolving conflicts:
- This is because it doesn’t specify homesteading criteria in any testable way.
- It doesn’t specify the conditions under which property should be considered abandoned by its previous owner.
- It doesn’t specify how restitution should be handled (if at all) in the case of rights violations.
Then the final question:
It doesn’t say anything about how historic misdeeds committed by long-dead agents of a trans-generational institution must be remedied.
They must only be remedied if the people who committed the misdeeds are still alive and only by those people under pressure of social ostracism. Yes that means there's no guarantee there will a remedy at all. If these persons have a big enough society that they can live happily together, there will be little pressure. History is full of theft, murder and worse. These misdeeds cannot be remedied. This has nothing to do with the NAP but the lack of philosophy or defenses by those people in question. They suffer the consequences of that, very few of those misdeeds can be remedied.
In general these questions express a desire to hold the NAP to an impossibly high standard. It's like demanding to know what the price of cotton will be a year after the end of slavery. These questions cannot be answered by philosophy but will be answered through negotiations and conflict resolution between individuals.
Here's a further Twitter exchange I had with the author:
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