Some years ago, after leaving religion and beginning to deconstruct my libertarian phase, I found myself debating so-called “anarcho-capitalists,” many of whom were simply parroting figures like Ayn Rand, Stefan Molyneux, and the usual internet propertarian talking points. During that period, a thought experiment occurred to me that forced me to think more carefully about the structure of the U.S. economy, property rights, taxation, coercion, and the moral assumptions buried inside political language. I present it here as a challenge to the idea of “freedom” that these types constantly invoke but rarely define with any seriousness, breadth, or depth.
Imagine that humanity finds itself in the middle of another world war. Conditions on Earth have become so catastrophic that ten scientists and astronauts board a futuristic spacecraft and leave the planet in search of somewhere else to live. After a long journey, they discover an exoplanet remarkably similar to Earth: breathable air, drinkable water, fertile soil, forests, minerals, rivers, and enough resources for all ten of them to survive.
The ship lands. The doors open. Everyone looks out at this strange new world with awe and relief. But before the group can discuss how they should proceed, one astronaut — the libertarian of the group — leaps down from the platform and plants his boots in the dirt. He turns back to the others and announces:
“Ha! I touched the ground first. Therefore, this planet is now mine. I am the rightful owner of this land, its water, its resources, and everything connected to it. If the rest of you want to live here, farm here, build here, drink from the rivers, or use any of the materials, you will have to pay me rent. And if you resist, you are violating my property rights and aggressing against me. I will defend myself accordingly.”
The absurdity here should be pretty obvious. Nothing about being first to touch the ground gives him a moral right to dominate everyone else’s conditions of survival. He did not create the planet. He did not create the rivers, the soil, the atmosphere, the forests, or the minerals. He did not even arrive there by himself. The journey was collective. The discovery was collective. The survival problem is collective. Yet through one arbitrary declaration, backed by the threat of violence, he attempts to convert a shared world into his private kingdom.
At this point, the libertarian may object: “But what if he had left Earth on his own? What if he built the ship himself, found the planet himself, and arrived there entirely by himself? Then wouldn’t the planet be his?”
But this objection still does not solve the problem. Even if he found the planet alone, why should discovery by itself generate total ownership? Why should “I got here first” mean “everyone else must now obey me”? Why should first contact with land, water, air, forests, and minerals create a moral right to exclude every future person from the basic materials of life?
That is not an argument. That is a mere assertion of “first past the post” dressed up as moral philosophy. It treats property as though it can be created by personal fiat: “I saw it first, therefore it is mine.” But no serious account of property can rest on that alone. A claim of ownership is not self-justifying simply because someone announces it loudly enough or defends it violently enough.
Property rights are not magical facts floating in the air. They are social and moral arrangements. They require justification. They require norms. They require recognition. They require some kind of mutual agreement about who may use what, under what conditions, and for what reasons. Without that, “property rights” reduce to nothing more than power: whoever can grab something, fence it off, and threaten others most effectively becomes the “owner.”
And that is not liberty. That is feudalism with a marketing department.
Of course, another objection often follows: “But if property is based on mutual agreement, then couldn’t a group of people simply come together and mutually agree to take someone else’ property away?”
This objection misunderstands the point. Saying that property rights are socially established does not mean they are infinitely or easily disposable, simpliciter. It does not mean that whatever the majority wants at any given moment automatically becomes just. A civilized society can recognize that property rights are created and maintained through social agreement while also building fundamental laws that protect individuals from arbitrary seizure, mob rule, corruption, and abuse.
That is precisely why societies develop constitutions, courts, legal procedures, due process, public standards, and limits on both private and state power. The point is not that property belongs to whoever can gather the biggest crowd. The point is that property claims must be justified within a legal and moral order and framework, not simply asserted by force, inheritance, conquest, or luck.
The alternative is not freedom. The alternative is vigilante rule. It is private armies, feudal lords, corporate kingdoms, warlords, and “justice” carried out by whoever merely has the most weapons, money, or leverage. We have already seen versions of this throughout human history, and it has not gone well.
This is the problem that so much right-wing libertarian and anarcho-capitalist rhetoric tries to hide. It speaks endlessly of “freedom,” “rights,” “non-aggression,” and “voluntary exchange,” but it often smuggles in a prior assumption: that existing property claims are already legitimate. Once that assumption is granted, taxation becomes theft, regulation becomes coercion, and the person born propertyless into a world already owned by others is described as “free” because no one is directly holding a gun to his head.
But this is a shallow concept of freedom. If every field, river, building, tool, machine, road, and workplace is already owned by someone else, then the propertyless person is not meaningfully free in any serious sense. He is free only in the narrowest and most ideological sense: free to obey the terms set by owners, free to sell his labor to survive, free to be excluded from the resources required for life, and free to call this arrangement “voluntary.”
So the question is not merely, “Did someone interfere with your property?” The deeper question is: how did that property claim become legitimate in the first place? Who decided that one person, or one class of people, gets to control the basic conditions of life while everyone else must pay for access? And why should we treat that arrangement as freedom rather than as domination wearing the language of liberty?
The New Planet example exposes a gaping hole in the so-called libertarian notion of freedom and property rights. If the Anarcho-Astronaut does not legitimately own the planet merely because his boot touched the dirt first, then the same problem applies to human history more broadly. No particular human being, tribe, family, king, corporation, or class of people had some obvious, pre-social, absolute ownership claim over the land and resources of the Earth from the dawn of humanity onward.
Imagine, for example, an early group of human beings trying to survive in North Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. One member of the group begins working a particular patch of soil more than the others. Perhaps he gathers food there, clears brush, builds a shelter, or tends the area in some useful way. Does that labor give him some practical claim to continue using what he has worked on? Maybe. But does it give him absolute ownership over the land itself? Does it give him the right to exclude everyone else from the water, plants, animals, minerals, and surrounding territory necessary for survival? Does it give him the authority to tell the rest of the group, “This is mine now, and you must pay me or obey me if you want access”?
At most, his labor may create a claim that others should respect his effort, his shelter, his tools, or the immediate fruits of his work. But that is very different from saying he has transformed part of the natural world into his private kingdom. The leap from “I used this” to “I own this absolutely” is precisely the leap that needs to be justified. It cannot be smuggled in through slogans about liberty, self-ownership, homesteading, or non-aggression. So too, so called Libertarians need to realize that such an arbitrary move can just as easily be used in the opposite direction.
Ownership, Liberty, & Freedom
Within these debates there are some other more foundational issues that begs our attention. Historically, “libertarian” did not originally mean what many American right-wing libertarians now mean by it. It was tied to anti-authoritarian, anarchist, and socialist traditions that opposed domination by both the state and capital. That matters because the modern propertarian use of “liberty” often protects only one kind of freedom: the unabated ability of owners to command, exclude, extract, accumulate, while calling their power “rights.”
But “freedom” does not simply mean that property owners are left alone to do whatever they want with whatever they happen to control. That is not a neutral definition of freedom. It is a definition loaded in favor of those who claim ownership. It treats interference with ownership as the central form of coercion while ignoring the coercive power that ownership itself can create.
If one person owns all the land, another owns the water, another owns the housing, another owns the roads, another owns the workplace, and another owns the tools needed to produce and survive, then the person who owns none of these things is not meaningfully “free” merely because no government official is pointing a gun at him. His life is still structured by commands, exclusions, permissions, prices, contracts, and threats. He must ask permission to live somewhere, work somewhere, grow food somewhere, use tools somewhere, or access the resources necessary for his continued existence.
This is why the rhetoric of “voluntary exchange” is often so misleading. A contract is not automatically free simply because it is formally agreed to. Background conditions matter. If the alternative to accepting someone’s terms is homelessness, hunger, poverty, exclusion, or death, then the agreement may be voluntary only in the thinnest and most ideological sense. The question is not merely whether someone signed the contract. The question is what social arrangement forced that contract to become the only survivable option in the first place.
Right-wing libertarianism often wants to begin the moral conversation after the world has already been divided up. It starts after the land has been claimed, the deeds have been written, the fences have been built, the factories have been inherited, the mines have been privatized, the police or private security forces have been positioned, and the propertyless have been told they are “free” to negotiate. This is kind of like a child being born into a private prison system and then being told, “You are free to do what the prison allows you to do.” What a garbage definition of freedom. The real philosophical question comes before all of that: who had the right to divide the world this way in the first place?
And herein lies the central problem. If a property claim is legitimate, then it must be more than a historical accident. It must be more than first possession (i.e. – first past the post). It must be more than conquest. It must be more than inheritance. It must be more than “my ancestor got there first,” “my company purchased it,” “the state recognized it,” or “I can afford to defend it.” Those may explain how a property claim came to exist, but they do not by themselves show that the claim is morally justified.
Any serious theory of freedom must account for more than the ability of happenstance of owners. It must also account for the freedom of those born into a world already owned by others. It must ask whether people have genuine access to the conditions necessary for human life and flourishing. It must ask whether people are subject to arbitrary domination, whether from the state, corporations, landlords, employers, inherited wealth, private security forces, or any other power capable of controlling their lives.
This does not mean that no property rights should exist. It does not mean that individuals should have no homes, possessions, tools, businesses, farms, savings, or personal claims. The point is not to erase every distinction between mine and yours. The point is that property rights are not self-justifying. They must be situated within a broader moral and social framework that recognizes the equal standing of persons and prevents ownership from becoming a weapon of domination.
A society in which a few people control the basic conditions under which everyone else must live is not a free society simply because those few people are called “private owners” rather than kings. If the result is that most people must submit to owners in order to survive, then the language of liberty has become a mask for hierarchy.
This is why the New Planet example matters. It strips away the inherited assumptions and forces us to look at the issue at the beginning. Before the deeds, before the courts, before the police, before the banks, before the landlords, before the corporations, before the accumulated wealth, before all the ideological fog, there is a simple question: why should one person’s claim over the world bind everyone else?
Until that question is answered, the libertarian appeal to property rights remains incomplete. And if the answer is merely “because I got there first,” or “because I mixed my labor with it,” or “because I say so,” or “because I am rational,” or “because I will defend it,” then we are not dealing with a serious theory of liberty. We are dealing with domination that has learned to speak in the language of freedom.
Objections (Oncoming Traffic)
There are, of course, other objections the anarcho-capitalist may raise.
- “My property rights are grounded in self-ownership. I own myself; therefore I own my labor; therefore I own whatever I mix my labor with.”
But this does not get them nearly as far as they think it does. Even if we grant self-ownership for the sake of argument, it does not follow that a person can come to own an entire planet, river, forest, field, or mineral system merely by interacting with it. My body may be mine. My labor may be mine. But the external world is not my body. If I pick an apple, build a shelter, dig a well, or cultivate a garden, perhaps I have some claim to the product of that labor. But that is very different from saying I now own the entire ecosystem around it, or that every future person must pay me tribute to exist there.
The labor-mixing argument also has a strange magical quality to it. If I pour a can of minerals and fish food into the ocean, I do not thereby come to own the ocean. If I carve my initials into a tree, I do not thereby own the forest. If I walk across a continent, I do not thereby own the continent. Labor may generate some kind of claim, especially to improvements one has actually made, but it does not automatically generate absolute dominion over natural resources that one did not create.
- “But there are natural rights. Property rights exist prior to society. They do not need anyone’s agreement.”
But again, this is just an assertion masquerading as an argument. To say “I have a natural right to this property” is not enough. The question is: why should anyone else accept that claim? A moral claim is not made valid simply because someone announces it with confidence. If the libertarian says, “I have this right because I am a rational being,” the obvious response is: so is everyone else. Rational agency may ground equal moral consideration, but it does not obviously ground one person’s unilateral authority to control the material conditions of everyone else’s life.
In fact, if rationality grounds rights, it seems to point in the opposite direction. It suggests that all rational beings deserve justification, not domination. It suggests that no one may simply announce, “This world is mine, and you must pay me to live on it.” A right that exists only because one person asserts it is not a right. It is a preference backed by force.
- The anarcho-capitalist may then say, “But I am not merely asserting it. Homesteading establishes ownership. The first person to appropriate unowned land becomes its owner.”
But this just kicks the question back one step. Why should homesteading have that moral power? Why should first possession create permanent exclusion? Why should arriving first give one person authority over those who arrive later? The homesteading principle is not self-evident. It is a proposed rule. And like any proposed rule, it requires justification.
If ten people arrive on a new planet together, and one person says, “The rule is that whoever touches something first owns it forever,” the other nine are perfectly reasonable in asking, “Why should we accept that rule?” The rule is obviously convenient for the person who got there first, but that does not make it morally legitimate.
- “But without absolute private property, everything becomes chaos. People will just steal from each other.”
This is a false choice. The options are not absolute private property on one hand and total chaos on the other. A society can recognize personal property, homes, tools, possessions, businesses, farms, and legitimate claims of use without pretending that one person can morally own the basic conditions of life by mere declaration. The question is not whether any property should exist. The question is what kind of property, under what justification, with what limits, and for whose benefit.
There is a meaningful difference between owning your shoes, your guitar, your house, or the crops you grew, and owning the only river, the only fertile valley, the only mine, or the only habitable land. A serious theory of property has to recognize this difference. Anarcho-capitalism often erases it by treating all property claims as though they were morally equivalent.
- “If people do not like the property owner’s terms, they can leave.”
But this response only works when there is somewhere else to go. If all usable land and resources are already claimed, then “you can leave” becomes hollow. Leave to where? Another property owner’s domain? Another landlord’s terms? Another workplace controlled by someone else? The mere fact that a person can move from one privately controlled space to another does not prove that he is free in any robust sense of the term.
A person trapped in a room with ten doors is not free if every door leads to a different master.
- The anarcho-capitalist may also appeal to voluntary exchange: “No one is forcing anyone. If someone pays rent, accepts a job, or buys access to resources, that is voluntary.”
But “voluntary” becomes a very thin concept when the alternative is deprivation. If one person controls the water and everyone else must pay him or die of thirst, the transaction may be formally voluntary in the narrow sense that no one physically moved their hand for them. But morally, the situation is coercive. The background conditions matter. A choice made under artificial exclusion from the necessities of life is not meaningfully free merely because it takes the form of a contract.
This is where anarcho-capitalism often plays a shell game. It condemns state coercion while ignoring private coercion. It sees taxation as force, but it does not see rent, wage dependence, resource monopoly, inherited ownership, enclosure, or exclusion as force. But exclusion is force. The fence is force. The lock is force. The armed guard is force. The threat of being removed from the means of survival is force. Calling it “property rights” does not make the coercion disappear.
- “But private defense agencies could protect property rights without a state.”
But then the question becomes: whose property rights, according to which rules, enforced by whom, and accountable to whom? If multiple armed agencies disagree about ownership, contract, punishment, or restitution, then either one becomes dominant, in which case it begins to resemble a state, or they compete violently, in which case we have privatized warfare. The problem has not been solved. It has simply been outsourced to whoever can pay for the strongest private army.
This is why anarcho-capitalism so easily collapses into neo-feudalism. In theory, everyone is a sovereign individual. In practice, those with the most wealth purchase the most protection, the most land, the most influence, and the most effective violence. Everyone else becomes dependent on private powers that are not democratically accountable.
- Another objection may be more bluntly metaethical: “There is no deeper justification needed. Rights just are what they are. I have the right to property because I say I do, because I am rational, because I own myself, or because aggression is wrong.”
But this is precisely the problem. A moral claim that imposes duties on others requires public justification. If I say, “You are morally required to stay off this land, pay me rent, obey my rules, and recognize my authority,” I owe you an explanation. Merely say, “Because I have right.” is question-begging. The question is why (and how) this alleged right exists, why it has this scope, and why it should bind everyone else.
Non-“Aggression” and the “Initiation” of Force
Yet another predictable response from the anarcho-capitalist is an appeal to the Non-Aggression Principle, or “NAP”:
- “But see, I go by the NAP. If you initiate aggression against me, I have the right to defend myself against that aggression by the use of force.”
But this immediately raises the question: what counts as “aggression”? What does that word actually mean?
Anarcho-capitalists and right-wing libertarians often play fast and loose with this term. On the surface, the NAP sounds obvious and reasonable: do not initiate force against peaceful people. Fine. Most people can agree with that in some general sense. But the difficulty appears the moment we ask what counts as “force,” what counts as “peaceful,” and what counts as “aggression.”
Is taxation aggression? Is eviction aggression? Is enclosing the only freshwater source aggression? Is threatening starving people with violence if they take food from unused land aggression? Is crossing a fence aggression? Is building the fence aggression? Is resisting exclusion aggression? Is the original act of exclusion aggression?
The NAP does not answer these questions by itself. It depends entirely on a prior theory of property, ownership, rights, and legitimacy. If that prior theory is unjustified, then the NAP merely protects whatever unjust distribution already exists.
Suppose the Anarcho-Astronaut declares the new planet his private property. The others reject his claim and begin drinking from a nearby river. He says, “You are aggressing against me by trespassing on my land and stealing my water.”
But the others can reasonably respond, “You have not shown that this is your land or your water in the first place.”
That is the problem. The NAP cannot tell us whether their action is aggression until we already know whether his property claim is legitimate. If the planet really is his, then perhaps their use of the river counts as trespass. But if the planet is not his, then his attempt to exclude them from the river may itself be the act of aggression.
So the NAP does not solve the dispute. It presupposes a solution to the dispute.
This is why the principle is far less useful than anarcho-capitalists pretend. It sounds like a neutral rule against violence, but in practice it smuggles in an entire theory of property. It says, “Do not aggress against people or their property,” while leaving unanswered the most important question: what makes something legitimately their property?
So when the libertarian says, “You are aggressing against me by using my land,” the correct response is: “You have not yet shown that it is rightfully yours, or how that alleged right was established in the first place.”
That is the central issue. Anarcho-capitalism tries to begin the moral conversation after property has already been assigned. It wants to start the game after the board has been divided, the deeds have been written, the fences have been built, the security guards have been hired, and the propertyless have been told they are free to choose among owners. But the real philosophical question comes before all of that: how were these claims justified in the first place?
If ownership has not been justified, then “defense of property” may simply be aggression in disguise. A man who fences off the only freshwater source and threatens to shoot anyone who drinks from it may call his violence “self-defense,” but that does not make it so. If his claim to the water is illegitimate, then his exclusion of others is not defense. It is domination.
This is where the libertarian use of “aggression” becomes selective. Taxation is aggression. Regulation is aggression. Redistribution is aggression. But enclosure is not aggression. Eviction is not aggression. Charging rent for access to land one did not create is not aggression. Threatening desperate people who attempt to use unused resources is not aggression. Private security removing the poor from spaces necessary for survival is not aggression. Somehow, the word “aggression” is almost always aimed at challenges to property, but rarely at the property system itself.
But why accept that framing?
If a person claims the Earth, or part of the Earth, or the only usable resources in a region, and then uses force to exclude everyone else, why is that not aggression? Why is the first act of exclusion treated as peaceful, while resistance to that exclusion is treated as violence? Why does the fence count as neutral, but the starving person crossing the fence counts as aggression? Why does the deed count as peaceful, but the dispossessed person questioning the deed counts as a threat?
The answer is that the NAP depends entirely on the legitimacy of the background property arrangement. If the property arrangement is just, then force used to defend it may be defensive. But if the property arrangement is unjust, arbitrary, coercive, or historically rooted in conquest and exclusion, then force used to preserve it may be the very thing the NAP claims to oppose.
This means the anarcho-capitalist cannot simply say, “I have a right to defend my property.” The prior question is: why is it your property? Until that question is answered, the appeal to self-defense is premature.
Consider again the New Planet example. If the Anarcho-Astronaut points a weapon at the others and says, “Leave my land or I will defend myself,” he has not avoided aggression. He has merely renamed his aggression as defense. He is not defending a legitimate moral order. He is attempting to create an order by force and then demanding that everyone else treat his violence as morally sacred.
This is the shell game. First, he asserts ownership. Second, he defines any violation of that asserted ownership as aggression. Third, he claims a right to use force against that aggression. But the entire argument depends on the first step, and the first step has not been justified.
So the response to the NAP objection is simple:
You cannot define aggression by appeal to property rights until you have already justified the property rights.
Otherwise, the NAP becomes circular. It says, “It is wrong to violate my property because violating my property is aggression, and it is aggression because it violates my property.” That is not a moral theory. That is a loop.
If property rights are legitimate, they must be more than declarations. They must be more than “I got here first.” They must be more than “I mixed my labor with it.” They must be more than “I am rational, therefore this is mine.” They must be embedded in a moral and legal order that recognizes the equal standing of persons, protects individuals from arbitrary seizure, and prevents the basic conditions of life from being converted into instruments of domination.
Otherwise, “liberty” becomes little more than the freedom of the first claimant, the strongest enforcer, or the richest owner to rule everyone else.
A serious theory of liberty must do more than condemn aggression after ownership has already been assigned. It must ask whether the original assignment of ownership was legitimate, whether the resulting system subjects people to domination, and whether the so-called “defense” of property is actually defending freedom or merely protecting hierarchy.
A Useless Term
Another problem concerns the phrase “the initiation of force.” Anarcho-capitalists often use this phrase as though its meaning were obvious, when it is not obvious at all. In fact, unless carefully defined, the phrase is either morally impotent or nearly meaningless.
What does it mean to “initiate force”? If it simply means to be the first cause of some physical pressure, movement, harm, or interference, then countless things “initiate force” all the time. A hurricane initiates force. A disease initiates force. A falling rock initiates force. A bear breaking into a chicken coop initiates force. Parents deciding to bring a child into existence initiates a causal chain that the child never consented to. The initial expansion of the known universe itself initiated force, energy, matter, motion, and conditions no anarcho-capitalist consented to.
But surely this is not what the anarcho-capitalist means. They do not usually think a hurricane violates the NAP. They do not think gravity commits aggression. They do not think the Big Bang morally aggressed against them. So “initiation of force” cannot merely mean “the first physical cause of some unwanted effect.” If that is all it means, the phrase becomes too broad to be useful.
The anarcho-capitalist might respond, “No, the initiation of force only counts when it is done by rational agents.”
But now we have moved from a physical claim to a normative claim (i.e. – we have moved from the topic of physics to the topic of normative ethics, and other related fields, in philosophy). The issue is no longer merely force. The issue is agency, responsibility, intention, moral standing, rights, duties, and blame. At that point, the Ancap needs to provide an argument. Why should the concept be limited in precisely that way? What counts as a rational agent? Does moral responsibility require libertarian free will? Does it require the ability to have done otherwise? Does it require responsiveness to reasons? Does it require conscious intent? And why should this theory of agency be accepted by everyone else?
The ANCAP cannot simply define the problem away. If the NAP depends on a distinction between morally responsible agents and non-responsible natural causes, then the NAP depends on a prior theory of moral responsibility. That theory needs to be defended. It cannot just be asserted or assumed.
Consider an example. Suppose the anarcho-capitalist legitimately owns a rural property in Alaska. One day, a large Kodiak bear wanders across the property line, breaks into his chicken coop, eats several chickens, and then starts eating fruit from his trees. In a plain causal sense, the bear has initiated force. It has crossed a boundary, damaged property, consumed resources, and interfered with the owner’s plans.
But has the bear committed aggression in the moral sense?
If the anarcho-capitalist says yes, then the term “aggression” has become incoherent. Is the bear a rights-violator? Is the bear morally culpable? Did the bear consent to the property system? Does the bear recognize land titles? Does the bear understand the non-aggression principle? Does the bear have libertarian free will? Does the bear possess the kind of agency required to be held morally responsible?
Surely not.
Of course, the property owner may still have practical reasons to use force against the bear. He may defend his chickens, protect his home, scare the bear away, or, in extreme cases, kill the bear to protect himself or others. But that is not because the bear has morally aggressed against him in the same way a person might. It is because the bear poses a threat. The situation is one of danger management, not moral blame (similar to protecting against an avalanche that is rolling down a hill toward your home).
This distinction matters because it shows that “force” and “aggression” are not the same thing. Force is a physical concept. Aggression is a moral concept. To call something aggression is not merely to say that force occurred. It is to say that force occurred wrongfully, by an agent who was morally bound not to do it.
But once we admit that, the NAP is no longer a simple axiom. It is the conclusion of a much larger moral theory. Before the anarcho-capitalist can say, “You initiated aggression,” they must first explain what aggression is, what rights exist, what they are, who has them, what counts as violating them, what kind of agency is required, and why their property theory is legitimate in the first place.
This creates a serious problem for the slogan. Again, if “initiation of force” is defined broadly in causal terms, then bears, avalanches, storms, diseases, births, and cosmic events all initiate force, making the concept morally useless. But if “initiation of force” is defined narrowly in moral terms, then the anarcho-capitalist must defend a whole set of controversial assumptions about moral agency, responsibility, freedom, and rights (which will likely be a very difficult hill for him/her to climb).
Either way, the phrase does not do the work they want it to do.
This becomes especially important when we return to property. Suppose a starving person crosses a fence to drink from a stream that a landholder claims as private property. The Ancap says, “That person initiated force by trespassing!” But why is crossing the fence the first relevant act of force? Why not the fence itself? Why not the original exclusion from the water? Why not the threat of violence used to keep others away from a resource necessary for life?
Under this usage, the phrase “initiation of force” pretends to identify the morally first act, but it often just identifies the first act that disrupts an already-assumed property arrangement. It begins the story exactly where the property holder wants the story to begin, when in fact that is the very thing under question.
That is why the concept is so slippery. The anarcho-capitalist says, “I oppose the initiation of force,” but what they often mean is, “I oppose force that interferes with the property claims I already recognize as legitimate.” But the legitimacy of those property claims is the very thing under dispute.
So again, the NAP begins too late. It starts after ownership has already been assigned, after the fences have already been built, after the land has already been claimed, and after the propertyless have already been told what counts as aggression. But if those background claims have not been justified, then the accusation of “initiating force” is premature.
The proper response is: you have not yet shown that this is aggression, because you have neither defined the term aggression in the morally salient sense nor have you shown that said property is actually yours.
Aaron Lietz
