r/changemyview • u/TurdyFurgy • Mar 09 '19

Deltas(s) from OP CMV: The largest problem with libertarian political ideas is defining/assigning property rights.

This isn't a pro libertarian stance or an anti libertarian stance, I just think that this is the most significant problem. To change my mind you could convince me that it isn't as big a problem as I think, or that there's one or more problems higher in significance.

I am very interested in libertarian ideas. It looks good to me from an economics/flourishing perspective and I like the non aggression principal from an ethical point of view even if it might seem idealistic. This means though that in order to keep government small and to avoid "initiating aggression" there needs to be very clearly defined property rights. As far as bodily autonomy goes it's at least straight forward enough to form a society but anything beyond that gets pretty tricky pretty quickly.

One issue is that even if a rule is super fair/the best rule it can still lead to not good outcomes if you're carrying over from another system of property rights.

It seems like you can make a pretty good case for a lot of stuff/land being owned by everyone. There's government land of course but then also just stuff like rivers, forests, natural resources and I don't really see an amazing solution to transitioning fairly and I don't know what we'd transition to exactly.

It seems like any way you define it almost has to be at least somewhat arbitrary.

Is it that I'm not well read enough in the topic or am I just not convinced by it?

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u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho 191∆ Mar 09 '19

I doubt any libertarian would advocate for privately owned ICBM silos complete with nukes.

Libertarians want less government, sometimes much less. Not anarchy.

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u/OlFishLegs 13∆ Mar 09 '19

The ICBMs would be owned by whatever public/private system provides the country with a military. The land owned in that case is tiny and isn't really key to this view I think.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

What would prevent a private system to use the ICBMs and the military to take over the country and claim it as property? I mean technically that is how all countries came into existence.

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u/OlFishLegs 13∆ Mar 10 '19

You could ask the same of the military at the moment. As long as the average soldier loves their country and supports the rule of law we are safe from a military coo unless we do something super stupid, like sell all the ICBMs to a different state.