The right answer, it turns out, is almost total agreement: “there are very few conclusions or remarks to which we are disposed to object.” And the one point for which Hodgskin does take Spencer to task is Spencer’s rejection of private ownership of land.

It’s almost as though traditional political categories are mistaken somehow ….

Incidentally, although Hodgskin makes some good points in his discussion of land (some of which are reminiscent of Dave Schmidtz’s work), I don’t think he quite sees the force of Spencer’s arguments. Spencer worries that if private land ownership were permissible, the entire earth could theoretically fall into private hands, whereupon the nonowners would be at the mercy of the owners – since while on other people’s property you have to do as they say or leave, and when leaving is impossible all that’s left is doing what they say. (Note, by the way, that Spencer’s worry is not that this would be a likely result. His worry is rather that the principle of land ownership gives the wrong answer to the question of what would be legitimate in the described situation; it says that the owners’ demanding whatever they like of the nonowners would be just, while the Law of Equal Freedom says it would be unjust.)

To this Hodgskin replies that nonowners would not be at the mercy of owners, because there are other ways of making a living besides farming: “what use is possession of the land to seamen, locomotive carriage drivers, and waggoners?” But Spencer’s point is not merely that nonowners would need permission from the owners in order to cultivate the soil; his point is that nonowners would need permission from the owners in order to sit, stand, or move. Hence Hodgskin’s waggoners and locomotive carriage drivers will be at the mercy of those whose land they have to cross, as will seamen if they need trees to make their ships out of. (At any rate, the force of Spencer’s thought experiment should cover hypothetical situations without navigable waters.)

Hodgskin is also unimpressed by Spencer’s insistence that nonowners would be at the mercy of owners, since, as Hodgskin points out, we are all at each other’s mercy anyway. But this likewise misses Spencer’s point, which is not the pragmatic worry that nonowners would in fact be at the mercy of owners, but rather the ethical worry that nonowners would be legitimately at the mercy of owners. My life may depend on other people’s not killing me, but my right to life does not.

I think Spencer’s worry can be answered, but the key to answering it lies in challenging the claim that if all the earth were private property, the owners could then demand whatever they wanted of the nonowners. As I’ve argued elsewhere:

Even when A has a right to recover some property in B’s possession, there are limits to the harm A can inflict in exercising this right. If you swallow my diamond ring, I do not have the right to cut you open to get it out, possibly killing you or causing serious injury. If you are trespassing on my property, I do not have the right to shove you off my front lawn and onto the street at the precise moment that a truck is coming that would flatten you. … Hence Spencer is mistaken in thinking that under private ownership his hypothetical “lords of the soil” could legitimately deny nonowners a right to exist ….

Spencer argues against trying to solve the problem by building into property rights an exception clause for extreme situations. I don’t have quite the same horror of exception clauses that he has, but in any case my suggestion is not an exception clause, but rather a proportionality requirement that is always in force.

A point I’m surprised that Hodgskin didn’t raise is the difficulty of reconciling Spencer’s views on land with his “right to ignore the state.” If everyone pays rent to society for their land, who is authorised to collect that rent?

P.S. – I wish Hodgskin had elaborated on his “other points of difference” (he says there are a few, but none as major as the land issue).

A solar-powered plane has just completed a 26-hour flight, the nighttime portion of the flight being powered by the daytime portion – with power to spare.

With an average speed of 25 mph, solar-powered flight isn’t quite ready to render jet fuel obsolete; but it’s nice to see some progress on the power-sources-that-aren’t-depleted-by-use-and-don’t-cause-so-much-collateral-damage front.

[BP CEO Tony] Hayward took a break from overseeing the energy giant’s efforts to contain the undersea leak so he could watch his 52-foot yacht “Bob” participate in the J. P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race.

If you put that description in fiction people would say: “the J. P. Morgan reference is too much; your satire is too heavy-handed.”

• Darian Worden here,

• Sheldon Richman here,
• Gary Chartier here,
• Alex Knight here, and
• Kevin Carson here, here, and here.

Please let me know in the comments section about other good commentaries I may have missed!

On a related note, this sign from an actual BP station is priceless. (The pic below is just a detail; click to see the whole thing.)

Oops! Our President Incarnate sends his flunkies to Afghanistan to carry out a dangerous and ill-conceived project without adequate safeguards, and a disaster results that claims twenty-three lives. I look forward to the President’s stern lecture to himself.

An economics prize for Krugman, a peace prize for Obama – they really give Nobels away like candy these days. (Yes, I know those two prizes technically come from different organisations.)

The changes look to me to be a mixed bag. There are some good things – most notably, the Greens have backed away from the idea of having scientists be legally required to swear an Oath to the Urth! On the down side, though, they’ve apparently made their peace with vivisection. (I don’t think vivisection should be banned by force of law, but I certainly favour opposing it.)

But the chief change seems to be a shift from a “regulate conventional medicine but not alternative medicine” position to a “regulate all medicine” position – a move in the direction of greater consistency, but an improvement in no other way.

A related story claims that “alternative medicine by definition is medicine that has been proven not to work, or not been proven to work. Alternative medicine that works is called ‘medicine’” – an assertion that belongs in the same category as the quondam Attorney General’s apothegm “you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”

Hmm, I wonder what the definition of an alternative party is.

Lester writes, inter alia:

What makes the business corporation in this movie so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale numbers of the inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property. … Gee, I thought, I can’t think of a single business corporation that engages in those particular practices. Office Depot doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Dell Inc don’t either.

So in the comments section I responded:

I can’t think of many businesses that engage in those particular practices all on their own. But I can think of plenty of businesses that have either gotten governments to engage in those practices on their behalf (examples range from the East India Company to the United Fruit/Brands Company) or have themselves engaged in those practices on some government’s behalf (e.g. Blackwater, DynCorp).