>From: Bryan Caplan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >For some reason this didn't seem to post on Friday. > >Incidentally, while staying in a Lake Arrowhead hotel room this weekend, >I noticed the incompatibility of mutualism with renting hotel rooms. >The alternative would be to have people buy their hotel room, then >re-sell it when they leave. Same basic result as you have today, but >highly inconvenient if you need to get a $50,000 loan just to sleep >overnight somewhere.
Like speculations on seizing land left fallow or whose owner goes away on a 2-week vacation, this requires putting the most inconvenient spin possible on mutualist rules. Actual mutualists might not be so accomodating to their discreditors. Lockean homesteading theory, if taken to a reductio ad absurdum, can likewise produce a lot of howlers. A mutualist system of property ownership, like a Lockean one, would require social consensus on the "rules of the game," and I doubt most communities would be averse to some kind of guest-hostel cooperative. Ironically, many anarcho-capitalists I've discussed these issues with are much less averse to mutualist occupancy tenure than to Geoist rent collection, viewing the former as having a plausible claim to being a genuine form of private property. Kevin Carson wrote: >>I meant slum occupants would simply become de facto owners, and stop >>paying >>rent--was that your understanding? >That's what it sounded like, but it was hard to believe anyone would say it. You did author the "Anarchist Theory FAQ," didn't you? So you must be aware that the proposal is not original with me. It was shared by Proudhon, Tucker, and many of the other thinkers you dealt with there. >>In the transition to a mutualist society >>and the expropriation of landlords, I'd be willing to negotiate some >>settlement in which landlords were paid up to the equivalent of what they >>could have saved from wage labor during their lifetime. Many wage earners >>are frugal and put their savings into small rental properties as a form of >>retirement investment, and I'd hate to see anyone robbed of the actual >>proceeds of his labor. But big slumlords and owners of vast tracts of >>land >>would be SOL. >So your proposal amounts to the following: >1. Partial expropriation of existing landlords. >2. A legal maximum rent of 0 forever afterwards. >After all, no one would ever build new rental property after your >proposal was implemented. The second part of the proposal just amounts >to a much more extreme version of New York rent control. People would >get around the policy by switching to owner occupancy, and anyone >lacking in current resources who doesn't qualify for a loan would be >homeless. Wonderful. One reason people have to rent under the current system is that land ownership has been preempted by absentee landlords and real estate speculators, and they have to pay tribute for access to it--instead of homesteading it. >Of course, if landlords had any warning, they would evict all of their >tenants and sell outright ownership - once against mimicing the long->run >response to rent control. A landlord occupying, say, a hundred family dwelling units, would have a hard time establishing his "occupancy and use" based ownership to the satisfaction of a mutualist community. Most likely, he'd be recognized as owner of whatever unit he occupied, and the rest would be homesteaded. >Frankly, this is one of the silliest ideas I've heard someone advocate >in a long time. Thanks, but I can't take all the credit for myself. As you surely know from editing the "Anarchist Theory FAQ," these ideas aren't original with me. They were shared by some of the people you treat as "right anarchist" precursors of anarcho-capitalism, in fact. _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
