anarchists and property

More comments on the mutualist blog. I believe that everyone should have the freedom to choose their own government. And cooperatives are excellent models for how businesses can run. So I have a lot of sympathy for anarchists. But we disagree on the issue of property.

Every anarchist I have read says that we should own the land we work. I don't see any philosophically sound reason for that. And there are serious practical objections as well. Suppose we all owned what we worked:

• What if I decided to work our neighbor's lands? Would I then own his?
• What if my land is more fertile than my neighbors? So I work an hour a day and get fat, while he works 18 hours a day and starves. Is this fair?
• What if I invent a tractor. Does that count as working? What if I remote control my tractor from a hut at the side of the field? What if my hut is a hundred miles away, with a giant TV and I control a hundred tractors? Who draws the line?

Plainly an anarchist system would need some kind of government that would make decisions that people did not like. But these decisions would also be fundamentally inefficient.

Let's imagine that I am a lousy farmer but a fantastic organizer. I could organize people to be wealthier, happier, and so on. This would be hard work, perhaps unpopular, and highly risky, so why should I bother? I create vast profits tied to the land, but cannot benefit from my work, beyond what little I could persuade the owners/workers to pay in advance. So nobody takes risks with new ideas.

So even if we did create our anarchist utopia, it could not survive even in competition with capitalism, let alone a better system. In summary, I like anarchists, but I don't agree with their views on land ownership. I prefer the idea that property equals causality - see the web site for details.