On Exclusion
Private property rights are based on excluding other people, but people should be free to go where they please in public spaces.
Dear Friends,
The late Kinky Friedman had a talent for clear thinking and clear prose. If you take the few minutes to listen to “We Reserve Service to You,” you’ll understand more about libertarianism and discrimination than you would after reading thousands of pages of philosophy books.
Give it a listen, I’ll wait.
What he’s covering in that song is the right to exclude another person from a place and how far we should go to enforce that right with our shared resources.
On Elon Musk’s website, there’s a thread of posts outlining a libertarian view on private property rights and the laws against discrimination in public accomodations. Since that website is one many people no longer patronize, I’ll reproduce the thread here in essay form.
In a free society, public spaces are not exclusive of any peaceful people. You can walk down the street no matter your immigration status, your age, your race, your religion, or really any status at all. Space that can't exclude, a basic working definition of public property.
Private property is based on exclusion. You can't walk into my house without my permission. Doing so violates the law and the government will enforce those laws on my behalf using shared resources for an enforcement mechanism. Property rights are not without costs.
Everybody else pays for your right to exclude people from your private property. We pay for land registries that keep records of who owns what property. We pay for courts to adjudicate disputes as a neutral that can be trusted by people who have conflicts. We pay for cops.
In the past, we paid for the property right of people to own other human beings. We paid for armed agents to track those people down and return them to their property owners. We paid for the recording of human chattel ownership, for judges to decide to keep people enslaved.
We used to pay to record racist covenants on land deeds, to exclude Jews or blacks or Chinese or various other racial & ethnic groups from owning shelter in certain places. We paid to enforce segregation, to exclude people from public stores because of their race. It wasn't free.
We no longer pay for racists and bigots to exclude people from businesses that are open to the public, because paying for infringements on the liberty to go into public spaces is contrary to American constitutional values. Libertarians don't want to go back to that. Period.
There are people who claim to be “libertarian” whose primary priority in life is defending the rights of segregationists and bigots to exclude other people from schools and businesses.
In case you forgot what that looked like, I found a picture:
They reject the liberty of people to be able to go where they please in a free society, without worry that the law and police and courts will be used to hurt them. We shouldn’t spend tax dollars to kick black folks out of stores or stop Muslims from buying the house down the street.
Libertarians don’t want to go back to that society.
MAGA Republicans want to go back. They demonstrate that they are only for the liberty of those they already agree with, those who look like them or pray like them or hate like them.
The Hard Rock Cafe has a good philosophy, “Love All, Serve All.” It’s a good way to run a business and a good way to run a country. All are welcome here.
We should exclude as few people as possible from as few places as possible.
Enjoy the week ahead and do what you can to help someone else.
Yours truly,
Nick
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