> I'm just skeptical of a centralized authoritative body sanctioned to use force can [do better than enforcing property rights].
I disagree but this is not what I was calling the extremist position. If you are skeptical that there are better ways of achieving liberty than enforcing property rights then you still acknowledge that the fundamental desirable quantity is something other than the property rights themselves. You admit the possibility, as I believe any reasonable person would, libertarian or not, that under some circumstances the connection between enforced property rights and the underlying good may occasionally break down and that you must therefore always ask yourself if enforcing a particular notion of property in a particular instance is a good idea -- even if you tend to lean one way or the other by default.
(The "particular notion of property," by the way, is the bit that is especially amusing to watch libertarians dance around. It's possible to construct notions of property to make nearly anything seem reasonable or unreasonable, revealing the concept to be about as subjective as any other utility metric. But I digress.)
On the other hand if you take the position that property rights are a fundamental good in and of themselves, then you close your ears to arguments like "X company is using Y strategy to take Z's money without adding net value to the situation. They should be stopped." I don't think that's reasonable. People find loopholes in the system all the time and if actions weren't taken to stop them the world would be a miserable place even fuller of monopolies than it is today.
I agree that property rights are not as objective as some would like to believe but there are some clever alternative methods to solve disputes. For instance, Ronald Coase addressed this issue in an article called "The Problem With Social Cost"
> A candy maker had had the same property for over 60 years when a doctor moved next door. After eight years passed without incident between them, the the doctor built a consulting room right against the confectioner’s kitchen. The doctor then found that the noise from the confectioner’s equipment interfered with the doctor’s ability to work, and in particular to hear with a stethoscope. The doctor filed suit to force the confectioner to stop using his equipment. The court recognized that the confectioner might suffer some hardship – thus admitting to the reciprocal nature of harm that Coase would later recognize – but it argued that to avoid even greater (unspecified) individual hardship and inhibiting land development for residential use, the confectioner must stop
Coase proposed considering how the parties might settle the dispute in a market transaction once the court made its findings; for space reasons I will present a simplified version of Coase’s argument. Though the doctor had won, in a market settlement he would be willing to allow the machinery to continue to operate were the confectioner to pay the doctor a sum that was greater than the doctor’s loss of income from having to either move or install sound abatement material. Conversely, had the confectioner won, in a market settlement he would have been willing to accept payment from the doctor to stop using the noisy machinery if the amount were greater than the confectioner’s costs to move the equipment or install sound abatement material.
In difference with Pigou, for Coase the general principle in cases of damage is that each case should be considered for its particular circumstances: “When an economist is comparing alternative social arrangements, the proper procedure is to compare the total social product yielded by these different arrangements” [0]
I'm not saying one solution is perfect but I am just more open-minded as to how disputes are handled without the use (or threat) of force. It's always interesting how a crowd like HN is so vehemently anti-authoritarian in some respects is willing to grant so much liberty to that same authority in some respects.
As far as "underlying good", that's above my pay-grade. To me, I just read that as either "think of the children" or "national security".
I disagree but this is not what I was calling the extremist position. If you are skeptical that there are better ways of achieving liberty than enforcing property rights then you still acknowledge that the fundamental desirable quantity is something other than the property rights themselves. You admit the possibility, as I believe any reasonable person would, libertarian or not, that under some circumstances the connection between enforced property rights and the underlying good may occasionally break down and that you must therefore always ask yourself if enforcing a particular notion of property in a particular instance is a good idea -- even if you tend to lean one way or the other by default.
(The "particular notion of property," by the way, is the bit that is especially amusing to watch libertarians dance around. It's possible to construct notions of property to make nearly anything seem reasonable or unreasonable, revealing the concept to be about as subjective as any other utility metric. But I digress.)
On the other hand if you take the position that property rights are a fundamental good in and of themselves, then you close your ears to arguments like "X company is using Y strategy to take Z's money without adding net value to the situation. They should be stopped." I don't think that's reasonable. People find loopholes in the system all the time and if actions weren't taken to stop them the world would be a miserable place even fuller of monopolies than it is today.