Munger for NC Governor--2008!!

Recording the campaign activities, events, and happenings of the Munger for Governor campaign.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Interesting Argument about Property

Scott over at Catallarchy has an interesting post on property rights. Obviously, fundamental rights, including (especially?) those involving property are very close the cornerstone of libertarian claims about the good society.

There are two sorts of arguments, as Scott notes. One is the purely moral claim, that rights are natural, or have some other basis that means that they must be respected. The second is consequentialist.

The more hardened members of the American left, perhaps represented best by the members of the Critical Legal Studies movement, have developed a variety of surprisingly powerful arguments against libertarianism and classical liberalism proper. Whereas their forebears, such as Robert Hale and other legal realists, attacked the the philosophy of classical liberalism on more moral grounds, the critical legal scholars have aimed their attacks at a new defensive libertarian mantra, the consequentialist argument, often given voice by practitioners of Posnerian Law and Economics.

I have always had some mishmash of these two beliefs (except when I was an idiot Maoist, of course).

What do you think of Scott's argument? ATSRTWT