—–Original Message—–
From: SG
Sent: Wed 7/20/2016 6:47 AM
To: Walter Block
Subject: LRC Blog Post on Homesteading
Walter: I want to quibble with one statement you made in today’s LRC blog post on the above topic, where you said “Second, surely, we “own our labor” in the sense that it would be a rights violation for anyone to steal our labor services from us, such as in coerced slavery, right?” The violation that results from coerced slavery is not an invasion of one’s “property in one’s labor”, but the physical aggression or the threat thereof against one’s body. You cannot have property rights in something conceptual, like labor. If you have property rights in your labor, then presumably you would have property in what your labor produces (absent a contract to the contrary), which (per Kinsella) leads to the erroneous view of having property rights in intellectual “property” such as ideas, information, literature, music, etc. Labor is simply the acts your body performs, not a thing capable of ownership itself; when you labor under agreement for someone else you are simply agreeing to use your body to do something they want, but in no sense can you sell – transfer ownership – of your labor. In fact, each act of labor dissipates upon its occurrence; there can be no labor “thing” which is capable of ownership, transfer or abandonment. Or, using Hoppean terminology, you can’t emborder your labor, marking it off to the world as objectively yours. SG

Dear SG: I quibble with this statement of yours: “If you have property rights in your labor, then presumably you would have property in what your labor produces (absent a contract to the contrary), which (per Kinsella) leads to the erroneous view of having property rights in intellectual “property” I’m a Kinsellian on IP. But, I quarrel with your “presumably.” I don’t think it logically follows. If your labor creates something scarce, a pot, or a shoe, then, yes, you own it, assuming you first owned the raw material which went into these things. But, if your labor created something non scarce, like an idea, then, I don’t see why I can’t maintain both that you own your labor and that you don’t own this particular product of it. In my view slavery is BOTH an invasion of one’s “property in one’s labor”, and ALSO the physical aggression or the threat thereof against one’s body.

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