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Are Antistate Libertarians Hypocrites Re: Voluntary Agreements?

Is the current State just an enormous and (highly dysfunctional) "ancap voluntaryist enclave" already, and libertarians are actually the NAP-breaking enemies of civil agreement?

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Sneak-peak at the ending/TL;DR: Is the current State just an enormous and (highly dysfunctional) "ancap voluntaryist enclave" already, and libertarians are actually the NAP-breaking enemies of civil agreement?

If we anti-state voluntaryists are to be intellectually honest, we need to confront something. I'm trying to work though this and am seeking thoughtful discussion and suggestions for further reading on this topic. Read on for a kind of extreme devil's advocate thought experiment:

Say I set up an anarchocapitalist/voluntaryist enclave on some previously unclaimed-by-any-State-or-peoples land. A lot of land. It's all going well, we've got plenty of "members" who choose to live on my land under mutually-agreed-upon terms, we've got lots of resources and various "governing" and organizing principles and systems. All voluntarily subscribed.
Some people express interest in more thoroughly using some of my property, so I agree to let them do so, under certain terms, with certain behaviors forbidden and with a kind of "rental" fee paid to me yearly based on the particular land and their particular activities. Again, they agree. We can say they "own" the property, but not exactly purely because there are stipulations that I set that they agreed to. Fine.
This turns out to be popular and is repeated a lot of times until most of MY land is being used by a lot of people in this way, according to voluntary agreements.

A few generations pass. The children of some of these "tenants" decide they no longer want to honor the agreement fully. They want to do whatever they want, against my wishes and our contract; also they don't want to pay me anymore either (they call it "theft"!).
Trying to keep the peace, I tell them that this is a voluntary agreement and they're free to leave if they no longer want to honor it. But they definitely can't just break the terms, squat on my property and not expect me to do anything about it...
In fact, our agreement very clearly states that my own contracted collection and protection agencies will work on my behalf to make me whole if the agreement is broken and the perpetrator insists on belligerence. So essentially even the contract enforcement via use of force was voluntarily agreed to and thus not "coercive".
Being a nice, reasonable guy (and one who would like to attract other nice, reasonable "tenants" in the future), I repeatedly remind these agitators that they can and should vacate if they don't like the terms of the agreement.

And get this, they say, "I was born here, I like it here! I'm not going anywhere! And besides, nobody else with property will let me do whatever I want on their land either! Anyway, the other places suck - it's better here; there are more resources, better neighbors, everyone speaks my language, you are usually a decent "landlord"... So, no, I'm not leaving. And on top of that, this property is now mine, not yours. If you send your protection or collection agencies out to enforce our agreement, I'll kick up a lot of shit and maybe even get some other "tenants" to feel the same way - and we might all band together. Then we'll fucking steal more land and redistribute it amongst ourselves and perhaps even attack you, physically... Come at me, bro."

...So what do I do? I've got a bunch of contract-breaking bandits who say our agreement is actually theft of their shit, and they insist they have a right to my property. I think maybe they're communists now? If I invoke the enforcement clause of our contract, they'll accuse me of being the "authoritarian", thieving bad guy!
I thought we were running a voluntaryist utopia, but it got infested with a bunch of property-rights-disrespecting, violent collectivists!

Right, okay, so, in the above fiction, "I" am "The State" as we know it today and my "tenants" are extreme libertarian, anti-state, freedom maximalists. Their argument for personal liberty rests upon breaking a voluntary agreement because it suits them. And they refuse to "just leave peacefully" mostly because they are cozy where they are (and "there's nowhere else to go", as if that's my problem.)

Put another way: Is the current State just an enormous and (highly dysfunctional) "ancap voluntaryist enclave" already, and freedom advocates are actually the NAP-breaking enemies of civil agreement?

So, back in the real world, are antistate voluntaryists guilty of violating their own core principle at moment zero of their philosophy?
Below are some items I see as contributing to the ambiguity and antagonizing the problem. For almost all of them, I don't think a resolution is obvious in "libertarian logic", but I hope others will join in the discussion. I think it's really important to address this head on in order to be honest and ethically/logically consistent.

  • "Citizenship" (the "tenants" of the thought experiment) is something one is involuntarily born into. A new immigrant wouldn't have a leg to stand on pulling the same move. Just like in an imagined ancap enclave, if you agree to a private place's terms upon entry, it is indefensible - in libertarian logic - to break the terms. Being born under an agreement is a confounding factor
  • "Private property" ownership (jurisdiction-specific) terms. How much is a property deed contingent upon legal stipulations set forth by the State? "etc. etc. pursuit to all local and federal laws, etc etc". We use the term "own" for land, but this is not the same sort of Platonic ideal "own" that you encounter in libertarian philosophy (nor internet poasts)
  • "The State" is NOT, in fact a person who owns property, nor an explicit signatory on "citizenship contracts". But there's nothing - in libertarian philosophy, logic and ethics - that disallows "deferring" or establishing abstract bodies and agreements that deal on behalf of the parties in an agreement. Power of attorney, etc. (Lysander Spooner's work comes to mind here)
  • If a voluntary agreement is in place between parties A and B, and the agreement includes terms for what happens to the physical property of A and B after their demise or exit from the system - are those 2nd and 3rd party future terms "valid" for the eventual individuals who have to deal with them? Is their validity up for renegotiation later? How, and by whom?!

In the bullets above, I've reached the "I just wrote a bunch of stuff and confused myself, now I'll try to list some things that I think I'm confused about so I can think and read about them more" stage of thinking aloud. I'll stop there.
If you have thoughts on this (agree, disagree, have solved this and will point me to prior art, want to tell me I'm retarded, etc.), please contact me on nostr or reply to this post.

Replies (10)

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Really liked this post. I'm too new and unversed in the literature to add much of value, but that won't stop me from jotting down a couple thoughts anyway. On item 1, that does seem to be a problem given a newborn can't voluntarily agree to something. So would seem cross-generational contracts can't work. Not sure I fully understand #2, but seems connected to something I was gonna comment on regarding "homesteading" as rule for initial ownership. In your hypothetical, you seem to be laying claim to far more land than you can possibly be making economic use of. In the real world, more of a collective of owners, it's a little trickier I suppose. Not really sure, feel like I'm missing something. An issue with #3 seems connected to #1, in that the State outlives the set of individuals who make up the initial collective. It has uncertain future makeup as well. Guess I'd need more time to think about it. Not even sure I've replied with anything meaningful, but I'll leave it in since I've already typed it out. Thought-provoking stuff!
↩ replying to YODL
these are excellent points! glad you typed them _and_ hit submit. I have the same intuition about "not being able to homestead that much land". ..with a few reservations: 1. what if i can?! i enter into a bunch of voluntary agreements with a whole mess of farmers and small local groups (i dunno, call them "states". they're kinda united together...) and they "homestead" the land "on my behalf" without ever taking ownership of the land themselves. we agree to a larger structure that says they are beholden to certain restrictions I wrote down one day. and 2. the whole homesteading thing never really landed well enough for me. always the biggest hole in the argumentation ethics -> property rights logic.. it seems to be ambiguous at best. what if i dig a sort of useless 1" hole in an unused field but you come along and dig a 12" trench that helps divert rainwater. did you homestead it or did I, having gotten there first and kinda tickled the dirt? Its clear we're going to have to argue (or fight) about the definition, so we're arguing and fighting anyway - with "homesteading" as a principle not really helping us much.
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↩ replying to vinney...axkl
Quit making me think about interesting topics, I've got mouths to feed! Rereading my own reply, and seeing an exchange between you and Chip Tuner moments ago, I wish I'd take more time to write clearly sometimes, smh. My excuse, on this topic anyway, is I could spend 10x the time and only improve my reply a small fraction. In the scenario laid out in #1, are you agreeing to this arrangement with the "mess of farmers" in advance of anyone having claimed first rights to this mass of land? It seems so, and I can't directly spot an issue with that, other than to wonder what would make someone give up full rights to ownership on virgin land, when maximal rights come with full ownership. It feels illogical. I guess we could contrive some reasons one might agree to such a contract, so I'm simply left shrugging (a common outcome when I think about such things too long). On #2, I feel like I read something about this in a book not too long ago, something about continued economic use of the land maybe? You can't just run marking all the land and claim it as yours. So, I'll assume your making use somehow of this small hole you made. The second person to come around would then be violating your rights by digging his big trench, no? You were already making use of the space, even if in some silly way. I see your point though, it's pretty hard to draw a strict line of what constitutes making (even perpetual) use of land. It is a bit weak, now the I think about it. Thanks for explaining nothing and leaving me with more questions ;)
↩ replying to YODL
thinking about certain things too long is a great way to develop further ambiguity about them! (for real though i think it's a good sign: it means you're naturally steelmanning and considering alternative angles. immediate certainty on novel topics is probably an anti-pattern)
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↩ replying to vinney...axkl
Indeed. There are very few things I take an "expert" stance on, and even those I probably overestimate my knowledge or abilities on. "Anti-pattern" is a great term that I'm gonna start using way too much in the near future.
↩ replying to Laeserin
To the text: Inheritance of contracts should be defined in the contract itself, and the person inheriting should have to explicitly agree to the terms, to take over the contract. If they have no valid tenancy contract and refuse to leave, they are trespassing.
"Are we the baddies?" -- I mean sure, if you accept the Curtis Yarvin idea of "formalism", or even traditional neoliberal ideas of the "social contract." We've all sort of signed on to this, so who are we to "say no"? Of course, no, I didn't sign no steeeenking social contract. My libertarian thought increasingly leads me to the conclusion that whether we're talking about States or large corporations, "scale matters." There's a certain scale at which economic calculation problems set in and service quality drops. So at a certain point the only way to maintain participation is through coercion. The USA as a federal system is basically there. And this is exactly what we see in MN, driven (indirectly) by Yarvin through Stephen Miller. There's some recognition of the idea that for "America" to be maintained, absolute Federal authority must be asserted over the States... In Blood, if need be. Miller's X profile (last I saw from the news, I'm not on there) is him shaking hands with Xi Jinping. That's telling.