Libertarian Legal Theory - Introduction

If you mean a school of economic thought, then yes, the Austrian school, the one that tries to discover economic laws like everyone else was doing in economics before Keynes, the mathematician, uneducated in economics, started writing what bankers and governments wanted to hear.

I didn't say E was false. I said that you're barking up the wrong tree trying to assign a numeric value to it. Also, null is not the same as zero. It would be false to say that those valuations equal zero, but it wouldn't be much more likely true to say that they equal some number of units of something, greater than zero. The truest thing that can be said about them is that they are unknown.

I just say that our right to appropriate equals true with respect to unowned property and false for owned property.

You're trying to show that we should expropriate all first comers to the benefit of possible late comers who may or may not want to use those resources in the future. The past, we know, but the future is unknown. The needs and desires of everyone in society and everyone to ever be born into that society are unknown. Basing an entire theory of law on assumptions about that future and those needs and desires looks like a very bad idea.

I stated the conclusion of Hume's is-ought gap. It's that no moral obligation or prohibition can be deduced from any morally neutral proposition. You keep delving into economic propositions, but all the true economic propositions in the world can't lead us to the conclusion that we ought to expropriate all land owners or that all land owners ought to pay rent to everyone else.

 

Well, between zero, not-zero, and null, what else is there? Cardinal or not, what makes this unknown quantity non-divisible? Would it be better or just the same to merely assert that the valuation of unowned resources is divisible?

And unknown? Unknown to whom? Don't we each valuate what we can perceive, and together, arrive at a mutually-perceived value?

I've been mulling over the apples and oranges, and I feel like you make an argument in one breath and its counterpoint in the next.
If we assumed cardinality, the three separate ordinal assertions would be contradictory, yes.
But, we know you don't freeze at the supermarket, frozen by paradox.
Don't we live 99% of our lives engaging with cardinality without encountering such paradoxes?
Isn't our kneejerk response that such circular assertions are atypical?
It feels like you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater; why is cardinality compromised, as opposed to one of your preferential assertions?
It is the very arrow of time that would make it possible to seem as if all three are simultaneously true, but in practicality, they can never be simultaneously true.
And, ultimately, doesn't cardinality manifest from an aggregate of ordinality, anyways? It doesn't matter what paradoxical ordinate assertions you have; at the market, the prices are cardinal.

Circling back to the OP, my biggest question is this:
If we assert that value is subjective, making labor subjective, making the very act of appropriation subjective, how can one claim a property right via appropriation without the consent of other perceiving parties?
Or, to simplify, "Bill's property rights don't exist until Ted perceives them."

 

Other non-numerical values like true or false.

Unknown to the person contemplating making law for everyone else.

We don't freeze in paradox at the supermarket, because we really don't consider our preference for one food over another in units. If there is a substantial difference in price, we may consider that, but, absent that, we just consider what we like more. If I'm there to fill a fruit bowl, but I don't want to buy everything on the shelves, I may get some bananas, apples, kiwis, and leave oranges and cantaloupe on the shelf. Form that, the economist can know that I prefer what I bought to what I traded away because I've proven it by my actions. The economist cannot know, from that, why I prefer what I prefer, which alternatives I might choose at another time, under other circumstances, or what price points or opportunity costs would trigger a change in my preferences.

The economist is not dealing with people. He's dealing with models of people having only those properties he can know of. When we act, we prove that we prefer the circumstances which we believe our actions will bring about to those that would have been had we not preformed the given action.

Earlier, I said that the OP is predicated on a more basic theory of rights. If you've read this, you know that I would say that Bill's rights do exist in the minds of others. In order to make a change in something Bill is using, against Bill's will, Ted would have to use violence, threats of violence, or deceit. Normal people perceive those things as evils, and expect justifications when they see them. If the conflict arising from Ted's actions is brought to other members of society for resolution, public recognition of ownership of the object in dispute will be established as it is settled. When Bill planted the field, he didn't have to use violence, threats of violence, or deceit; there wasn't anyone around with a claim to the land, much less a better claim than that of Bill. The question is that of who has the better claim. Is it Bill, who's claim was established peacefully, or Ted, who's claim was established violently?

 

How does Ted, or any 3rd party arbitrator, define "using" or a "claim"? How does this system guard against frivolousness? Forget Ted's conflicting claim; how do we recognize Bill has any initial claim at all at any point?
Hypothetically, in a culture where planting a field is considered worthless, or akin to no action at all, would Bill have a claim?
Let's say Bill is merely making mudpies, worth nothing.
But then mudpies are discovered to cure cancer.
Doesn't Bill's claim vest in a shared belief that his actions have value? And if that belief must be shared, what does it say about who can grant or create property rights?

 

Well, If I were the judge, I would ask Bill what his claim to the land is. He would tell me he found it unowned and decided to use it for mudpies. I would ask Ted what his claim to the land is, and he would tell me he found Bill making mudpies and thought he could put it to better use so he drove Bill off. I would rule in Bill's favor because that ruling is consistent with minimizing conflict.

 

But both Bill's claim and your judgment stem from a common, subjective belief, a belief in the value of mudpies.
What if you do not share that view? Worse than nothing, you share Ted's view that mudpies are a reprehensible waste of time?
What if Bill isn't making mudpies, but using the land as a sacred space to imagine mudpies?
How do you have the authority to determine the property right? Did Ted not have to cede authority to you?

How can conflict be avoided without arriving at a subjective consensus on worthwhile appropriation?