I listened to
this exchange over lunch, and a couple of things came to mind:
- In just a few sentences, Molyneux completely swung me over to the Rothbardian notion of property: just like you "own" the negative consequences of your actions, so do you "own" the positive outcomes. All it took for me to "get it" was for someone to explain it in different terms, as opposed to Rothbard's "mixing of labor" language, which has never made any sense to me.
- Molyneux actually struggled to answer the really obvious bait question put forth by the caller: "If you steal a painting of mine and give it to your son, is it mine or your son's?" The answer: "It's yours. Until you die, at which point you relinquish ownership of it." Just because someone "steals" someone else's land-- whatever that even means-- does not mean that the descendants of the victim somehow have a moral claim to that land, fifteen generations later. That's the legal basis for why, when a codger with no heirs in the middle of the woods dies, the State actors don't hunt down the descendants of some random person who once owned that property-- rather, they hold an estate auction and sell the property off to the highest bidder, because any previous owners relinquished the claim when they either sold it, or died.