So here we have the freedom bill. This seems to be what the 'libertarian blogosphere' has been waiting for. Is this the movement's raison d'etre? When explaining how they came to blog most bloggers cite the iliberal slew of legislation from the labour government. The blogosphere was palpably disappointed after the election when it became increasingly apparent that the blue team were just the same as the red team. Many quit blogging for various stated reasons. I suspect that they had felt part of some kind of tory resistance movement staging a heroic guerilla war against the socialists. If they could just get the message out to enough people then come the election their beloved tories would oust the iliberal socialists and we would all be back in the non existent good ole days. When reality shattered this ridiculous dream of a return to the classical liberalism of gladstone and acton the sense of futility, embarrassment, and misplaced loyalty was too much for many 'libertarian' bloggers who were in actual fact no more than the militant wing of the Conservative party and they left the blogosphere in despondency. Hopefully they can realise that individual liberty is not a question of right vs left. The answer cannot be found at any point along the X-axis of the Nolan chart. To find freedom we must look the the furthest reaches of the y-axis. At one end lies the coercive power of the state, at the other liberty. There is no magic sweetspot. No perfect balance of liberty vs coercion. There can be no true individual liberty under the authority of the state, no matter how freedom loving that state claims to be. With the right holding the coercive power of the state there might be freedom for people on the right but those on the left will necessarily be subjugated. Then they will want to wrest coercive power from the right and then there wont be any freedom for the right. In the absence of coercive power there will be total freedom for all tempered only by voluntary mutually beneficial agreements between individuals.
Those bloggers that remain have been waiting for the state to roll back some of the restrictions it enforced upon the slaves. That the state never changes, just the faces on television, and this 'roll-back' is nothing more than a subtle re-optimisation of the machinery of slavery completely escapes the pro state libertarian. It makes no difference to the state whether 40% or 60% of people working with children have to pass a magic test. So long as they keep everyone happy, stable and productive they do not care. They still hold the coercive monopoly on this regulation and there is no voluntary trust accreditation to rival the crb so again the state is happy. If the crb has to be imperceptibly tweaked to keep a small band of critics who may be called on a quiet news day from causing problems then so be it. Any libertarian cheering this as being of any significance has been fooled by the smoke and mirrors.
What really fucks me off is the double-think involved in smuggling the clamping ban under the banner of liberty. I dont believe the principle of property should ever be compromised in any way. This attitude that a private land owner can and should be banned from any form of activity on his own property is lunacy. The commonly held view that car parks are, by dint of being commercial enterprises, in some way not private property is the same view we see held by socialists when they call for taxes and nationalisation/seizure of businesses. Because its a business it is some faceless evil. Its ok to tax the arse off it because its an evil profit making business not a noble working man. The socialists will fight for the working man but only if he's highly visible, easily identified and simply displayed. The working man that runs a business is in some way not a working man. He is an evil fatcat/capitalist lounging in his robber baron mansion in a smoking jacket whilst taking potshots at the gardeners. If any libertarian or anyone on the right that believes in property rights and the free market hails the ban on clamping on private property as a good thing they are more dangerous than fools – they become Useful Idiots. This separate treatment of commercial enterprises as being not private property is the same insidious creep of the state that we saw in the bigotted b+b affair. I think the mystically influenced homophobes and love-licence fans are idiots and in a freemarket would not do very well at all. Individuals should be free to publicly castigate their irrational discrimination (I am not against discrimination. I am against irrationality) and call for boycotts. What should never happen is the coercive power of the state wade in and force any private individual to allow people they dont want onto that private property. Again, in this case the popularly held view among the wider public was that because the b+b was a business it was no longer private property.
Let me make my position very clear (I am not pretending to know what the actual reality of our current legal definitions, I am merely positing how it should be according to libertarian principles of property rights as I understand them.)
A public place is one owned by the public (whoever the fuck that is). It is not merely 'open to the public' but there can be no restriction on public entry to that place because it is, in effect, their property.
A private place is one that is owned privately. That is to say that entry to and usage of that place is by definition exclusive. A commercial property is private property. Even if it be jointly owned by more than one individual. Whether a corner shop or tescos the principle of private property should always be applied consistently. The fact that the owners of that commercial property make it 'open to the public' does not make it a publicly owned place. It is only open to them. The public have no right to enter based on their shared ownership as in the case of a public place. A municipal recreation ground is a public place, a pub, despite the name, is not.
Discrimination cannot be outlawed primarily because there is no principled reason that would trump individual self ownership and derived property rights but also the empirically obvious pragmatic reason that discrimination is inherent in the fundamentals of human interaction. How can the b+b trade if it does not discriminate entry based on payment?
Apparently all this goes right out the window because the b+b is an evil faceless business. It is no longer private property with all the exclusivity and discriminatory freedom that principle entails. It is now a public place because the owners opened it to members of the public. The public do not own it like they do the municipal park so they have no property rights, they cannot insist on entry.
now to drag this back to wheel clamping. It is now considered absolutely fine to ban clamping on private land. This is because clamping is branded evil and by private land everyone reads evil businesses that are open to the public. Commercial carparks are commonly referred to as 'public carparks'. They are not. Some towns may have municipally owned carparks that can be described in this way (even this socialist dream is woefully inaccurate – just try publicly parking in a public carpark and you will soon realise there is no difference between your borough council and ncp). Again just because a business is open to the public this does not give the public any rights on that land. They do not own it, they have no property rights there. Tesco's carpark is not common land. When you enter you are entering private property. This is lost on most people because there is little discernible difference between the public road where they have the 'right'/entitlement to park almost wherever the fuck they want (tragedy of the commons) and the similarly paved, signposted, curbed tesco carpark. There is no gate you simply roll from the world of public entitlement into the world of private property rights.
Without the coercive monopoly legal system of the state such assumed entitlements would not lead to this confusion. The brainless serf parks their wage wagon and blissfully assumes that there must be some law somewhere protecting their 'rights'. Because all this is assumed there is no awareness of contract. Because there is a monopoly legal system if there isnt a law explicitly coercing property owners to display full terms of contract to entry and use of their private property then this does not happen anywhere. So there is no choice for the consumer between a carpark that clearly sets out terms of contract and one that leaves you to assume that your car wont be clamped by some spurious sense of entitlement. Without this competition for trust and awareness the only competition is in cost whereby the drawing up of such legalities and their display is dis-economic. The state's monopoly legal system make the private issue of fines and their enforcement and collection massively difficult. Thus a private business owner trying to maximise profits through availability of parking spaces has no way of discouraging customers overstaying their paid for time through fines. The most economic recourse left to the business owner is clamping whereby the ineffectiveness of the monopoly legal system can be circumvented by the physical detention of the vehicle until payment is received.
Im not praising wheel clamping as virtuous I am merely explaining why banning it contravenes libertarian principles and how the problem is not the clampers but the state.
Without the state controlling and limiting land use there would be a free market in parking rather than cartel-ised lack of choice. Without state protected businesses (corporatism) there would likely be more traders in the market place. This would generate competition which would make awareness of terms of contract clearer. This same competition would either eliminate a practise as reviled as clamping or at least make the individual explicitly aware of and responsible for the consequences of their actions rather than relying on nanny state to prevent the bad men from telling you off for being an idiot.
Without the state's coercive monopoly legal system other, more effective means of enforcement would emerge. Law would be stronger, more effective, more efficient, faster and cheaper. A fine would not be the commercial impossibility it is now.
Dont ban clamping, ban coercion. Fuck the state and its freedom bill.
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