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Ask a group of anarchists about rights and you'll get responses that range from eye rolling to invitations to fight. Rights are hard because the American national mythology refers to rights as things that are equal and protected, but I find that something being a right seems to mean whatever people want it to mean on any given day. The definition is particularly malleable if a politician is using it.

So why am I calling out housing in particular as a right that isn't? Simply because it is adjacent to something that reasonably would be a natural right, but our acceptance of feudalism as a legitimate way to handle property norms has created the dynamics that lead to poverty, urbanization, and homelessness and stripped all of the reasonable human right to have a place to exist turning the right into a privilege instead. The thing that makes housing not a right is specifically labor. In order for housing to be a right that means that one person has the right to another person's labor to build and maintain the housing and that is in fact slavery. As a matter of context some of my thoughts on this are similar to other authors such as Murray Rothbard in The Ethics of Liberty where he discusses some of the issues of government land monopoly in chapter 11, Land Monopoly Past and Present.

I've probably gone and made more claims than I can afford to lay out arguments in support of in this format, but I'll give it a try. First, my premise is that while housing is not a right, having a piece of ground on which to build the home of your choice and live in reasonable peace is in fact a basic human right. I further assert that there is no place on the earth where such a right can be enjoyed except in territories currently under the control of indigenous people that have managed to otherwise be left alone.

The trouble here is feudalism. I know that a lot of people give me funny looks when I start talking about how terrible feudalism is. After all, that's something they did in Europe in the middle ages and surely things have changed so we don't have to deal with that anymore. The trouble is that feudalism hasn't gone away, it has just adapted itself to fit newer and more fashionable institutions. In essence the feudal lord has been replaced by the county council and quit rent has simply been relabeled as property taxes when holding a fee simple title. In addition to the extraction of taxes we also are bound to obey the will of the feudal lord which means building permits and abiding by building codes.

Now, before we go much further, I know what a lot of you are going to say. I know it because it has come up so quickly and so frequently when I talk about these things with people. I am aware that there are "necessary services" that taxes go toward. Police, fire, roads, parks, and other services. This is not going to be a discussion about how to pay for those another way or the merits of finding a way to pay for them. Instead I want to talk about what it is costing us when those things are a foregone conclusion and we accept that everyone must pay in order to exist on a piece of land.

Lets talk about poverty and urbanization. My suspicion is that these go hand in hand because of the unfortunate economics inherent in property taxes. The first thing to remember is that as long as you are expected to pay property taxes you are required to participate in the wider economy. This may not seem that extreme, but it really does turn the idea of living off of the land into a problem where you now must find a way to produce a product for someone else to consume so you can get enough money to pay the taxes. Unless you are producing something that is marketable and you earn more than the supplies cost then living off the land and being otherwise self sufficient is a slow slide into poverty. Each time the tax bill comes due it will deplete your reserves further. While it is important to remember that living in a way that is completely self sufficient is incredibly hard because of the lack of specialization found in a modern economy the persistent march of taxes makes it hard to have a locally self sufficient economy because everyone present must still come up with the dollars required to pay their taxes even if everyone was otherwise comfortable and meeting the community's needs on a barter basis. When the economic incentives of property taxation tends toward wealth destruction people will try to turn to places with greater economic efficiencies, that is to say, they attempt to move to the cities in order to earn higher wages and hopefully enjoy lower costs for basic needs.

Homelessness is a nagging problem that I think can't be resolved until property taxation and feudal ownership of land with local county or municipal control through permitting is abolished. The essence of homelessness is that there is no place for a person to exist. The scarcity of land and places to live that has come from government land monopoly has resulted in a system where it is impossible for some people to produce enough economic value to be able to afford a home or rent a place to live. Some people have looked to tiny houses as a possible way to help the homeless, but without letting people build what they see fit on a piece of land it isn't always safe to assume you can build something economical and be allowed to live in it.

So what can be done? Unfortunately at the moment government land monopoly means that until the institutions of government as we know them have failed there will be no way to practice new norms of property ownership. If the empire ends up falling at some point what could we do instead? This I think is a very interesting question. First, I'd like to advocate for my favorite property norm, homesteading. The general idea of homesteading is that the world began entirely unowned and as people began to move around, cultivate, and improve their surroundings they came to own the land because they had mixed their labor with it. If you plant crops that field is now yours as long as you maintain it. If you build a house the house and a reasonable margin of ground around it is yours because you have improved it with a structure.

I find it interesting that we have a mythology of this being a christian nation founded upon the principles of freedom or that the nation was founded with principles of Judeo-Christian ethics. What I find most interesting about that is that the old testament law that was given to the people of Israel when they were freed from Egypt actually granted every person a piece of ground for their family forever. In fact, on the year of jubilee land that had transferred out of the family was to be returned so that the family that was to inherit it could again occupy it. This is a far cry from the situation of a central government owning the land and dictating what is or is not allowed on the land.

In another interesting example we have times in the Book of Mormon where people built communities on unowned land. Early on you have Nephi escaping his brothers with the rest of the family that didn't want to be governed by Laman. There are other times when people exercised the right to head out of town and form a new community as happens with Alma and the people at the waters of mormon. I believe there are others in the book of alma, but it is getting late and I'm running out of time.

It can seem like government land monopoly is a forgone conclusion and that there is no other reasonable way to handle land ownership norms and paying for basic government services, but I would like to encourage you to consider that we don't have to hand over ownership of the entire earth to governments that only seem to worry about their own institutional survival in order to find norms that allow us to live together in peace. Someday when the american empire collapses in on its self I hope that we can change more than just the names and titles of the people who end up living off of our labor and resources and deciding what laws they would like us to follow.