Just because the state claims the authority to apprehend and punish rapists doesn’t mean that apprehending and punishing rapists is a form of state coercion.

So it's voluntary?

My point was that just because the state (currently) punishes rapists doesn't mean that rapists shouldn't be punished. Similarly, just because the state (currently) enforces property rights doesn't mean property rights shouldn't (or don't, for you absolutists) exist.

You better than anyone should know the difference between how things should be and how they are, and of the dangers inherent in assuming that any law is founded on moral intuition. I don't deny the possibility of deriving some independent moral basis for property rights or violent crime statutes or whatever else, but please simply consider whose authority, in our society, really stands behind them, determines them and enforces them, and whether one's own moral standards really coincide with the penal code to any significant degree.

please change that "who's" to "whose": it's making my eyes hurt.

please simply consider whose authority, in our society, really stands behind them, determines them and enforces them, and whether one's own moral standards really coincide with the penal code to any significant degree.

Of course; again, my point is just that if your moral standard/intuition happens to agree with the legal standard, that doesn't necessarily mean your standard/intuition is wrong.

please change that "who's" to "whose": it's making my eyes hurt.

Done.

No, but I do not necessarily accept the validity of state enforcement of law or right even if I concur with the law or right in principle, because I recognize that that concurrence is merely coincidence, and that the power the state appropriates for itself in no way derives from the principles that I recognize as legitimate.

And, once again, the only really essential point is that a title of property, at least in our society, is a legal distinction, and hence ultimately derived from the state. To me, that is no more controversial than asserting that the criminality of rape is likewise a matter of legality, of compliance with the state's demands, which should be evident regardless of one's feelings about its moral value.

The formal title is issued by the state, but the title is not ownership, only evidence of ownership. In the settling of the American West, 'squatters' took up hanging out on land the government titled to someone else. There was a protracted fight, but the end result was the 'squatters' got the land.

In a somewhat related matter, Anglo-American law has long had the doctrine of "adverse possession." Adverse possession says that there are cases where the formal title is wrong and ought not be enforced/recognised because actual ownership belongs to someone else.

- Josh

Two possible interpretations occur to me: a) if squatting is not the same as legitimate property ownership, then the difference consists precisely in the recognition by the state in the one and not the other or b) if squatting is a legitimate form of property ownership, then it seems to me that this whole business of property ownership as a human institution distinct from dogs fighting over a bone is pretty much illusory.

Incidentally, Clay, while I'm somewhat dubious about the real merit of De Soto's ideas, as I've heard reports about the virtual impossibility of leveraging slum-land title for anything like bank loans, since banks see virtually no value in most cases in repossessing slum-dwellers land and possessions, as well as the tendency of sleazy developers to gobble up all the patches of decent slum-land and kick their former occupants off to even worse areas, I find interesting the very corroboration of my argument about property rights as an expression of state power buried in one of the final paragraphs:

"the government is the only game in town. The “private law” solutions developed by the informals do well amongst themselves (for example, street vendors tend to have “rights” to their particular patch of sidewalk, which are respected and defended by their neighbors), but outside of the informal realm, they don’t work so well, since the state still, ultimately, holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Obviously the "legitimacy" of property rights do not derive from the cooperation of the interested parties, which after all might change, but in the recognition of disinterested third-parties and their willingness to defend the prerogative of one or the other of those interested parties, and in that regard, since force is ultimately implied in such arrangements, the government, at least in our society, is, as you say, "the only game in town."

And, I should hasten to add, in response to the inevitable reply, "Yes, but it doesn't have to be that way," that I'm not really interested in exploring every possible hypothetical, but simply, as regards the most common run-of-the-mill possessions (cars, houses, etc.) in contradicting the myth in American culture about the private/public dichotomy, namely the idea that property owners create their own property rights, and that that title represents an absolute limitation on the prerogatives of the state, rather than recognizing that it is precisely from the state that that title originates, and which therefore presumably has the "authority" to revoke it at will--just think of that bogeyman called eminent domain, which I believe you ridiculed in connection with Wal-Mart.

And, of course, those two magical words, which the high priests have only to utter to overturn everything, property rights, legal rights, human rights: "national security."

I think you may have slightly misread my paraphrasing of DeSoto. In the bit you quote, what I'm saying is that the "informals" are capable of protecting their property rights from pretty much everyone but the state; the reason it's important they should get legal title to their property is not so that they can use the might of the state to kick trespassers off their land (which they're capable of doing on their own or with the help of their neighbors), but so that the state won't grab their land whenever it gets an urge to build a soccer stadium or to clear out the rabble in preparation for a UN summit.

Of course, one could implicitly turn this on its head and arrive at your conclusion (and I don't deny the possibility that this is what you've been doing all along).

How is it that having legal title to the land will necessarily prevent the state from building a soccer stadium (or a Wal-Mart) anyway? What the state granteth the state taketh as well.

It won't. But it makes it slightly less likely.

It take it, then, that as concerns the actual state of things now, as opposed to the land of hypotheticals, we're basically agreed then.