LrcBlog: "On a recent episode of Free Talk Live (Nov. 18, 2008) [starting at about 1:45:35, and in particular starting at about 1:55:18] one caller says he's a communist, and then struggles with whether a person owns his own body or not. He doesn't seem to realize that rights in bodies are but a type of property right and, in fact, meaningless without the right to homestead and privately own scarce resources. Indeed, as Hoppe observes:
With this justification of a property norm regarding a person's body it may seem that not much is won, as conflicts over bodies, for whose possible avoidance the nonaggression principle formulates a universally justifiable solution, make up only a small portion of all possible conflicts. However, this impression is not correct. To be sure, people do not live on air and love alone. They need a smaller or greater number of other things as well, simply to survive--and of course only he who survives can sustain an argumentation, let alone lead a comfortable life. With respect to all of these other things norms are needed, too, as it could come to conflicting evaluations regarding their use. But in fact, any other norm must be logically compatible with the nonaggression principle in order to be justified itself, and, mutatis mutandis, every norm that could be shown to be incompatible with this principle would have to be considered invalid. In addition, as the things with respect to which norms have to be formulated are scarce goods--just as a person's body is a scarce good--and as it is only necessary to formulate norms at all because goods are scarce and not because they are particular kinds of scarce goods, the specifications of the nonaggression principle, conceived of as a special property norm referring to a specific kind of good, must in fact already contain those of a general theory of property."
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