Bob, agreed: in this case the fake-bob has defrauded the creditor (it's not "at best"--he has), and he has not taken stolen from Bob Murphy.

I don't see why this is a problem. The harmed party has a cause of action.

(In some cases of identity theft, there can be cognizable damage to the person whose identity is appropriated: suppose a guy persuades the bank he is you, and then takes the contents of your safe deposit box. He is using a lie about his identity as a means of stealing your stuff.)
 

How does the cost of repairing credit factor in? If it costs me $100 to ferret out all of the fraudulent claims in order to restore my credit rating, do I have no restitution against the 'thief'? He's vandalized my credit rating in effect. At the minimum it takes my labor to restore, and possible my money. If uncaught it may cause me to pay much higher interest rates. But it seems that in the way Bob presented the problem, I have no claim. I guess it is similar to the defamation idea, so maybe i'm out of luck. What do you two think?
 

If you have to repair your credit, that is because your credit company (or others) have decided to lower your credit, which is their right.

Why is this any different from a credit rating company that lowers your credit (or a life insurance company raising your premium) based on statistics that may be wrong in your case, or that you disagree with? You don't have a right to any of this. If companies A, B, C are misjudging your credit presumably they will suffer a cost.
 

I am 95% persuaded by Stephan Kinsella's classic article "Against Intellectual Property"[lb]

Sure, because you never actually approached the work with a critical eye. You just thought: hey, he's one of our guys, he says some correct things about state abuses, and heck, there's that warm and fuzzy feeling. And to hear "the other side", well, I'd have to take Silas seriously for once and not misrepresent him. Rah rah, go team!

Real serious, respectable scholarship there Bob. How are the royalties working out for you?

I don't have a right to borrow money from people; they are always free to refrain from lending to me. And it is standard in Rothbardian libertarian theory that blackmail defamation isn't a crime, because you don't have a right to your reputation. (How can you have a property right in what other people think of you?)[lb]

So far, so good. But what about societies that have some monetary system not based on claims to commodities, and where money is purely electronic? (i.e. no bearer notes) In that case, money is just information. Therefore, any property right to money means a property right in "how much money other people believe you have".

In that case, if (via computer glitch, hackers, or deliberate ignorance) people suddenly stopped believing you were the owner of $100, they have stolen from you, and yet there is no physical good that you can point to as being "yours" in defense of your right to the money.

So yes, there are plausible scenarios where part of a right means the right to certain beliefs of others.

Ah, the messy implications of lack of property rights in information...
 

What if the only way to get out of the debts the thief created is to pay an attorney to clear it all up (or spend your own valuable time doing so)? Has the value of the legal fees (time) not been stolen from you? My first reaction would be they have.

It is an interesting question.
 

Silas-- nothing.

Skyler: Except you don't have a right to the value of things. You have a right to their physical integrity. But how others value it is their business.
 

Stephan_Kinsella: You have nothing substantive to add, indeed.
 

I'm not sure I see how that relates. If the thief creates a debt for me and the company decides it's my debt and I can't prove otherwise, wouldn't they have the law behind them? That could do me some pretty serious damage. People have lost a lot to identity theft, and that loss is real, is it not?
 

Skylar: "I'm not sure I see how that relates. If the thief creates a debt for me and the company decides it's my debt and I can't prove otherwise, wouldn't they have the law behind them? That could do me some pretty serious damage. People have lost a lot to identity theft, and that loss is real, is it not?"

I am not sure how the thief "creates" a debt. You have no debt. If the company defrauded erroneously thinks so, that's their error. They have to prove you did it, and they can't, since you didn't. They are the one who are robbed, not you.
 

That is true, but if it costs you time/money to get them to see it that way?

I've never been a victim of identity theft, so I don't have any personal experiences on how much those costs can be, but I understand that they can be pretty high. It's actually the reason I have identity theft insurance with a $1M to help me clean up. I suppose most of that would be "my good name", but surely that's not the only cost? I could be wrong, I certainly don't want to find out. ^_^.
 

Silas, you're kidding, right? I am listing a potential problem with Stephan's approach. And this is proof that I am rooting for his team and getting royalty checks...? I think you must be kidding.

You raised an interesting point about the spectrum, and I don't think I ever resolved that. And now you are raising an interesting point here about a case where money is just what the bank says your account balance is.

Good stuff; I don't know why you need to bite my head off every time I speak (except for the CO2 I thereby emit, contributing to my desire to drown children in Bangladesh).

The reason I said I agree 95% with Stephan is that his approach to property rights seems pretty good from a first-principles viewpoint, but I hesitate because of situations like this one, or like your spectrum (possibly). On the other hand, if we just say, "People own information," then that leads to other absurdities too, like who owns the Pythagorean theorem etc.

So I've yet to find an overarching theory of property rights that gives the "right" answer to all of my intuitions on what is theft and what isn't.

You certainly bring useful ideas to such discussions, but I don't know why you seem to go out of your way to make sure everyone gets p*ssed off at you. Is it some type of defense mechanism, so this way no one takes you seriously (which I agree they don't) and then you can always be right in your head?
 

Bob:

1) If you had seen people admit to fundamental flaws in their ideas, like Stephan_Kinsella has more than once in response to my criticism of his IP arguments, and yet go trucking along anyway with no attempt to resolve the glaring flaws, I'm sure you'd feel just as p*ssy. You'd certainly handle it better, but you'd probably also become skeptical of their good faith.

And based on what you've said, I think you're justified in putting your persuasion level much below 95%.

2) The royalty remark was to make the point that it's hard to agree with the illegitimacy of IP and then delegate to others the right to use force against people for copying your ideas.
 

One more data point: In the blog discussion I linked, note how much of my responses to you are correcting your misinterpretation of Stephan's position.

That suggests you didn't read Against Intellectual Property with an *interested* eye, let alone critical one. Hence my skepticism.
 

Silas,

Oh OK, fair point about the royalties. Obviously I would never initiate a lawsuit about it, but yeah I did grant Regnery the ability to use the government to punish people who copy the two PIGs I wrote.

Stephan, if you're still reading, I think Silas has a good point here. Even in our current monetary system, my checking account could be defined by a spreadsheet on the bank's computers (or whatever). So one might interpret your position to be, that if someone hacks into the bank's system and transfers $1000 out of my checking and into his own account, then the only libertarian crime was messing with the bank's physical property (computer). The hacker didn't steal $1000 from me, because he didn't alter any of my physical property.

So however you deal with that, I think it shows that focusing just on physical property is a little off.
 

Bob, I am not convinced focusing on material property is "off." In a free market if I put my property in a warehousing bank, then I probably give up title to it and gain title to a fractional share of a fungible supply (Huerta de Soto explains the legal terms for this in his book on this). Now if Silas robs the bank by pretending to be me, and takes my property, he has stolen my property. I may or may not have a claim of indemnification against the bank or an insurer; if I do, they subrograte to my rights against Silas.

If the bank still owes me for the amount of my claim, then Silas hasn't harmed me but has harmed the bank.

Again, I don't see the problem.
 

Thank you Stephen...

If I deposit money in a bank, and that bank inflates their money, do I have a right to sue them for restitution? No.

And if you use a bank that allows people to steal your identity and spend on your account, another bank might be in order.

The way Silas argues things makes me think he just grasping at the undefendable. Like liberals trying to justify the state, he quickly breaks down to calling others stupid knuckle draggers like that ever convinced anyone.
 

@Stephan_Kinsella: If you're still reading this:

You haven't answered the question. In the scenario as defined, there is no specific property you can point to as being yours. If you require property rights to be defined solely with respect to physical objects, and always require full fee-simple ownership of that object, then you have no enforceable claim when the bank forgets about your money.

Let's take the case of a hacker. He deletes the bank's records. What do I have the right to do to him now? I can make him restore the data, but what if that's impossible? We still have the machine that the data was stored on.

Robbing *means* deletion of information in that case (and arguably any case involving money). You cannot say that's unjustified unless you allow for a "right to have the bank believe certain things".

By the way, you STILL haven't resolve the contradiction between opposing IP and supporting EM spectrum rights, which are completely isomorphic and parallel to one another. An electromagnetic wave is nothing more than a pattern of time-varying electric and magnetic fields that have certain frequency characteristics. A right to an EM frequency is therefore the exclusive right, within a certain region, to form a certain pattern. It does not physically prevent other people from forming that kind of pattern, so you should claim it's not scarce and therefore not property.
 

If an ID thief steals my identity and then uses it to take out a loan, it seems plausible that I have a claim against him for theft. What the thief has done is to request that the bank issue ME a loan. The fact that I didn't really want the loan or that it was done without my knowledge or authorization doesn't change the fact that the bank issued the loan to me. If the ID thief then takes off with the money it is theft from me because the property transfer was from the bank to me.

I think the thief is guilty of defrauding the bank and of stealing my money.
 

Mitchell and Webb's "Identity Theft" sketch had an interesting take on this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E