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I want to cover briefly why theft is a necessity to an efficient market and should remain an option. Similarly to how backing out of a contract or failing to pay a debt are moral neutrals that we should approach clear eyed or risk losing important information in the market...
Let's say a pair of siblings makes a pie. Each sibling starts out with different assignments of trust, goodwill, debt, etc towards the other. Because each sibling contributes differently to the making of the pie they each construct different theories of proportional ownership.
Each sibling could have varying types and degrees of contribution. What is the correct assignment of ownership? Well start from either end. If the whole pie goes to A, what is the loss to A in standing with B? If the whole pie goes to B, what is the loss to B in standing with A?
Because A and B as siblings are stuck in effectively infinite repeat interactions, there's game theoretic reasons to both extremely respond in reputation sanction at the point of complete pie seizure and to want to minimize reputation loss with the other sibling.
Basically what's happening is trades. A might have a vested interest in not taking the whole pie because of a severe loss in standing with B, and so would choose 99% over 100%. One balance thus has more subjective utility for A, which can be seen in A's revealed preference.
A and B are essentially trading, they have threats about consequent responses which hurt future utility, and they have expected utility re slices of pie. Because they can make commitments re categories of contribution, they may not resolve to a 50/50 split if they do resolve.
It's not inherent that they will resolve to a detente, an agreed border through the pie, but there are generally pressures to. Part of what makes all talk and precommitments work is their capacity for "theft" -- simply failing to recognize intolerable apportionment schemas.
Now this is not to say that pie apportionment will be abstractly fair according to some universal objective criterion, rather there will be a vast host of dynamics and contextual considerations integrated in the final apportionment. These end up constructing a complex world.
However for the resulting world to integrate all such things "theft" *has* to be on the table. If one actor got to just declare what was a fair balance for the work put in, the resulting market would be skewed as fuck. Same if what was 'fair' was arbitrarily decided by a book.
The rules of property title are not objective. While different camps have arguments about ideal rules, what is *emergent* will depend upon context & indeed *should* depend upon context. What constitutes abandonment, for example, is gonna change with culture & technological level.
There's an endless host of arbitrary maneuvers in various theories of property that implicitly depend upon objective value. I've made a small cottage industry of pointing them out. For example ideas of labor mixing and "to make improvements". It's a fucking mess.
Some market anarchists, in recognition of fuzziness to property title rules left even in their a priori arguments, go 'okay, competing arbiters in polycentric legal systems should converge upon social norms of the day' but this maneuver can put the cart before the horse.
There's many ways polycentric legal systems can depend upon established objective property rules, and we risk missing how such a system *comes into existence.* Okay, fine you eventually get competing mediators with emergent norms, but how do they bootstrap?
Moreover a system can be perturbed far from optimal functionality, how does it self-restore? And if the public registry of accepted property titles is itself an emergent function that can get warped, how do we stop that warping from self-compounding?
Theft is not strictly a bad or a good thing, it has its uses. Just as a world where we outsource all violence to the state and abandon individual capacity for violence is a bad one, so too is a world without decentralized capacity for and occasional usage of theft a bad one.
And of course the deeper issue here I've repeatedly emphasized is that because there's no objective property lines, there's no clean objective lines that can be drawn re concepts like "violence" & "theft." We have to go deeper for solid values. (Hence my work on positive freedom)
Anyway, this is not to say that "any detente arrived at is morally good" obviously there can be thugs empowered by chance and capable of skewing detentes. If Stirner claims as property your house and gains it via his superior pecs, that sucks. This is a theory of market signals.
The point of anarchism is to build asymmetric systems/tool/strategies/coalitions/etc that counter arbitrary imbalances of privilege, whether sick pecs or historical accumulation, bending detentes back to egalitarianism and away from runaway power concentrations.
It's important to constantly point out the arbitrariness and shakiness upon which existing property titles rest because the state's enforcement enables those with wealth to avoid serious exploration of WHY we should respect a given title. There are of course often valid reasons.
But the moment we start making the reasons explicit, the moment we return to consciously negotiating detentes, a huge host of absurdities are revealed as only propped up by the state's force. And many more as benefiting to *some degree* from the state.
