Equal Rights Libertarian is a person who believes in paramount value of two notions – equal, unalienable, and marketable property rights for natural resources for everybody and individual freedom for everybody based on maximizing resources available to each individual.
RL believes that property is naturally created by direct, indirect, and/or potential violence and will remain the cause of violence as long as not everybody accepts fairness of whatever current distribution of property exists. In order to achieve such acceptance and obtain the most effective use of resources RL supports separation of all resources into 3 categories with different application of property rights:
- Natural resources – everything that exists without human being creating it. For example space of earth surface between XX and YY coordinates or right to emit some harmful staff (like carbon dioxide while breathing)
- Material resources – everything created or changed by humans. For example a house build on the lot between XX and YY coordinates or car that does a bit more carbon dioxide emitting then humans being while breathing.
- Knowledge resources – everything immaterial created by humans and available for sharing without limitation. For example a blueprint for a house built on the lot between XX and YY coordinates or some invention that makes car to emit flowers instead of carbon dioxide.
The different treatment of resources becomes possible because of technological advancements in collection, control, and procession of information achieved over last 100 years. It allows knowing who owns and uses what, how much, when and where.
Therefore we now can:
- To know who owns and uses more of natural resources than average, who uses less and make people who use more than average to buy rights for such use from people who use less than average, giving everybody something valuable to sell even if they did not inherit or produced anything.
- To know what kind of material resources used by whom when and how is creating an opportunity to move ownership of open access material resources such as roads to private ownership. With GPS and automatic sensors it is no brainer to charge road user per pound/mile and facilitate private ownership of the roads.
- To know what kind of knowledge resources individual uses, how much time it takes, and reward creators of these knowledge resources correspondingly. For instance everybody could be charged flat tax for use of knowledge with proceeds allocated according to time resource was used for entertainment or perceived value of use for technological information.
RL rejects any notion of public / government / common property as illusion because any resource either natural, or material, or knowledge could conceivably be a subject of property rights and is always in control of only one individual at any given point in time and space regardless of formalities. Only inappropriately applied levels of scale and abstraction allow these notions to mislead the great majority of people into believing in “common” use of a road, bridge, stadium, or White house for that matter.
RL believes that wellbeing of each individual depends on the level of connection between use and creation of resources and availability of resources for personal use – people who create resources should be able to use them any way they want after purchasing rights to use resources they did not created from other people.