Response To Anonymous Question On Defence & Expropriation

In a (trashed) comment to my post below on the amendments to the land expropriation act, an anonymous commenter (I have a suspicion as to who it was) asked me a not entirely unreasonable question amid a barrage of vile and gratuitous insults. I will answer it here in a short seperate post for several reasons: first, I want to keep it seperate from the rest of the defence essay I'm writing; second, as I write it's nearly 3am on Friday night and I've been busy all day - I'm too tired to do much more than a short post; third, I don't back down from a challenge like that, even if I do trash the rest of the comment (unlike Turton, I will not ban people for arguing with me, nor even for bad language or strongly expressed disagreement - but I probably will ban you for gratuitous, extreme incivility). The question was this:

"So let's say mainland China will imminentaly attack Taiwan, should the government go into lengthy protracted discussions with land owners to be able to use their land for defense installations?"

First of all, there is an obvious problem with the way this question is put - which is that, if an attack from the PRC was "immanent" (i.e. already underway or very soon to be so), then not only would "protracted discussions" be a waste of valuable time, but possibly the actual construction of any "defence installations" would be too; not only that, but the siting of "defense installations" could hardly be rearranged in such circumstances unless they were highly mobile units such as PAC-3 missile launchers (and even then, were an attack "immanent", mobile units almost certainly could not be redeployed to new, unprepared locations quickly enough).

That problem aside however, there is still the substantive matter of whether land expropriation by the State is justified if it is done for the purpose of national defense. So you might easily imagine the government preparing a new site well in advance of any potential attack, and in doing so, considering whether to buy land voluntarily or simply expropriate it. Alternatively, you might consider whether existing sites used by the MND today were at some point acquired through use of legalized theft. Either scenario would bring you to the same substantive ethical point of question.

I think there are two questions to answer here. The first is how likely a property owner is to refuse to sell up, and the second is whether the State is justified in forcing him to do so or not.

On the first question, I would guess that most property owners would be more likely to sell their land for use in collective defense against the declared threat of an external State than for its' use by a large corporation. The distribution of benefits seems to be wider and more generalized across the population in the case of national defense than in the case of a single manufacturer establishing a plant requiring a few thousand employees. Those assumptions are arguable however, since not only do the benefits of "defense installations" depend on success, but whether any given manufacturer can continue to work depends on broader conditions of security, i.e. you probably can't do your normal job if you're factory is being bombed. Whatever the unconsidered uncertainty of the assumptions through which the "defense installation" project might be perceived, it nonetheless remains likely that, at least for reasons of social pressure, most property owners would sell-up their land for the cause (assuming they perceived the MND as competent at installing and running the thing).

However, it is still possible to imagine, on several grounds, scenarios in which property owners refuse to sell. Would the State then be justified in seizing their land? No - unless perhaps it could be conclusively demonstrated that the non-sale of the land would result in disaster for other people with whom the property owner is in society with and that the State's proposed seizure were the only means of preventing this. Those conditions however, are extremely stringent and therefore unlikely to apply. First, the mere possession or "installation" of defensive weapons cannot by itself guarantee that a disastrous attack by an enemy State will not succeed; perhaps nuclear weapons are the closest thing to any such guarantee, although some of the problems with that should be obvious. Second, since the State exercizes an effective monopoly on the production of security, it is susceptible, like all other economic cartels, to being perverted by the economic incentives for high prices and poor quality that monopoly and cartel structures tend to inculcate (i.e. basically, there is always a good chance they are likely to make a f*cking mess of whatever it is they are supposed to be doing). Third, and in dovetail with that last point, it may be that a property owner (or group of such property owners) have a viable alternative means of either dissuading or repelling aggression which requires that they access to their land (e.g. militia groups which, whilst they might do nothing to raise the cost of invading, could be significant in raising the costs of staying put).

More generally, I stick to the principle that the State may not expropriate land under any circumstances, even war (there ought to be no need for this anyway, even in war time). Dogmatic? Yes, but not stupid.

There are other arguments to be made in response to the question, but pursuing them here would not only take me too far into subjects I'm already writing about for my defense essay, but tapping them out on the keyboard would likely retard my rise tommrow morning by another hour or two.

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Incidentally, a correction... I noted in an earlier post that the Nankunshan temple was in the Beidou district of Chiayi county... well not according to this map of Tainan I snapped in the 7-11 the other night (zoom in on the far left, upper-corner):