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RE: “Defining Voluntaryism” - No, private property is not “optional” (addressing @lukestokes)
There has to be some form of private property ownership though. Some land, like the lakeside lot, is going to be worth more than other land. Some land will have gold on the surface or under it. Other land will not. Land near fertile areas will be worth more than desert land. Humans have to have a fair way to control those areas. If there is no private property system, who gets to control it then? Who decides where who lives? Who gets the lot with gold, and who gets to live beside the lake? That group or that person then becomes a ruler.
My feeling is that to move forward on a voluntarian system we need to adopt a stewardship mentality when it comes to property (land) ownership.
With an exceptable criteria of good stewardship a community could then decide to assign or revoke stewardship to land depending on how the individual lives up to that criteria.
Ad long as each individual in the society voluntarily agrees to this system, sure.
I'm a business owner, and I plan to add more businesses to my list of assets. Am I inherently evil for owning them? I also plan to buy properties with houses or cabins on them to rent to people. Does that make me evil? According to some people here, I'm not "allowed" to have such things. Having them makes me a tyrant in their opinion apparently.
Not evil in the least, in my opinion, @finnian. To be applauded in fact in capitalism. My thought was that too much of capitalism is backed up with guns to be a good economic system to use in a voluntarist community.
Corporatism is. Capitalism, absent the state, is nothing more than the freedom to trade. This will always be fully present in any free society.
Bringing land ownership into trade changes things considerably, in my opinion.
The trade of which you speak brought to my mind an image of a post crusade english market... existing after the crusades yet before the Lords of the Land stepped in and outlawed all transaction tokens but their own.
In the new markets of post crusade england a boot maker might give a boot chit to the miller for flour who might then give it to a guild member he wants to do work on their mill. The peasants were accumulating wealth and with such trade; as you rightly mention; more freedom. They still did not own land at this point.
By adopting crapitalism volunterists are destined to create a new boss from the old one; should they ever move from theory to becoming actualized, in my opinion.
Please see my other comment regarding the objective necessity of a universalizable property norm if violent conflict is to be minimized.