This post is simply meant to draw readers’ attention to the interesting conversation going on in the comment thread on the “Property and Serfdom” post below. Kyle Baxter asks:
If the original distribution is unjust (e.g. it depended on the violation of rights), but at some point just rules for trade were implemented (ones based on rights), does that make the resulting distributions increasingly just as you move away from the original distribution? That is, if 2009 is the “original” distribution date, but just rules are implemented in 2010, does 2020′s distribution become more just? 2030′s more so, and 2040′s even more just?
What implications do our answers to these questions have for our theory of property rights, and given a particular theory of property rights, for contemporary issues such as land reform and reparations?
And Mark Lebar makes the important point that emergency scenarios don’t necessarily show that rights aren’t absolute, merely that rights over tangible goods are bundles that can be apportioned differently in different circumstances.
PILEUS 
If original perfect justice is needed to validate the present system (which must be a possibility, else the question is a false one), and given that human history doesn”t consist of just the original point in time and the present, then all other intervening transfers must also maintain an unbroken streak of perfect justice. Based on what we know of human history, that hasn’t happened. So any theory that past injustice irremediably taints a system of distribution means the system is irremediably unjust for eternity. And I would suggest the question is then a false one (or rhetorica), as there is only one conceivably possible answer if the past is determinative.
Further, implementation of any endstate-defined notion of justice runs roughshod over all intervening transfers, no matter how just, so is itself unjust to some extent, although not in ways endstate sponsors are able to concede – because of course it destroys their system of beliefs. So you have the Orwellian proposition that one last round of injustice is needed and then we can have justice thereafter. And one can say the same thing of that approach – based on what we know of human history, that never happens.
So this approach ensures injustice and renders all states but one unjust. I question how productive it is to pursue either one in that light. It is clearly a totalitarian mindset to deny justice to all but one state of affairs.
I also question the utility of these modes of thinking about property rights in the context of what is almost entirely a service economy with a fiat currency, i.e., where at least one side of the exchange (and likely both) is transferring something that did not exist at the time of the original distribution.
I also question the utility of these modes of thinking about property rights in the context of what is almost entirely a service economy with a fiat currency, i.e., where at least one side of the exchange (and likely both) is transferring something that did not exist at the time of the original distribution.
But the vast majority of wealth that exists today did not exist even 100 years ago, and virtually all value that has been created since then has been made with exchanged materials and labor, rather than with matter freshly appropriated from an unowned state. I don’t really see anything special about fiat currency & services in that respect. One of the almost “magical” things about market exchange is that the mere exchange of something creates value (wealth) that did not previously exist.