1. Slavery

"A person is their own property." Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Sounds like Libertarians and Conservatives (LibCons) are taking a position opposed to slavery, right? Nope. See, there's a problem with that statement: Property owners have the legal right to sell what they own to someone else. What's more, property can be legally seized by creditors. They're not saying every person is perpetually and intrinsically entitled to fundamental human rights - that's a liberal position, and one they hold in utter contempt. What they're saying is that if you are in possession of such rights, then they belong to you until you willingly sign them away, have them stripped by creditors, or revoked by courts. A human being is nothing more than a commodity in this ideological viewpoint, and a free person is merely one who happens to be in their own possession.

In other words, you don't really have any rights - just an account sheet listing your assets, with two of the items on it being life and liberty. So, if you wanted to - or if your economic situation were sufficiently dire - you could by this logic sell yourself into slavery. And I don't mean merely de facto slavery, like signing an abusive contract with draconian terms: I mean LibCon ideology holds that "freedom" entitles people to put themselves into literal slavery, as chattels with no rights whatsoever. And conversely, this "right" necessarily means that the receiver of the slave has the right to hold that property and exercise total jurisdiction over it.

That means that if they felt like it, the new owner could sexually assault, torture, maim, or kill their property without violating the moral/legal framework, and by this logic it would be "voluntary" on the part of the victim even if they died screaming for mercy: They "voluntarily" signed away all right to themselves, and thus all events that followed from that decision are also voluntary. This is how LibCons rationalize wage slavery and enforced poverty, and taken to its ultimate conclusion it's also how they rationalize literal slavery. It's how even allegedly "moral" Confederates rationalized murdering their fellow Americans on the battlefield to protect an institution they acknowledged to be wrong: Because they thought the "wrong" of taking away the "property" of slave owners more than outweighed the justice of liberating slaves.

But it gets even worse, because if a person can transfer their "property" of themselves to another as part of a deliberate transaction, then that transaction can also be forced on them if they default on loans, can't pay bills, can't pay legal fines for minor offenses due to being in poverty, etc. They can be enslaved for being poor, unlucky, or just maliciously targeted by someone with greater resources. And that's quite a big step away from the "freedom" of the individual to make their own decisions, but it actually gets even worse than that.

If you own a tree, you also own the seeds it produces, so if you plant those seeds and they grow into more trees, you own them too. If you own a cow and the cow gives birth to a calf, you own the calf too. So if you own a human being, you own what comes from them - their productive output, whether that output is agricultural produce, manufactured products, or more "human capital" in the form of children. And it doesn't matter how many degrees of separation it goes through: You own their children, their children's children, and their children's children's children. This is a natural consequence of the idea of humans being anyone's property rather than repositories of intrinsic, indivisible, non-transferable moral and legal value.

And if one of these great-great-grandchildren of the guy who sold himself into slavery wants to be free, well...he should have thought of that before being born a slave. Or he should seek his Master's permission and work really hard to "earn" that freedom. If that Master still won't allow it, well, that's his "right." Just as it would be his right to cut off the insolent slave's head who dared to ask for freedom and mount it on a pike as an example to the other property. See, this is what freedom looks like to Libertarians and Conservatives.

Even if there were some slave owner who changed their mind and went on a crusade to buy and liberate slaves, the others in their community would have the "liberty" to pass a law giving them to right to hang that guy for trying to undermine their way of life. They would also have the "freedom" to wage war on their own country if it tried to end slavery. In other words, nothing even resembling what any sane human being would call freedom or liberty - just a state where those with all power and privilege are able to act with total impunity against everyone else. Speaking of which...

2. Dictatorship & Serfdom

Another heinous consequence of "sovereign citizen" horseshit is the notion that private property gives its owners dictatorial powers within its boundaries - in other words, that all laws other than the whim of the owner cease to exist once you enter private property. To this way of thinking, the United States of America doesn't exist on private property - it's just a bitterly resented grouting between lawless private tyrannies like medieval dukedoms. According to this viewpoint, if you step off the street into a person's home, you're stepping out of 21st century America into 10th century Wallachia, with all the attendant differences in rights and morals.

This is the origin of "Stand Your Ground" laws, and conservative resentment of Child Protection services and enforcement of domestic violence laws: To hold that anyone other than the person whose name is on the deed to the property has any rights whatsoever is a violation, in their view. They believe the phrase "King of the Castle" is supposed to be literally true: A King being someone who has the right to have people executed, beaten, tortured, arrested, doesn't matter - completely at their discretion.

But wait, it gets worse. What if you economically have no choice but to live on someone else's property - do owners have the right to have private security forces arrest, beat, or summarily execute renters? They do if LibCons have their way. According to them, unless you own the property on which you live, you have to leave your own home and walk out into the public square to have any rights at all. Except, uh oh, the corporation that owns your apartment complex bought the public square too. They own the parks and retail centers, and the city leases the land from them on which its municipal government buildings are located, so you can't protest there - because Freedom. Maybe you could protest in an empty, undeveloped field...except no, because real estate speculators own it all.

Maybe on the little neglected, graffiti-strewn islands in the crooks of freeway onramps the United States of America still exists in such a state of affairs. Maybe those little 20-foot patches of dead grass are the "free speech zones" where someone who doesn't own land still has rights, unless of course they were built as part of some public-private partnership where a corporation can tell you to go away. So that too is the LibCon idea of "freedom" - one where you have the freedom to choose between being homeless or being a serf contractually obligated to fall to the floor in the presence of your wealthy betters. Which brings up an interesting hypothetical scenario...

3. Robbery

Suppose a rich conservative buys up all the land surrounding your property - and I do mean all of it: A solid ring. According to LibCon principles, they now have the right to set up a tollbooth between your house and the outside world and charge you $5,000 to leave and come back. Moreover, they have the right to man that tollbooth with armed Blackwater guards with heavy machine guns, and swiss-cheese you if you try to cross their property without paying what they demand. Now, most places have laws guaranteeing right-of-way under such conditions, but LibCon logic holds that to be "Big Gubmint interference" in the "free market," and a violation of the rights of property owners to absolute sovereign dictatorship over their territory.

After all, you voluntarily chose to live there, and you were negligent in not realizing they were encircling you before they did. If you had been more diligent, you would have seen it coming and either fled or preempted them by buying the land before they could. Or if you couldn't possibly afford that, well, you should have thought of that too - you should have anticipated that you would be victimized and gotten rich to avoid it, or else not been so insolent as to live near someone with more money than you.

This scenario is a perfect metaphor for just about everything that happens in the private sector: We have almost zero power to negotiate our own compensation as employees or the prices of what we buy, because so much of the economy is under the total control of small and shrinking oligopolies intimately tied to political conservatism and its "Libertarian" handmaidens. You don't agree to pay what you pay for healthcare - they demand it and you have no practical choice. Same with rent, same with transportation, same with most things. So from the laudable, liberal principle that people should be secure in their property, conservatives and Libertarians create a dark, twisted ideology where they call it "freedom" to be robbed at every turn, to be denied alternatives by people who own the ground beneath your feet and set up tollbooths between the citizenry and critical needs. The LibCon ideal of the "entrepreneur" has more in common with a highway robber than a creator of productive enterprise.

4. Lynching / Private imprisonment

LibCon ideology holds that everything is better when handled privately than by the government, and criminal justice is no different. The "first line of defense" in this framework is the Dictator Landowner described before, who would to this way of thinking be within their rights to have private mercenary thugs hang someone from a tree for setting foot on their property without permission; or for stealing an apple while on the job picking them; or for having a skin tone the owner doesn't like and an attitude they find insolent (or "uppity"); or really any reason they see fit. But if they're a slightly more merciful tyrant, maybe they don't have the offender killed - maybe they just lock them in a dungeon for a year or two, then dump them disheveled, emaciated, and half-crazy out into the street. LibCons think this would be perfectly within a property owner's rights.

But they don't limit it to actually being on someone else's property: They extend the Dictator-Owner principle to entire communities, so if you do something the powerful citizens of the community find offensive (like being black and looking at a white lady), well they may just decide to settle things privately with a lynch mob. Why "waste" taxpayer money on an explicit legal process that at least pretends the accused has rights when you can do away with all pretense and cut to the chase? If you want to stop them, you should have thought of that before failing to be powerful. If the police aren't part of the mob, they'll still defer to it if it has the blessing of money - at least in a LibCon society where police are paid so little (if anything) that they have to depend on private security work to survive.

Which brings us to things actually going on in our society: The sale of courts, elections, and police forces to the highest bidder, who then build private prisons and turn the entire system of criminal justice into a for-profit diabolical farce where human suffering is the only product. Of course, since LibCons think it's all right for courts to put people into slavery via forced prison labor, it makes sense they would also support the kinds of corrupt "political enterpreneurship" that arises from it - like that juvenile court judge in Pennsylvania who took money to send thousands of kids to jail.

5. Child prostitution

Going back to the Slavery part, remember how LibCons said everyone is their own property? Well, see, they also tend to believe that children are the property of their parents, partly because of the whole "people are property" idea in general, and also because of the "King of the Castle" horseshit. But even if they try to hedge by conceding that parents are guardians of rights held in trust, one of those rights is the right to sell yourself into slavery - so if you can do it to yourself, then someone who holds that right for you would also have the same right in your place. If the parent/guardian/owner decides (or at least claims) that what's best for their child is to be pimped out to financially contribute to household income, well, that's their "right" as a parent/guardian/owner. Laws that prevent such a decision are "Big Gubmint interference" in "family."

The child might not want to be a prostitute, but hey, they don't want to go to school either - which fortunately their "enterprising" parents have the absolute right to keep them out of, choosing instead to form a charter school where the curriculum consists of prostitution and drug muling crystal meth across the Mexican border. Whether the charter school teaches math and reading, fatuous religious dogma, or the proper procedure for weighing out bricks of cocaine, who is Big Gubmint to interfere in the decisions of a family (i.e., the absolute decisions of Head of the Family)? They're teaching their kid a trade, and the value of money, so who could be against that? What are ya, a Communist?

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Libertarians and Conservatives will never admit this is what they favor, but their actions are clear: They oppose all measures that would prevent it. Which in Sane People Land means this is what they support.