Please Stop Saying That Property Ownership Is Bad.
It does not matter how well-meaning your are or what lovely visions you have. Anti-propertarianism is wrong. (DN 3.0)
Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |
(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22
(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0
Because the message of this piece is absolutely essential (and because it is a tad longer than usual), and I going to leave it at the top for two days.
If you understand and agree with the message of this piece, then you are right where you need to be, and for that, you deserve half off of a year's subscription!
Chapter 3: Where
Chapter 3.0
Property Rights Are Natural Rights
In every generation, a certain percentage of people hold a strange and dangerous belief: That property ownership is bad…and even that it ought to be forbidden.
This notion has a variety of sources. Communist ideology. A romanticization and misperception of the realities of ‘indigenous’ tribal life.1 A desire for ‘fairness.’ Discussion of these and other reasons could occupy us for quite some time, but that is beyond our current scope.
Whatever the reasons, this belief is wrong and extremely bad for humankind.
I do not wish to alienate anyone, but I must nonetheless take the risk, in order to ensure clarity, and thus state clearly that
Anti-propertarian beliefs run counter to basic natural law.
Anti-propertarian beliefs are directly correlated with economic disaster, complete social failure, and population-scale mass-murder.
Somehow, some way, I really hope to convince you that anti-propertarian beliefs are seriously bad medicine.
Let us begin at the beginning.
In chapter 1, we carefully demonstrated the basic realities of natural law:
No one has any ontological authority over anyone else, and thus no one has any right to initiate coercive force against, or violate the consent of, any other person.2
Every person has complete, exclusive, inalienable ownership of himself or herself. You are the sole owner of your life, body, being, choices, thoughts, and actions.
Combine these two and you get rights. You choose to live, so no one has a right to kill you. You choose with whom to have sex, so no one has a right to rape you. You choose to be healthy, so no one has a right to poison you.
So let’s focus on your choice to live (your right to life). How do accomplish this?
First, you must exist physically, and occupy a physical space. No one has a right to say, I need the physical space you are in, and the elements your body is using, so I am going to dismantle you now.
You need to eat. In order for the morsel of food you are about to consume to be useful to you, it must be yours. It cannot be anyone else’s, or everyone else’s. And as long as you did not take it by force from anyone else, it IS yours.
Somehow, you acquired this morsel of food. You traded fairly for it. You produced it (say, by raising chickens and collecting their eggs). Or it was a previously unowned resource and you gathered, hunted, cultivated, or otherwise homesteaded it.
Remember, there really is only one rule: You may not initiate coercive force against anyone or violate their consent in any transaction. Trading, producing, and homesteading do not initiate force or violate consent.
We can carry this on up the line…
You need a tool to help you get your food. A fishing spear. A basket for gathering. You mix yourself—your thoughts, your choices, your labor—with a stick or some reeds to carve that spear or weave that basket.
In order for these constructed objects to be useful to you, they must be yours. They cannot belong to some other group of people, or to everyone in the world. They must be yours and yours alone. And by the laws of nature, they are.
Any assertion to the contrary invites violence (and thus violates natural law). Even if the source of the assertion comes from well-meaning communists or ‘spiritual’ people, it still invites violence. It takes a nonviolent act—your peaceful creation of property—and invites others to make a claim against you for it. Unsurprisingly, it takes five seconds for those others—jealous and lazy, as humans can so easily be—to turn that claim into a pretext for violence against you.
Most people understand that peaceful acts must not be met with violence. And yet that is exactly what anti-propertarianism does.
Continuing…
In order to feed a family, you might need to do more than hunt and gather—you might need to farm. That requires a piece of land. In order for that land to be useful to you and your family, it must be yours. It cannot be used by everyone. It cannot belong to everyone. You must be able to exclude others from its use.
The same goes for the farmhouse where you live, the stove upon which you cook, and the beds in which you and your family sleep. These cannot be everyone’s house, stove, or beds. They must be yours. And so long as you traded for, acquired, produced, or received them without violence, they ARE yours.
How could it be otherwise? If we do not own the things we trade for, produce, acquire, or receive without violence, then who does?
Common stock?
This is a crucial moment. This is the moment where we explore something that John Locke got wrong, and it is very important…
Locke described the original condition of Earth as having been given to us all “in common.” It’s a nice-sounding and poetic notion, but from a practical standpoint, it is wrong and extremely damaging. If we take the attitude that the world is a “common stock,” and thus that property is the act of “removing from the common stock,” we open the door to a Pandora’s Box of problems.
By trading, producing, or homesteading, you are not initiating force against anyone. But if we hold that you are removing from a common stock, then we have immediately problematized your actions. We have turned your legitimate act into a transgression.
It gets worse. These are actions that you must take in order to survive. You cannot exist without exclusive property. So, if we claim that you have removed something from the common stock, we are problematizing your very existence. It says that you and your life are a problem for all of humankind, right out of the gate.
That is seriously bad juju.
There’s more. If you remove something from “common stock,” shouldn’t you first ask permission? That is, after all, what we must do before we take stuff that does not belong to us, or that is deemed to be common property.
So whom do we ask? Clearly we cannot ask all of humanity. Thus, we find ourselves ‘guilty’ for doing something ‘wrong,’ with no one from whom to beg permission or forgiveness. And yet—surprise, surprise—there is always someone ready to speak in loco humanis and relieve you of that guilt…for a price:
I speak for all of humanity. You may only own something with my permission. Now pay me.
Recognized property rights, and a legal system for their protection, are essential, as we will soon discuss. But these aren’t private title companies offering you a service for a reasonable fee. These are a small number of government ‘officials’ taxing you, claiming to be your superior landlord, and then granting you ‘permission’ to ‘own’ what is already yours by right.
Y’know, because after all…you stole it from the common stock.
Do you see how this notion of “owning the Earth in common” is a recipe for bad things? It tells us that we are guilty of…something…just for doing what we must do to live. That our very existence is somehow harming others. It breeds resentment, and it opens the door to exploitation.
Locke got just about everything else on the subject of property correct. Indeed, his work on the subject has been invaluable to humanity. But the “common stock” notion is wrong, and disastrously so.
It is much better to take the approach of Rothbard, Hoppe, and others and simply note that we started out in a world of unowned resources. Through thought, planning, and effort—all of which are outgrowths of our self-ownership—we mix ourselves with those unowned resources, homesteading small bits of them. Then we set about trading them, producing with them, or giving them to others in voluntary bequeath.
Who owns your stuff?
As Rothbard pointed out, there are only three possibilities.
You own your stuff.
Some group of other humans own your stuff.
Everyone in the world owns a “quotal share” of your stuff.
Number 3 is unworkable. How can everyone in the world claim a share of ownership of anything? How can they benefit from that tiny share? And if they did not produce, trade for, or homestead the thing, then where does their claim even come from? And how would they press their claim?
They would not. They cannot. Which brings us to Number 2. There is always some group of men eager to profit by speaking for the group, the tribe, the collective, or the whole world:
Step 1: Assert that the group has some claim on the property of the individual. That’s easy enough to do, given that plenty of human beings are lazy, greedy, or jealous, and plenty of others are idealistic and easily fall for this sort of nonsense, in their desire to be ‘good’ people.
Step 2: Claim to ‘serve,’ and promise to protect, the interests of the group. This is easy enough to do too. In the USSR, it took about 15 seconds for everyone to realize that it is impossible for “the workers” to own the means of production. Obviously, the state would have to do it for them. There’s no other way, and everyone knows it. Of course, ‘the state’ is just some small cabal of people. So the end result of this attitude is to give some small group of men control over the property of the individual…for the common good, dontcha know.
Step 3: Use this position of power to tax, control, and expropriate the property of individuals.
The notion that your house and your things belong not to you but to some other group of men isn’t protecting “the group.” It is a racket. And it can only exist if ‘well-meaning’ people keep denying the existence of individual property rights.
Only Number 1—that your stuff belongs to you—makes any sense.
Property is not to blame
Throughout history, some property has been acquired through evil means or used for evil purposes. This leads to one of the most erroneous conclusions in the history of erroneous conclusions:
Some people have acquired property in bad ways, or have done bad things with their property; therefore, property is bad.
Give me strength.
The existence of conquest does not make property bad; it makes conquest bad.
Property is not to blame for the existence of deceit, treachery, or exploitation.
Property is not to blame for the existence of slumlords or feudal lords.
The fact that mortgage lenders, governments, and bankers collude in shady ways doesn’t make ownership of property shady. It makes them and what they are doing shady.
In other news, the existence of hands cannot be blamed for the fact that some people punch each other.
Territory and title
Critiques of left-wing anti-propertarianism have already been done so thoroughly that there is little point in adding more here. Suffice it to say that every time communists or socialists gain complete control of a society, it ends in failure and monstrous oppression. They start out with the view that no one should own anything (or the workers should own everything, or whatever) and they end up with piles of corpses. Every damn time.
There were so many murdered in the twentieth century that hundreds of thousands of people just get swept up in estimates and rounding errors. 120 million? 150 million? No one even knows. The fact that some people still keep trying to make these ideas happen is completely disgusting.
But it is what it is. Instead, I would rather focus on the anti-propertarian position that goes something roughly like this:
Indigenous people didn’t have property, so why should we?
Needless to say, that is a summary of a range of views, but they do all kind of boil down to some variant of that. No property titles, items shared in common, living in harmony with the land…doesn’t that sound nice?
This is a romanticized oversimplification. It is understandable, given the occasionally horrifying complexity of modern life, but it is a gross oversimplification nonetheless.
First, indigenous peoples have varied greatly in their cultural approaches to property. As such, it is a mistake to make any dispositive statements or paint with an over-broad brush. Yet we must understand that in many of the ways that matter, most do have property.
They may not register a deed with a title company, but a tribe will generally have a territorial range. Other tribes will either respect this territory, or recognize that if they choose not to respect it, a fight will result. That IS property. It is just dealt with differently.
One of the reasons why they can get by without using legally recorded title deeds is because of low population density and ample land area. An Amazon tribe can claim a territorial range and still leave plenty of room for others to have their territories too.
If such groups were to experience a massive population boom, they would eventually need legal titles to land too, or some other way of establishing recognized claims. No one can get by without property—to live on, hunt on, fish on, farm on, exist on. No one. It’s just a question of how it’s done, and a lot of that depends on how much land is available and how many people there are.
Similarly, within a tribe, some personal property must also exist. Even in tribes with the highest levels of communal ownership, there are still rules. They aren’t tearing off each other’s loincloths or kicking each other out of huts in the middle of the night.
The vision of tribes sharing everything, and living harmoniously without the “evil of property,” is gauzy and incorrect. They are not special humans, better than us foolish moderns. If their populations were to increase—thus increasing density and territorial pressure—they too would develop a more complicated understand of property rights. They would have to.
Communities and consent
Communal ownership of certain things is possible in very small, homogeneous groups with specific cultural traditions. As groups grow in size, those things become more difficult to maintain. The same goes for certain cultural practices.
Let us imagine, for example, that some small group—a tribe or some sort of commune—does wife-swapping as a part of their cultural life. For a while, this system is accepted by all and results in a growing population.
Then, one day, a couple comes along who decide they do not want to wife-swap, or do anything of the sort. They just want to be with each other exclusively. Should the rest of the group force them, against their will?
Bottom line: Everything comes down to consent…
If you want your cordless drill to be community property, feel free to form or join such a community. If you want to live in a community of swingers, polygamists, or polyandrists, go for it. If you want to live on a commune and share the land, go for it. No one is stopping you.
But the desire to have, and exclusively own, one’s house, land, bed, tools, and food is a natural, normal human desire that is totally justified by, and in keeping with, natural law. The desire to have one’s relationships be exclusive is also entirely consonant with natural law. Because consent.
Anyone who thinks that I should not be able to own my house should feel free to come here and try to take it from me. Watch what happens. Every bit as much as anyone who thinks they ought to be able to horn in on my conjugal relationship with my wife can feel free to ask my wife. Watch what happens there too.
Love how you wish, and whom you wish. Make whatever living arrangements you want.3 Just don’t violate the consent of others, or use force upon them if they have not first used force against you. It’s pretty simple, really.
Anti-property is anti-human
The phenomenon of property titles, which can be exchanged in voluntary transactions, is not a crime against humanity. It is a peaceful, civilized way of dealing with the realities of human life.
Property is not violence. The attitude that says that no one gets to have property—THAT is violence. Any society that attempts to actuate this attitude always produces rivers of blood in the attempt.
Why?
It is unnatural.
Property rights are an outgrowth of natural law. Denying people the ability to own property violates natural law, and violations of natural law always produce strife. Always.
It is unworkable.
Some communal approaches to property can work in some very small groups, so long as participants consent. Beyond that, denying people the ability to own property will always produce chaos and failed societies. Always.
It violates consent.
The inviolability of consent is the central moral rule. Taking away the natural human right of property violates consent, and people HATE it when you violate their consent. (And rightly so.) Thus, to deny them property always requires force. Always.
All of this should be obvious, and yet people do keep trying to come up with new ways of justifying robbing people of their natural right to own their own stuff.
I recently saw a video on someone’s stack in which the speaker informed the viewer that a world without property rights is coming in our future. The tones may have been sing-songy and the intent may have been well-meaning, but make no mistake: this was no sweet, spiritual sentiment.
It was a threat.
Property rights are natural, necessary for survival, and foster peace. There is only one way to do away with them: violence. Terrible, terrible violence. And that is exactly what happens every time ‘well-meaning’ people try.
Just so we’re clear…
Throughout this work, I have endeavored to demonstrate that the distributed nation is an inclusive phenomenon, welcoming to people of every identity and culture. There are no tests. Just live as the free and independent being that you are, and respect the basic, obvious, universal principles and protocols of natural law.
But you must understand—that includes property rights.
We are not Georgists. We are not geo-libertarians. And we absolutely are not communists. The WHERE of the distributed nation begins with you, in the sovereign space in which you dwell.
If you rent that space, then hopefully you have made a good, voluntary arrangement with the owner, on mutually agreeable terms.
If you own it, then as far as the distributed nation is concerned, it is yours. Allodially.4
Governments will claim to be your superior landlord, and we cannot do anything about that…for now. But we deem that claim to be illegitimate from the start.
And others will come along with all sorts of justifications for why your stuff isn’t really yours. We reject every single one of those claims as well.
Your stuff is yours. My stuff is mine.
Everyone else..KYFHO.
I put “indigenous” in scare quotes in part because, depending on how you define the word, we are all indigenous (https://self-realisation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Doctrine-of-Micro-Sovereignty.pdf [HT: Calvin Perrins]). This is a subject to which we shall return.
The ‘exception’ for children (and non compos mentis adults) will be discussed separately.
You are, of course, free to form or join a commune if you so desire. Communities that attempt complete communal ownership tend to be unstable, but if you can make it work, more power to you. But as far as natural law is concerned (and thus as far as the distributed nation is concerned), your consent is paramount, and any consent you give to any arrangement must be voluntary, informed, explicit, transparent, and revokable. Thus, you must be free to take your property and leave if you wish.
This, of course, raises the question of contracts. We know that contracts deal in alienable property, and thus a slave contract (which attempts to surrender your inalienable self-ownership) cannot be valid. In practical terms, this knowledge must be reflected in the fact that any normal contract must include a clear termination clause. It is foolish, and invites a difficult conflict with natural-law principles, to do otherwise. Any common-law tradition we develop will reflect this understanding.
To own something allodially is to own it absolutely, with no superior landlord.
Great takedown of the "common stock" problems. Unowned and commonly owned are two very different arrangements.
And the point about the "Indigenous people didn’t have property" fallacy is another important claim to counter. Record keeping and property aren't the same thing. A lack of formally written titles doesn't mean a lack of exercising the natural right of property. Birth certificates in the U.S. have been the norm for less than a century; would this mean births didn't happen before then?
Sure, the generous government will let everybody control their own 3 X 7 foot plot of land so when they crush you they have a place to bury you. Owning property is important but at what point do you truly own it? Never as long as there is a government of thieves ready to pounce on your land. If it has value to them, then it must be valuable, otherwise they wouldn't tax the crap out of it and regulate it to death.