Property

Posted on: October 20, 2021 at 11:56:16 CT

https://mises.org/library/crusoe-social-philosophy

from chapters 6-9 of The Ethics of Liberty

Tangible Property

We cannot fully explain the natural laws of property and of violence without expanding our discussion to cover tangible property. For men are not floating wraiths; they are beings who can only survive by grappling with and transforming material objects. Let us return to our island of Crusoe and Friday. Crusoe, isolated at first, has used his free will and self-ownership to learn about his wants and values, and how to satisfy them by transforming nature-given resources through "mixing" them with his labor. He has thereby produced and created property. Now suppose that Friday lands in another part of this island. He confronts two possible courses of action: he may, like Crusoe, become a producer, transform unused soil by his labor, and most likely exchange his product for that of the other man. In short, he may engage in production and exchange, in also creating property. Or, he may decide upon another course: he may spare himself the effort of production and exchange, and go over and seize by violence the fruits of Crusoe's labor. He may aggress against the producer.

If Friday chooses the course of labor and production, then he in natural fact, as in the case of Crusoe, will own the land area which he clears and uses, as well as the fruits of its product. But, as we have noted above, suppose that Crusoe decides to claim more than his natural degree of ownership, and asserts that, by virtue of merely landing first on the island, he "really" owns the entire island, even though he had made no previous use of it. If he does so, then he is, in our view, illegitimately pressing his property claim beyond its homesteading-natural law boundaries, and if he uses that claim to try to eject Friday by force, then he is illegitimately aggressing against the person and property of the second homesteader.

Some theorists have maintained — in what we might call the "Columbus complex" — that the first discoverer of a new, unowned island or continent can rightfully own the entire area by simply asserting his claim. (In that case, Columbus, if in fact he had actually landed on the American continent — and if there had been no Indians living there — could have rightfully asserted his private "ownership" of the entire continent.) In natural fact, however, since Columbus would only have been able actually to use, to "mix his labor with," a small part of the continent, the rest then properly continues to be unowned until the next homesteaders arrive and carve out their rightful property in parts of the continent.[17]

Let us turn from Crusoe and Friday and consider the question of a sculptor who has just created a work of sculpture by transforming clay and other materials (and let us for the moment waive the question of property rights in the clay and the tools). The question now becomes: who should properly own this work of art as it emerges from the fashioning of the sculptor? Once again, as in the case of the ownership of people's bodies, there are only three logical positions: (1) that the sculptor, the "creator" of the work of art, should have the property right in his creation; (2) that another man or group of men have the right in that creation, i.e., to expropriate it by force without the sculptor's consent; or (3) the "communist" solution — that every individual in the world has an equal, quotal right to share in the ownership of the sculpture.

Put this starkly, there are very few people who would deny the monstrous injustice in either a group or the world community seizing ownership of the sculpture. For the sculptor has in fact "created" this work of art — not of course in the sense that he has created matter, but that he has produced it by transforming nature-given matter (the clay) into another form in accordance with his own ideas and his own labor and energy. Surely, if every man has the right to own his own body and if he must use and transform material natural objects in order to survive, then he has the right to own the product that he has made, by his energy and effort, into a veritable extension of his own personality. Such is the case of the sculptor, who has placed the stamp of his own person on the raw material, by "mixing his labor" with the clay. But if the sculptor has done so, then so has every producer who has "homesteaded" or mixed his labor with the objects of nature.

Any group of people who expropriated the work of the sculptor would be clearly aggressive and parasitical — benefiting at the expense of the expropriated. As most people would agree, they would be clearly violating the right of the sculptor to his product — to the extension of his personality. And this would be true whether a group or the "world commune" did the expropriation — except that, as in the case of communal ownership of persons, in practice this expropriation would have to be performed by a group of men in the name of the "world community." But, as we have indicated, if the sculptor has the right to his own product, or transformed materials of nature, then so have the other producers. So have the men who extracted the clay from the ground and sold it to the sculptor, or the men who produced the tools with which he worked on the clay. For these men, too, were producers; they too, mixed their ideas and their technological know-how with the nature-given soil to emerge with a valued product. They, too, have mixed their labor and energies with the soil. And so, they, too, are entitled to the ownership of the goods they produced.[18]

Land Property

If every man has the right to own his own person and therefore his own labor, and if by extension he owns whatever property he has "created" or gathered out of the previously unused, unowned state of nature, then who has the right to own or control the earth itself? In short, if the gatherer has the right to own the acorns or berries he picks, or the farmer his crop of wheat, who has the right to own the land on which these activities have taken place? Again, the justification for the ownership of ground land is the same for that of any other property. For no man actually ever "creates" matter: what he does is to take nature-given matter and transform it by means of his ideas and labor energy. But this is precisely what the pioneer — the homesteader — does when he clears and uses previously unused virgin land and brings it into his private ownership. The homesteader — just as the sculptor, or miner — has transformed the nature-given soil by his labor and his personality. The homesteader is just as much a "producer" as the others, and therefore just as legitimately the owner of his property. As in the case of the sculptor, it is difficult to see the morality of some other group expropriating the product and labor of the homesteader. (And, as in the other cases, the "world communist" solution boils down in practice to a ruling group.) Furthermore, the land communalists, who claim that the entire world population really owns the land in common, run up against the natural fact that before the homesteader, no one really used and controlled — and hence owned — the land. The pioneer, or homesteader, is the man who first brings the valueless unused natural objects into production and use.

And so, there are only two paths for man to acquire property and wealth: production or coercive expropriation. Or, as the great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer perceptively put it, there are only two means to the acquisition of wealth. One is the method of production, generally followed by voluntary exchange of such products: this is what Oppenheimer called the economic means. The other method is the unilateral seizure of the products of another: the expropriation of another man's property by violence. This predatory method of getting wealth Oppenheimer aptly termed the political means.[19]

Now the man who seizes another's property is living in basic contradiction to his own nature as a man. For we have seen that man can only live and prosper by his own production and exchange of products. The aggressor, on the other hand, is not a producer at all but a predator; he lives parasitically off the labor and product of others. Hence, instead of living in accordance with the nature of man, the aggressor is a parasite who feeds unilaterally by exploiting the labor and energy of other men. Here is clearly a complete violation of any kind of universal ethic, for man clearly cannot live as a parasite; parasites must have non-parasites, producers, to feed upon. The parasite not only fails to add to the social total of goods and services, he depends completely on the production of the host body. And yet, any increase in coercive parasitism decreases ipso facto the quantity and the output of the producers, until finally, if the producers die out, the parasites will quickly follow suit.

Thus, parasitism cannot be a universal ethic, and, in fact, the growth of parasitism attacks and diminishes the production by which both host and parasite survive. Coercive exploitation or parasitism injure the processes of production for everyone in the society. Any way that it may be considered, parasitic predation and robbery violate not only the nature of the victim whose self and product are violated, but also the nature of the aggressor himself, who abandons the natural way of production — of using his mind to transform nature and exchange with other producers — for the way of parasitic expropriation of the work and product of others. In the deepest sense, the aggressor injures himself as well as his unfortunate victim. This is fully as true for the complex modern society as it is for Crusoe and Friday on their island.

Property and Criminality

We may define anyone who aggresses against the person or other produced property of another as a criminal. A criminal is anyone who initiates violence against another man and his property: anyone who uses the coercive "political means" for the acquisition of goods and services.[20]

Now, however, critical problems arise; we are now indeed at the very heart of the entire problem of liberty, property, and violence in society. A crucial question — and one which has unfortunately been almost totally neglected by libertarian theorists — may be illustrated by the following examples:

Suppose we are walking down the street and we see a man, A, seizing B by the wrist and grabbing B's wris****ch. There is no question that A is here violating both the person and the property of B. Can we then simply infer from this scene that A is a criminal aggressor, and B his innocent victim?

Certainly not — for we don't know simply from our observation whether A is indeed a thief, or whether A is merely repossessing his own watch from B who had previously stolen it from him. In short, while the watch had undoubtedly been B's property until the moment of A's attack, we don't know whether or not A had been the legitimate owner at some earlier time, and had been robbed by B. Therefore, we do not yet know which one of the two men is the legitimate or just property owner. We can only find the answer through investigating the concrete data of the particular case, i.e., through "historical" inquiry.

Thus, we cannot simply say that the great axiomatic moral rule of the libertarian society is the protection of property rights, period. For the criminal has no natural right whatever to the retention of property that he has stolen; the aggressor has no right to claim any property that he has acquired by aggression. Therefore, we must modify or rather clarify the basic rule of the libertarian society to say that no one has the right to aggress against the legitimate or just property of another.

In short, we cannot simply talk of defense of "property rights" or of "private property" per se. For if we do so, we are in grave danger of defending the "property right" of a criminal aggressor — in fact, we logically must do so. We may therefore only speak of just property or legitimate property or perhaps "natural property." And this means that, in concrete cases, we must decide whether any single given act of violence is aggressive or defensive: e.g., whether it is a case of a criminal robbing a victim, or of a victim trying to repossess his property.

Another vital implication of this way of looking at the world is to invalidate totally the utilitarian way of looking at property rights and therefore of looking at the free market. For the utilitarian, who has no conception, let alone theory, of justice, must fall back on the pragmatic, ad hoc view that all titles to private property currently existing at any time or place must be treated as valid and accepted as worthy of defense against violation.[21] This, in fact, is the way utilitarian free-market economists invariably treat the question of property rights. Note, however, that the utilitarian has managed to smuggle into his discussion an unexamined ethic: that all goods "now" (the time and place at which the discussion occurs) considered private property must be accepted and defended as such. In practice, this means that all private property titles designated by any existing government (which has everywhere seized the monopoly of defining titles to property) must be accepted as such. This is an ethic that is blind to all considerations of justice, and, pushed to its logical conclusion, must also defend every criminal in the property that he has managed to expropriate. We conclude that the utilitarian's simply praising a free market based upon all existing property titles is invalid and ethically nihilistic. [22]

I am convinced, however, that the real motor for social and political change in our time has been a moral indignation arising from the fallacious theory of surplus value: that the capitalists have stolen the rightful property of the workers, and therefore that existing titles to accumulated capital are unjust. Given this hypothesis, the remainder of the impetus for both Marxism and anarchosyndicalism follow quite logically. From an apprehension of what appears to be monstrous injustice flows the call for "expropriation of the expropriators," and, in both cases, for some form of "reversion" of the ownership and the control of the property to the workers.[23] Their arguments cannot be successfully countered by the maxims of utilitarian economics or philosophy, but only by dealing forthrightly with the moral problem, with the problem of the justice or injustice of various claims to property.

Edited by pickle at 11:57:31 on 10/20/21