Part 1 The Libertarian Creed
Chapter 2 Property and Exchange
The Non-Aggression Axiom
The Libertarian Creed rests upon one central axiom, that no man or group of men may aggress
against the person or property of anyone else.
This may be called the Non-Aggression Axiom.
Aggression is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against
the person or property of anyone else.
Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
If no man may aggress against another, if, in short, everyone has the absolute right
to be free from aggression, then this at once implies that the libertarian stands for square
for what are generally known as civil liberties, the freedom to speak, publish, assemble and
to engage in such victimless crimes as pornography, sexual deviation and prostitution, which the
libertarian does not regard as crimes at all, since he defines a crime as violent invasion
of someone else's person or property.
Furthermore, he regards conscription as slavery on a massive scale, and since war, especially
All of these positions are now considered leftist on the contemporary ideological scale.
On the other hand, since the libertarian also opposes invasion of the rights of private
property, this also means that he just as emphatically opposes government interference
with Property Rights or with the free market economy through controls, regulations, subsidies
or prohibitions.
For if every individual has the right to his own property without having to suffer aggressive
depredation, then he also has the right to give away his property, bequest and inheritance,
and to exchange it for the property of others, free contract and the free market economy
without interference.
The libertarian favors the right to unrestricted private property and free exchange, hence
a system of laissez-faire capitalism.
In current terminology, again, the libertarian position on property and economics would be
called extreme right-wing.
But the libertarian sees no inconsistency in being leftist on some issues and rightist
on others.
On the contrary, he sees his own position as virtually the only consistent one, consistent
on behalf of the liberty of every individual.
For how can the leftist be opposed to the violence of war and conscription, while at
the same time supporting the violence of taxation and government control?
And how can the rightist trumpet his devotion to private property and free enterprise, while
while at the same time favoring war, conscription, and the outlawing of non-invasive activities
and practices that he deems immoral.
And how can the rightist favor a free market while seeing nothing amiss in the vast subsidies,
distortions, and unproductive inefficiencies involved in the military-industrial complex?
While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and
Property, The Libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has
been one central, dominant and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights, the state.
In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right or in between, the Libertarian refuses to
give the state the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would
would be immoral, illegal and criminal if committed by any person or group in society.
The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone and makes
no special exemptions for any person or group.
But if we look at the state naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed and
and even encouraged to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible
crimes.
The state habitually commits mass murder, which it calls war, or sometimes suppression
of subversion.
The state engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls conscription.
And it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls taxation.
The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority
of the population is not germane to their nature, that regardless of popular sanction,
war is mass murder, conscription is slavery, and taxation is robbery.
The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently
that the emperor has no clothes.
Throughout the ages, the emperor has had a series of pseudo-clothes provided for him
by the nation's intellectual caste.
In past centuries, the intellectuals informed the public that the state or its rulers were
divine, or at least clothed in divine authority, and therefore what might look to the naive
and untutored eye as despotism, mass murder and theft on a grand scale was only the divine
working its benign and mysterious ways in the body politic.
In recent decades, as the divine sanction has worn a bit threadbare,
the emperor's court intellectuals have spun ever more sophisticated apologia,
informing the public that what the government does is for the common good and the public welfare,
that the process of taxation and spending works through the mysterious process of the multiplier
to keep the economy on an even keel, and that, in any case, a wide variety of governmental
services could not possibly be performed by citizens acting voluntarily on the market
or in society.
All of this, the libertarian denies.
He sees the various apologia as fraudulent means of obtaining public support for the
state's rule, and he insists that whatever services the government actually performs
could be supplied far more efficiently and far more morally by private and cooperative enterprise.
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification
and de-sanctification of the state among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the democratic state has no clothes,
Rules, that all governments subsist by exploitive rule over the public, and that such rule is
the reverse of objective necessity.
He strives to show that the very existence of taxation and the state necessarily sets
up a class division between the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled.
He seeks to show that the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the
of the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept state
rule and that these intellectuals obtain in return a share in the power and pelf extracted
by the rulers from their deluded subjects.
Take for example the institution of taxation, which statists have claimed is in some sense
really voluntary.
Anyone who truly believes in the voluntary nature of taxation is invited to refuse to
pay taxes and to see what then happens to him.
If we analyze taxation, we find that among all the persons and institutions in society,
only the government acquires its revenues through coercive violence.
Everyone else in society acquires income either through voluntary gift, lodge, charitable
Society, chess club, or through the sale of goods or services voluntarily purchased by
consumers.
If anyone but the government proceeded to tax, this would clearly be considered coercion
and thinly disguised banditry.
Yet the mystical trappings of sovereignty have so veiled the process that only libertarians
Libertarians are prepared to call taxation what it is—legalized and organized theft
on a grand scale.
Property Rights If the central axiom of the libertarian creed
is non-aggression against anyone's person and property, how is this axiom arrived at?
What is its groundwork or support?
Here libertarians, past and present, have differed considerably.
Roughly there are three broad types of foundation for the libertarian axiom, corresponding to
three kinds of ethical philosophy, the emotivist, the utilitarian, and the natural rights viewpoint.
The emotivists assert that they take liberty or non-aggression as their premise purely
on subjective emotional grounds.
While their own intense emotion might seem a valid basis for their own political philosophy,
this can scarcely serve to convince anyone else.
By ultimately taking themselves outside the realm of rational discourse, the emotivists
thereby ensure the lack of general success of their own cherished doctrine.
The utilitarians declare from their study of the consequences of liberty as opposed
Now, no one disputes that relative consequences should be studied in assessing the merits
or demerits of respective creeds.
But there are many problems in confining ourselves to a utilitarian ethic.
For one thing, utilitarianism assumes that we can weigh alternatives and decide upon
and Policies on the basis of their good or bad consequences.
But if it is legitimate to apply value judgments to the consequences of X, why is it not equally
legitimate to apply such judgments to X itself?
May there not be something about an act itself which in its very nature can be considered
good or evil?
Another problem with the utilitarian is that he will rarely adopt a principle as an absolute
and consistent yardstick to apply to the varied concrete situations of the real world.
He will only use a principle, at best, as a vague guideline or aspiration, as a tendency
which he may choose to override at any time.
This was the major defect of the 19th century English radicals who had adopted the laissez-faire
The 18th Century Liberals had substituted a scientific utilitarianism for the mystical concept of natural rights as the groundwork for that philosophy.
Hence the 19th Century laissez-faire liberals came to use laissez-faire as a vague tendency rather than as an unblemished yardstick,
and therefore increasingly and fatally compromised the libertarian creed.
To say that a utilitarian cannot be trusted to maintain libertarian principle in every specific application may sound harsh, but it puts the case fairly.
A notable contemporary example is the free-market economist Professor Milton Friedman, who, like his classical economist forebears, holds to freedom as against state intervention as a general tendency,
Let us consider a stark example.
Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the
Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation, so few
as to be statistically insignificant.
The utilitarian libertarian might well reason, while the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable,
the executions are small in number.
The vast majority of the public as non-redheads achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from
The Social Cost is Negligible, The Social Psychic Benefit to the Rest of Society is Great, Therefore it is Right and Proper for Society to Execute the Redheads.
The Natural Rights Libertarian, Overwhelmingly Concerned as he is for the Justice of the Act, Will React in Horror and Staunchly and Unequivocally Oppose the Executions as Totally Unjustified Murder and Aggression upon Non-Aggressive Activists.
upon non-aggressive persons.
The consequence of stopping the murders, depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure,
would not influence such a libertarian, the absolutist libertarian, in the slightest.
Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural rights libertarian cheerfully
admits to being doctrinaire, to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines.
Let us turn then to the natural rights basis for the libertarian creed, a basis which in
one form or another has been adopted by most of the libertarians past and present.
Natural rights is the cornerstone of a political philosophy which, in turn, is embedded in
and a Greater Structure of Natural Law Natural Law Theory rests on the insight that we live
in a world of more than one, in fact, a vast number of entities, and that each entity has
distinct and specific properties, a distinct nature which can be investigated by man's
reason, by his sense perception and mental faculties.
Man therefore has a distinct nature and behaves in a certain way, and so do iron, salt, etc.
The species man, therefore, has a specifiable nature, as does the world around him and the
ways of interaction between them.
To put it with undue brevity, the activity of each inorganic and organic entity is determined
by its own nature and by the nature of the other entities with which it comes in contact.
Specifically, while the behavior of plants, and at least the lower animals, is determined
by their biological nature or perhaps by their instincts, the nature of man is such that
each individual person must, in order to act, choose his own ends and employ his own means
in order to attain them.
Possessing no automatic instincts, each man must learn about himself and the world, use
his mind to select values, learn about cause and effect, and act purposively to maintain
himself and advance his life.
Since men can think, feel, evaluate, and act only as individuals, it becomes vitally necessary
for each man's survival and prosperity that he be free to learn, choose, develop his faculties,
and act upon his knowledge and values.
This is the necessary path of human nature.
To interfere with and cripple this process by using violence goes profoundly against
what is necessary by man's nature for his life and prosperity.
Individualist interference with a man's learning and choices is therefore profoundly anti-human.
It violates the natural law of man's needs.
Individualists have always been accused by their enemies of being atomistic, of postulating
that each individual lives in a kind of vacuum, thinking and choosing without relation to
anyone else in society.
This however is an authoritarian strawman.
Few, if any, individualists have ever been atomists.
On the contrary, it is evident that individuals always learn from each other, cooperate and
interact with each other, and that this, too, is required for man's survival.
But the point is that each individual makes the final choice of which influences to adopt
and which to reject, or of which to adopt first and which afterwards.
The libertarian welcomes the process of voluntary exchange and cooperation between freely acting
individuals.
What he abhors is the use of violence to cripple such voluntary cooperation and force someone
to choose and act in ways different from what his own mind dictates.
The most viable method of elaborating the natural rights statement of the libertarian
and Position is to divide it into parts and to begin with the basic axiom of the right
to self-ownership.
The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man by virtue of his or her
being a human being to own his or her own body, that is, to control that body free of
coercive interference.
Since each individual must think, learn, value and choose his or her ends and means in order
to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital
activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation.
Consider too the consequences of denying each man the right to own his own person.
There are then only two alternatives, either one, a certain class of people, A, have the
right to own another class, B, or two, everyone has the right to own his own equal quota share
of everyone else.
The first alternative implies that while Class A deserves the rights of being human, Class
B is in reality subhuman, and therefore deserves no such rights.
But since they are indeed human beings, the first alternative contradicts itself in denying
natural human rights to one set of humans.
Moreover, as we shall see, allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is
allowed to exploit and therefore to live parasitically at the expense of the latter.
But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirement for life, production
and Exchange.
The second alternative, what we might call participatory communalism or communism, holds
that every man should have the right to own his equal quota share of everyone else.
If there are two billion people in the world, then everyone has the right to own one two
billionth of every other person.
In the first place, we can state that this ideal rests on an absurdity, proclaiming that
Every man is entitled to own a part of everyone else, yet is not entitled to own himself.
Secondly, we can picture the viability of such a world, a world in which no man is free
to take any action whatever without prior approval or indeed command by everyone else
in society.
It should be clear that in that sort of communist world, no one would be able to do anything,
and the Human Race would quickly perish.
But if a world of zero self-ownership and 100% other ownership spells death for the
human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the natural law of what is
best for man and his life on earth.
Finally, however, the participatory communist world cannot be put into practice, for it is
is physically impossible for everyone to keep continual tabs on everyone else, and thereby
to exercise his equal quota share of partial ownership over every other man.
In practice, then, the concept of universal and equal other ownership is utopian and impossible,
and supervision, and therefore control and ownership of others, necessarily devolves
The libertarian, therefore, rejects these alternatives, and concludes by adopting, as his primary axiom, the universal right of self-ownership, a right held by everyone by virtue of
of Being a Human Being
A more difficult task is to settle on a theory of property in non-human objects in the things
of this earth.
It is comparatively easy to recognize the practice when someone is aggressing against
the property right of another's person.
If A assaults B, he is violating the property right of B in his own body.
But with non-human objects, the problem is more complex.
If, for example, we see X seizing a watch in the possession of Y, we cannot automatically
assume that X is aggressing against Y's right of property in the watch.
For may not X have been the original true owner of the watch, who can therefore be said
to be repossessing his own legitimate property?
In order to decide, we need a theory of justice in property, a theory that will tell us whether
Whether X or Y, or indeed someone else, is the legitimate owner.
Some libertarians attempt to resolve the problem by asserting that whoever the existing government
decrees has the property title should be considered the just owner of the property.
At this point we have not yet delved deeply into the nature of government, but the anomaly
here should be glaring enough.
It is surely odd to find a group eternally suspicious of virtually any and all functions
of government, suddenly leaving it to government to define and apply the precious concept of
property, the base and groundwork of the entire social order.
It is particularly the utilitarian laissez-faireists who believe it most feasible to begin the
Let us illustrate with a hypothetical example.
Suppose that libertarian agitation and pressure has escalated to such a point that the government
and its various branches are ready to abdicate.
But they engineer a cunning ruse.
Just before the government of New York State abdicates, it passes a law turning over the
entire territorial area of New York to become the private property of the Rockefeller family.
The Massachusetts legislature does the same for the Kennedy family, and so on for each
state.
The government could then abdicate and decree the abolition of taxes and coercive legislation,
But the victorious libertarians would now be confronted with a dilemma.
Do they recognize the new property titles as legitimately private property?
The utilitarians, who have no theory of justice in property rights, would, if they were consistent
with their acceptance of given property titles as decreed by government, have to accept a
new social order in which 50 new satraps would be collecting taxes in the form of unilaterally
Imposed Rent.
The point is that only natural rights libertarians, only those libertarians who have a theory
of justice in property titles that does not depend on government decree, could be in a
position to scoff at the new rulers' claims to have private property in the territory
of the country, and to rebuff these claims as invalid.
As the great 19th century liberal Lord Acton saw clearly, the natural law provides the
only sure ground for a continuing critique of governmental laws and decrees.
What specifically the natural rights position on property titles may be is the question
to which we now turn.
We have established each individual's right to self-ownership, to a property right in
in his own body and person.
But people are not floating wraiths.
They are not self-subsistent entities.
They can only survive and flourish by grappling with the earth around them.
They must, for example, stand on land areas.
They must also, in order to survive and maintain themselves, transform the resources given
by nature into consumer goods, into objects more suitable for their use and consumption.
Food must be grown and eaten, minerals must be mined and then transformed into capital and then useful consumer goods, etc.
Man, in other words, must own not only his own person, but also material objects for his control and use.
How, then, should the property titles in these objects be allocated?
Let us take as our first example a sculptor fashioning a work of art out of clay and other materials, and let us wave for the moment the question of original property rights in the clay and the sculptor's tools.
The question then becomes who owns the work of art as it emerges from the sculptor's fashioning.
It is, in fact, the sculptor's creation, not in the sense that he has created matter, but in the sense that he has transformed nature-given matter, the clay, into another form dictated by his own ideas and fashioned by his own hands and energy.
Surely it is a rare person who, with the case put thus, would say that the sculptor does not have the property right in his own product.
Surely, if every man has the right to own his own body, and if he must grapple with
the material objects of the world in order to survive, then the sculptor has the right
to own the product he has made by his energy and effort, a veritable extension of his own
personality.
He has placed the stamp of his person upon the raw material by mixing his labor with
with the Clay, in the phrase of the great property theorist John Locke, and the product
transformed by his own energy has become the material embodiment of the sculptor's ideas
and vision.
John Locke put the case this way, Every man has a property in his own person.
This nobody has any right to but himself.
The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in,
he hath mixed his labor with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby
makes it his property.
It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labor
Something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men.
For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right
to what that is once joined to.
As in the case of the ownership of people's bodies, we again have three logical alternatives.
1. Either the transformer or creator has the property right in his creation, or 2. Another man or set of men have the right in that creation, that is, have the right to appropriate it by force without the sculptor's consent, or 3. Every individual in the world has an equal quota share in the ownership of the sculpture, the communal solution.
Again, put baldly, there are very few who would not concede the monstrous injustice
of confiscating the sculptor's property, either by one or more others, or on behalf
of the world as a whole.
By what right do they do so?
By what right do they appropriate to themselves the product of the creator's mind and energy?
In this clear-cut case, the right of the creator to own what he has mixed his person and labor
would be generally conceded. Once again, as in the case of communal ownership of persons, the world communal solution would in practice be reduced to an oligarchy of a few others expropriating the creator's work in the name of world public ownership.
The main point however is that the case of the sculptor is not qualitatively different from all cases of production.
The man or men who had extracted the clay from the ground and had sold it to the sculptor
may not be as creative as the sculptor, but they too are producers.
They too have mixed their ideas and their technological know-how with the nature-given
soil to emerge with a useful product.
They too are producers, and they too have mixed their labor with natural materials to
to transform those materials into more useful goods and services.
These persons, too, are entitled to the ownership of their products.
Where then does the process begin?
Again, let us turn to Locke.
He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered
from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself.
They can deny, but the nourishment is his.
I ask then, when did they begin to be his?
When he digested?
Or when he ate?
Or when he boiled?
Or when he brought them home?
Or when he picked them up?
And tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could.
That labor put a distinction between them and common.
That added something to the more than nature the common mother of all had done, and so
they became his private right.
And will anyone say he had no right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated because
he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his?
Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common?
If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God
had given him.
Thus the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged
in my place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property
without the assignation or consent of anybody.
The labor that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed
my property in them.
By making an explicit consent of every commoner necessary to any one's appropriating to himself
any part of what is given in common, children or servants could not cut the meat which their
father or master had provided for them in common without assigning to every one his
peculiar part.
So the water running in the fountain be everyone's, yet who can doubt but that in the pitcher
is his only who drew it out?
His labor hath taken it out of the hands of nature where it was common, and hath thereby
appropriated it to himself.
Thus the law of reason makes the deer that Indians who killed it, tis allowed to be his
And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind, this original law of nature
for the beginning of property in what was before common still takes place, and by virtue
thereof, what fish anyone catches in the ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind,
For what ambergris anyone takes up here is by the labor that removes it out of that common
state nature left it in, made his property who takes that pains about it.
If every man owns 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 what of the last great question, 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 the right to own his crop of wheat or peaches, who has the right to own the land
on which these things have grown?
It is at this point that Henry George and his followers, who have gone all the way so
so far with the libertarians leave the track and deny the individual's right to own the
piece of land itself, the ground on which these activities have taken place.
The Georgists argue that while every man should own the goods which he produces or creates,
since nature or God created the land itself, no individual has the right to assume ownership
of that land.
But if the land is to be used at all as a resource in any sort of efficient manner,
it must be owned or controlled by someone or some group.
And we are again faced with our three alternatives.
Either the land belongs to the first user, the man who first brings it into production,
or it belongs to a group of others, or it belongs to the world as a whole, with every
Every Individual Owning a Quotal Part of Every Acre of Land
Georgia's option for the last solution hardly solves his moral problem.
If the land itself should belong to God or nature, then why is it more moral for every
acre in the world to be owned by the world as a whole than to concede individual ownership?
In practice, again, it is obviously impossible for every person in the world to exercise
In practice, of course, a small oligarchy would do the controlling and owning, and not
the world as a whole.
But apart from these difficulties in the Georgist position, the natural rights justification
for the ownership of ground land is the same as the justification for the original ownership
of All Other Property.
For as we have seen, no producer really creates matter.
He takes nature-given matter and transforms it by his labor energy in accordance with
his ideas and vision.
But this is precisely what the pioneer, the homesteader, does when he brings previously
unused land into his own private ownership.
Just as the man who makes steel out of iron ore transforms that ore out of his know-how
and with his energy, and just as the man who takes the iron out of the ground does the
same, so does the homesteader who clears, fences, cultivates, or builds upon the land.
The homesteader, too, has transformed the character of the nature-given soil by his
labor and his personality.
The homesteader is just as legitimately the owner of the property as the sculptor or the
manufacturer.
He is just as much a producer as the others.
Furthermore, if the original land is nature or God-given, then so are people's talents,
health and beauty.
And just as all these attributes are given to specific individuals and not to society,
So then are land and natural resources.
All of these resources are given to individuals and not to society, which is an abstraction
that does not actually exist.
There is no existing entity called society.
There are only interacting individuals.
To say that society should own land or any other property in common then must mean that
a group of oligarchs, in practice, government bureaucrats should own the property, and at
the expense of expropriating the creator or the homesteader who had originally brought
this product into existence.
Moreover, no one can produce anything without the cooperation of original land, if only
as standing room.
No man can produce or create anything by his labor alone.
He must have the cooperation of land and other natural raw materials.
Man comes into the world with just himself and the world around him, the land and natural
resources given him by nature.
He takes these resources and transforms them by his labor and mind and energy into goods
more useful to man.
Therefore, if an individual cannot own original land, neither can he in the full sense own
any of the fruits of his labor.
The farmer cannot own his wheat crop if he cannot own the land on which the wheat grows.
Now that his labor has been inextricably mixed with the land, he cannot be deprived of one
without being deprived of the other.
Moreover, if a producer is not entitled to the fruits of his labor, who is?
It is difficult to see why a newborn Pakistani baby should have a moral claim to a quotal
share of ownership of a piece of Iowa land that someone has just transformed into a wheat
field, and vice versa, of course, for an Iowan baby and a Pakistani farm.
Land in its original state is unused and unowned.
Georgists and other land communalists may claim that the whole world population really
owns it, but if no one has yet used it, it is in the real sense owned and controlled
by no one.
The pioneer, the homesteader, the first user and transformer of this land is the man who
first brings this simple valueless thing into production and social use.
It is difficult to see the morality of depriving him of ownership in favor of people who have
The moral, natural rights issue involved here is even clearer if we consider the case of animals.
Animals are economic land, since they are original nature-given resources.
Yet will anyone deny full title to a horse, to the man who finds and domesticates it?
Is this any different from the acorns and berries that are generally conceded to the gatherer?
Yet in land, too, some homesteader takes the previously wild, undomesticated land and tames it by putting it to productive use.
Mixing his labor with land sites should give him just as clear a title as in the case of animals.
As Locke declared, as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He, by his labor, does, as it were, enclose it from the common.
The libertarian theory of property was eloquently summed up by two 19th century laissez-faire French economists.
If man acquires rights over things, it is because he is at once active, intelligent, and free.
By his activity, he spreads over external nature.
By his intelligence, he governs it and bends it to his use.
By his liberty, he establishes between himself and it the relation of cause and effect and
makes it his own.
Where is there, in a civilized country, a clod of earth, a leaf, which does not bear
this impress of the personality of man?
In the town, we are surrounded by the works of man.
We walk upon a level pavement or a beaten road.
It is man who made healthy the formerly muddy soil, who took from the side of a faraway
hill the flint or stone which covers it.
We live in houses.
It is man who has dug the stone from the quarry, who has hewn it, who has planed the woods.
It is the thought of man which has arranged the materials properly and made a building
of what was before rock and wood.
And in the country, the action of man is still everywhere present.
Men have cultivated the soil, and generations of laborers have mellowed and enriched it.
The works of man have dammed the rivers and created fertility where the waters had brought
only desolation.
Everywhere a powerful hand is divined, which has molded matter, and an intelligent will
which has adapted it to the satisfaction of the wants of one same being.
Nature has recognized her master, and man feels that he is at home in nature.
Nature has been appropriated by him for his use.
She has become his own, she is his property.
This property is legitimate.
It constitutes a right as sacred for man as is the free exercise of his faculties.
It is his because it has come entirely from himself and is in no way anything but an emanation
from his being.
Before him there was scarcely anything but matter.
Against him and by him there is interchangeable wealth, that is to say, articles having acquired
a value by some industry, by manufacture, by handling, by extraction, or simply by transportation.
From the picture of a great master, which is perhaps of all material production that
in which matter plays the smallest part, to the pail of water, which the carrier draws
The producer has left a fragment of his own person in the thing, which has thus become valuable, and may hence be regarded as a prolongation of the faculties of man acting upon external nature.
As a free being, he belongs to himself. Now the cause, that is to say, the productive force, is himself. The effect, that is to say, the wealth produced, is still himself.
Who shall dare contest his title of ownership, so clearly marked by the seal of his personality?
It is then to the human being, the creator of all wealth, that we must come back.
It is by labor that man impresses his personality on matter.
It is labor which cultivates the earth and makes of an unoccupied waste an appropriated
field.
It is labor which makes of an untrodden forest a regularly ordered wood.
It is labor, or rather a series of labors, often executed by a very numerous succession
of Workmen, which brings hemp from seed, thread from hemp, cloth from thread, clothing from
cloth, which transforms the shapeless pyrite picked up in the mine into an elegant bronze
which adorns some public place and repeats to an entire people the thought of an artist.
Property, made manifest by labor, participates in the rights of the person whose emanation
it is.
Like him, it is inviolable, so long as it does not extend so far as to come into collision
with another right.
Like him, it is individual, because it has origin in the independence of the individual,
and because when several persons have cooperated in its formation, the latest possessor has
purchased with a value the fruit of his personal labor, the work of all the fellow laborers
who have preceded him.
This is what is usually the case with manufactured articles.
When property has passed by sale or by inheritance from one hand to another, its conditions have
not changed.
It is still the fruit of human liberty manifested by labor, and the holder has the rights as
the producer who took possession of it by right.
Society and the Individual
We have talked at length of individual rights.
But what, it may be asked, of the rights of society?
Don't they supersede the rights of the mere individual?
The libertarian, however, is an individualist.
He believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat society as if it
were an actually existing entity.
Society is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding rights
of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money
If in a small community ten people band together to rob and expropriate three others, then
this is clearly and evidently a case of a group of individuals acting in concert against
another group.
In this situation, if the ten people presumed to refer to themselves as society acting in
its interest, the rationale would be laughed out of court.
Even the ten robbers would probably be too shame-faced to use this sort of argument.
But let their size increase and this kind of obfuscation becomes rife and succeeds in
duping the public.
The fallacious use of a collective noun like nation, similar in this respect to society,
has been trenchantly pointed out by the historian Parker T. Moon.
When one uses the simple monosyllable France, one thinks of France as a unit, an entity.
When we say, France sent her troops to conquer Tunis, we impute not only unit but personality
to the country.
The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama
in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh and
blood men and women who are the true actors.
If we had no such word as France, then we should more accurately describe the Tunis Expedition
in some such way as this.
A few of these 38 million persons sent 30,000 others to conquer Tunis.
This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions.
Who were the few?
Why did they send the 30,000 to Tunis?
And why did these obey?
Empire building is done not by nations, but by men.
The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each
nation who are directly interested in imperialism, and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities
pay the expense and fight the war necessitated by imperialist expansion.
The individualist view of society has been summed up in the phrase, society is everyone
but yourself.
Put thus bluntly, this analysis can be used to consider those cases where society is treated
not only as a superhero with super-rights, but as a super-villain on whose shoulders
massive blame is placed.
Consider the typical view that not the individual criminal, but society, is responsible for
for His Crime.
Take for example the case where Smith robs or murders Jones.
The old-fashioned view is that Smith is responsible for his act.
The modern liberal counters that society is responsible.
This sounds both sophisticated and humanitarian until we apply the individualist perspective.
Then we see that what liberals are really saying is that everyone but Smith, including
Putting of course the victim Jones is responsible for the crime.
Put this baldly, almost everyone would recognize the absurdity of this position.
But conjuring up the fictive entity society obfuscates this process.
As the sociologist Arnold W. Green puts it, it would follow then that if society is responsible
for crime and criminals are not responsible for crime, only those members of society who
who do not commit crime can be held responsible for crime.
Nonsense, this obvious, can be circumvented only by conjuring up society as devil, as
evil being, apart from people and what they do.
The great American libertarian writer Frank Chaturov stressed this view of society when
he wrote that society are people.
Society is a collective concept and nothing else.
It is a convenience for designating a number of people.
So too is family or crowd or gang or any other name we give to an agglomeration of persons.
Society is not an extra person.
If the census totals a hundred million, that's all there are, not one more, for there cannot
be any accretion to society except by procreation.
The concept of society as a metaphysical person falls flat when we observe that society disappears
when the component parts disperse, as in the case of a ghost town or of a civilization
we learn about by the artifacts they left behind.
When the individuals disappear, so does the whole.
The whole has no separate existence.
Using the collective noun with a singular verb leads us into a trap of the imagination.
We are prone to personalize the collectivity and to think of it as having a body and a
psyche of its own.
Free Exchange and Free Contract
The central core of the libertarian creed, then, is to establish the absolute right to
to Private Property of Every Man, first, in his own body, and second, in the previously
unused natural resources which he first transforms by his labor.
These two axioms, the right of self-ownership and the right to homestead, establish the
complete set of principles of the libertarian system.
The entire libertarian doctrine then becomes the spinning out and the application of all
For example, a man, X, owns his own person and labor, and the farm he clears on which he grows wheat.
Another man, Y, owns the fish he catches.
A third man, Z, owns the cabbages he has grown and the land under it.
But if a man owns anything, he then has the right to give away or exchange these property titles to someone else.
or exchange these property titles to someone else, after which point the other person also has
absolute property title. From this corollary right to private property stems the basic
justification for free contract and the free market economy. Thus, if X grows wheat, he may
and probably will agree to exchange some of that wheat for some of the fish caught by Y,
With both X and Y making voluntary agreements to exchange property titles, or Y and Z, or X and Z, the property then becomes with equal legitimacy the property of the other person.
If X exchanges wheat for Y's fish, then that fish becomes X's property to do with as he wishes, and the wheat becomes Y's property in precisely the same way.
Further, a man may exchange not only the tangible objects he owns, but also his own labor, which of course he owns as well.
It so happens that the free market economy, and the specialization and division of labor it implies, is by far the most productive form of economy known to man, and has been responsible for industrialization and for the modern economy on which civilization has been built.
This is a fortunate utilitarian result of the free market, but it is not to the libertarian the prime reason for his support of this system.
That prime reason is moral and is rooted in the natural rights defense of private property we have developed above.
Even if a society of despotism and systematic invasion of rights could be shown to be more productive than what Adam Smith called the system of natural liberty, the libertarian would support this system.
Fortunately, as in so many other areas, the utilitarian and the moral, natural rights and general prosperity go hand in hand.
The developed market economy, as complex as the system appears to be on the surface, is nothing more than a vast network of voluntary and mutually agreed upon two-person exchanges, such as we have shown to occur between wheat and cabbage farmers, or between the farmer and the teacher.
Thus, when I buy a newspaper for a dime, a mutually beneficial two-person exchange takes place.
I transfer my ownership of the dime to the news dealer, and he transfers ownership of the paper to me.
We do this because, under the division of labor, I calculate that the paper is worth more to me than the dime,
while the news dealer prefers the dime to keeping the paper.
Or, when I teach at a university, I estimate that I prefer my salary to not expending my labor of teaching, while the university authorities calculate that they prefer gaining my teaching services to not paying me the money.
If the news dealer insisted on charging 50 cents for the paper, I might well decide that it isn't worth the price.
Similarly, if I should insist on triple my present salary, the university might well decide to dispense with my services.
Many people are willing to concede the justice and propriety of property rights and the free market economy,
to concede that the farmer should be able to charge whatever his wheat will bring from consumers,
or the worker to reap whatever others are willing to pay for his services.
But they balk at one point, inheritance.
If Willie Stargell is ten times as good and productive a ballplayer as Joe Jack, they are willing to concede the justice of Stargell's earning ten times the amount.
But what, they ask, is the justification for someone whose only merit is being born a Rockefeller inheriting far more wealth than someone born a Rothbard?
The libertarian answer is to concentrate not on the recipient, the child Rockefeller or
the child Rothbard, but to concentrate on the giver, the man who bestows the inheritance.
For if Smith and Jones and Stargel have the right to their labor and property, and to
exchange the titles to this property for the similar property of others, they also have
have the right to give their property to whomever they wish, and of course most such gifts consist
of the gifts of the property owners to their children, in short, inheritance.
If Willie Stargel owns his labor and the money he earns from it, then he has the right to
give that money to the baby Stargel.
In the developed free market economy then, the farmer exchanges the wheat for money.
The wheat is bought by the miller, who processes and transforms the wheat into flour.
The miller sells the flour to the baker, who produces bread.
The baker sells the bread to the wholesaler, who in turn sells it to the retailer, who
finally sells it to the consumer.
And at each step of the way, the producer may hire the labor services of the workers
in exchange for money.
How money enters the equation is a complex process, but it should be clear that conceptually
the use of money is equivalent to any single or group of useful commodities that are exchanged
for the wheat, flour, etc.
Instead of money, the commodity exchanged could be cloth, iron, or whatever.
At each step of the way, mutually beneficial exchanges of property titles are agreed upon
and Transacted.
We are now in a position to see how the libertarian defines the concept of freedom or liberty.
Freedom is a condition in which a person's ownership rights in his own body and his legitimate
material property are not invaded, are not aggressed against.
A man who steals another man's property is invading and restricting the victim's freedom,
As does the man who beats another over the head. Freedom and unrestricted property right
go hand in hand. On the other hand, to the libertarian, crime is an act of aggression
against a man's property right, either in his own person or his materially owned objects.
Crime is an invasion by the use of violence against a man's property and therefore against
The Libertarian, then, is clearly an individualist, but not an egalitarian.
The only equality he would advocate is the equal right of every man to the property in
and His Own Person, to the property in the unused resources he homesteads, and to the
property of others he has acquired either through voluntary exchange or gift.
Property Rights and Human Rights
Liberals will generally concede the right of every individual to his personal liberty,
to his freedom to think, speak, write, and engage in such personal exchanges as sexual
Activity between consenting adults. In short, the liberal attempts to uphold the individual's
right to the ownership of his own body, but then denies his right to property, that is,
to the ownership of material objects. Hence the typical liberal dichotomy between human rights,
which he upholds, and property rights, which he rejects. Yet the two, according to the libertarian,
are inextricably intertwined. They stand or fall together. Take, for example, the liberal socialist
who advocates government ownership of all the means of production while upholding the human
right of freedom of speech or press. How is this human right to be exercised if the individuals
constituting the public are denied their right to ownership of property? If, for example, the
If all the government owns all the newsprint and all the printing shops, how is the right to a free press to be exercised?
If the government owns all the newsprint, it then necessarily has the right and the power to allocate that newsprint,
and someone's right to a free press becomes a mockery if the government decides not to allocate newsprint in his direction.
And since the government must allocate scarce newsprint in some way,
The right to a free press of, say, minorities or subversive antisocialists will get short shrift indeed.
The same is true for the right to free speech, if the government owns all the assembly halls, and therefore allocates those halls as it sees fit.
Or, for example, if the government of Soviet Russia, being atheistic, decides not to allocate many scarce resources to the production of matzes,
For Orthodox Jews, the freedom of religion becomes a mockery.
But again, the Soviet government can always rebut that Orthodox Jews are a small minority
and that capital equipment should not be diverted to matzah production.
The basic flaw in the liberal separation of human rights and property rights is that people
are treated as ethereal abstractions.
If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real
world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming
resources.
He must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he
must use.
In short, to sustain his human right, or his property rights in his own person, he must
Most also have the property right in the material world, in the objects which he produces.
Property rights are human rights, and are essential to the human rights which liberals
attempt to maintain.
The human right of a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint.
In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights.
The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from
the owners or to own one oneself.
The human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets
or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy.
There is no extra right of free speech or free press beyond the property rights we can
enumerate in any given case.
And furthermore, discovering and identifying the property rights involved will resolve
any apparent conflicts of rights that may crop up.
Consider for example the classic example where liberals generally concede that a person's
right of freedom of speech must be curbed in the name of the public interest.
Justice Holmes' famous dictum that no one has the right to cry fire falsely in a crowded
theater.
Mises and his followers have used this illustration again and again to prove the supposed necessity
for all rights to be relative and tentative, rather than precise and absolute.
But the problem here is not that rights cannot be pushed too far, but that the whole case
is discussed in terms of a vague and woolly freedom of speech, rather than in terms of
the rights of private property.
Suppose we analyze the problem under the aspect of property rights.
The fellow who brings on a riot by falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater is necessarily
either the owner of the theater or the owner's agent or a paying patron.
If he is the owner, then he has committed fraud on his customers.
He has taken their money in exchange for a promise to put on a movie or play, and now
Now instead, he disrupts the show by falsely shouting fire and breaking up the performance.
He has thus welshed on his contractual obligation, and has thereby stolen the property, the money,
of his patrons, and has violated their property rights.
Suppose on the other hand that the shouter is a patron and not the owner.
In that case, he is violating the property right of the owner, as well as of the other
guests to their paid-for performance.
As a guest, he has gained access to the property on certain terms, including an obligation
not to violate the owner's property or to disrupt the performance the owner is putting
on.
His malicious act, therefore, violates the property rights of the theater owner and of
all the other patrons.
There is no need, therefore, for individual rights to be restricted in the case of the
false shatter of fire.
The rights of the individual are still absolute, but they are property rights.
The fellow who maliciously cried fire in a crowded theater is indeed a criminal, but
not because his so-called right of free speech must be pragmatically restricted on behalf
of the public good.
He is a criminal because he has clearly and obviously violated the property rights of
of Another Person.