WEBVTT NOTE 2. The Libertarian Creed: Property and Exchange 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.960 Part 1 The Libertarian Creed 2 00:00:04.960 --> 00:00:10.000 Chapter 2 Property and Exchange 3 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:13.520 The Non-Aggression Axiom 4 00:00:13.520 --> 00:00:20.360 The Libertarian Creed rests upon one central axiom, that no man or group of men may aggress 5 00:00:20.360 --> 00:00:24.420 against the person or property of anyone else. 6 00:00:24.420 --> 00:00:28.620 This may be called the Non-Aggression Axiom. 7 00:00:28.620 --> 00:00:33.660 Aggression is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against 8 00:00:33.660 --> 00:00:37.700 the person or property of anyone else. 9 00:00:37.700 --> 00:00:41.820 Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion. 10 00:00:41.820 --> 00:00:47.920 If no man may aggress against another, if, in short, everyone has the absolute right 11 00:00:47.920 --> 00:00:54.260 to be free from aggression, then this at once implies that the libertarian stands for square 12 00:00:54.260 --> 00:01:00.940 for what are generally known as civil liberties, the freedom to speak, publish, assemble and 13 00:01:00.940 --> 00:01:07.900 to engage in such victimless crimes as pornography, sexual deviation and prostitution, which the 14 00:01:07.900 --> 00:01:14.260 libertarian does not regard as crimes at all, since he defines a crime as violent invasion 15 00:01:14.260 --> 00:01:17.420 of someone else's person or property. 16 00:01:17.420 --> 00:01:24.220 Furthermore, he regards conscription as slavery on a massive scale, and since war, especially 17 00:01:24.220 --> 00:01:41.540 All of these positions are now considered leftist on the contemporary ideological scale. 18 00:01:41.540 --> 00:01:46.360 On the other hand, since the libertarian also opposes invasion of the rights of private 19 00:01:46.360 --> 00:01:51.980 property, this also means that he just as emphatically opposes government interference 20 00:01:51.980 --> 00:01:58.620 with Property Rights or with the free market economy through controls, regulations, subsidies 21 00:01:58.620 --> 00:02:00.820 or prohibitions. 22 00:02:00.820 --> 00:02:06.260 For if every individual has the right to his own property without having to suffer aggressive 23 00:02:06.260 --> 00:02:13.220 depredation, then he also has the right to give away his property, bequest and inheritance, 24 00:02:13.220 --> 00:02:18.780 and to exchange it for the property of others, free contract and the free market economy 25 00:02:18.780 --> 00:02:21.500 without interference. 26 00:02:21.500 --> 00:02:28.100 The libertarian favors the right to unrestricted private property and free exchange, hence 27 00:02:28.100 --> 00:02:32.180 a system of laissez-faire capitalism. 28 00:02:32.180 --> 00:02:37.640 In current terminology, again, the libertarian position on property and economics would be 29 00:02:37.640 --> 00:02:40.540 called extreme right-wing. 30 00:02:40.540 --> 00:02:46.500 But the libertarian sees no inconsistency in being leftist on some issues and rightist 31 00:02:46.500 --> 00:02:47.960 on others. 32 00:02:47.960 --> 00:02:54.440 On the contrary, he sees his own position as virtually the only consistent one, consistent 33 00:02:54.440 --> 00:02:58.420 on behalf of the liberty of every individual. 34 00:02:58.420 --> 00:03:03.600 For how can the leftist be opposed to the violence of war and conscription, while at 35 00:03:03.600 --> 00:03:09.120 the same time supporting the violence of taxation and government control? 36 00:03:09.120 --> 00:03:14.680 And how can the rightist trumpet his devotion to private property and free enterprise, while 37 00:03:14.680 --> 00:03:20.900 while at the same time favoring war, conscription, and the outlawing of non-invasive activities 38 00:03:20.900 --> 00:03:24.600 and practices that he deems immoral. 39 00:03:24.600 --> 00:03:30.540 And how can the rightist favor a free market while seeing nothing amiss in the vast subsidies, 40 00:03:30.540 --> 00:03:37.960 distortions, and unproductive inefficiencies involved in the military-industrial complex? 41 00:03:37.960 --> 00:03:43.460 While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and 42 00:03:43.460 --> 00:03:49.300 Property, The Libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has 43 00:03:49.300 --> 00:03:58.180 been one central, dominant and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights, the state. 44 00:03:58.180 --> 00:04:04.820 In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right or in between, the Libertarian refuses to 45 00:04:04.820 --> 00:04:10.100 give the state the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would 46 00:04:10.100 --> 00:04:17.360 would be immoral, illegal and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. 47 00:04:17.360 --> 00:04:23.800 The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone and makes 48 00:04:23.800 --> 00:04:28.280 no special exemptions for any person or group. 49 00:04:28.280 --> 00:04:34.160 But if we look at the state naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed and 50 00:04:34.160 --> 00:04:41.000 and even encouraged to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible 51 00:04:41.000 --> 00:04:42.840 crimes. 52 00:04:42.840 --> 00:04:48.720 The state habitually commits mass murder, which it calls war, or sometimes suppression 53 00:04:48.720 --> 00:04:50.540 of subversion. 54 00:04:50.540 --> 00:04:56.500 The state engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls conscription. 55 00:04:56.500 --> 00:05:03.380 And it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls taxation. 56 00:05:03.380 --> 00:05:08.520 The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority 57 00:05:08.520 --> 00:05:15.600 of the population is not germane to their nature, that regardless of popular sanction, 58 00:05:15.600 --> 00:05:22.140 war is mass murder, conscription is slavery, and taxation is robbery. 59 00:05:22.140 --> 00:05:28.480 The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently 60 00:05:28.480 --> 00:05:31.620 that the emperor has no clothes. 61 00:05:31.620 --> 00:05:36.780 Throughout the ages, the emperor has had a series of pseudo-clothes provided for him 62 00:05:36.780 --> 00:05:39.700 by the nation's intellectual caste. 63 00:05:39.700 --> 00:05:44.860 In past centuries, the intellectuals informed the public that the state or its rulers were 64 00:05:44.860 --> 00:05:51.540 divine, or at least clothed in divine authority, and therefore what might look to the naive 65 00:05:51.540 --> 00:05:58.820 and untutored eye as despotism, mass murder and theft on a grand scale was only the divine 66 00:05:58.820 --> 00:06:02.660 working its benign and mysterious ways in the body politic. 67 00:06:03.860 --> 00:06:08.580 In recent decades, as the divine sanction has worn a bit threadbare, 68 00:06:08.580 --> 00:06:13.220 the emperor's court intellectuals have spun ever more sophisticated apologia, 69 00:06:13.780 --> 00:06:19.220 informing the public that what the government does is for the common good and the public welfare, 70 00:06:19.780 --> 00:06:26.020 that the process of taxation and spending works through the mysterious process of the multiplier 71 00:06:26.020 --> 00:06:32.500 to keep the economy on an even keel, and that, in any case, a wide variety of governmental 72 00:06:32.500 --> 00:06:38.220 services could not possibly be performed by citizens acting voluntarily on the market 73 00:06:38.220 --> 00:06:40.580 or in society. 74 00:06:40.580 --> 00:06:43.740 All of this, the libertarian denies. 75 00:06:43.740 --> 00:06:49.620 He sees the various apologia as fraudulent means of obtaining public support for the 76 00:06:49.620 --> 00:06:55.180 state's rule, and he insists that whatever services the government actually performs 77 00:06:55.180 --> 00:07:01.260 could be supplied far more efficiently and far more morally by private and cooperative enterprise. 78 00:07:02.780 --> 00:07:10.140 The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification 79 00:07:10.140 --> 00:07:17.260 and de-sanctification of the state among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate 80 00:07:17.260 --> 00:07:24.140 repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the democratic state has no clothes, 81 00:07:24.140 --> 00:07:30.800 Rules, that all governments subsist by exploitive rule over the public, and that such rule is 82 00:07:30.800 --> 00:07:33.960 the reverse of objective necessity. 83 00:07:33.960 --> 00:07:39.560 He strives to show that the very existence of taxation and the state necessarily sets 84 00:07:39.560 --> 00:07:45.640 up a class division between the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. 85 00:07:45.640 --> 00:07:50.360 He seeks to show that the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the 86 00:07:50.360 --> 00:07:57.060 of the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept state 87 00:07:57.060 --> 00:08:04.480 rule and that these intellectuals obtain in return a share in the power and pelf extracted 88 00:08:04.480 --> 00:08:09.000 by the rulers from their deluded subjects. 89 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:14.760 Take for example the institution of taxation, which statists have claimed is in some sense 90 00:08:14.760 --> 00:08:17.440 really voluntary. 91 00:08:17.440 --> 00:08:22.880 Anyone who truly believes in the voluntary nature of taxation is invited to refuse to 92 00:08:22.880 --> 00:08:27.140 pay taxes and to see what then happens to him. 93 00:08:27.140 --> 00:08:33.980 If we analyze taxation, we find that among all the persons and institutions in society, 94 00:08:33.980 --> 00:08:39.340 only the government acquires its revenues through coercive violence. 95 00:08:39.340 --> 00:08:45.640 Everyone else in society acquires income either through voluntary gift, lodge, charitable 96 00:08:45.640 --> 00:08:52.440 Society, chess club, or through the sale of goods or services voluntarily purchased by 97 00:08:52.440 --> 00:08:54.320 consumers. 98 00:08:54.320 --> 00:09:00.640 If anyone but the government proceeded to tax, this would clearly be considered coercion 99 00:09:00.640 --> 00:09:03.680 and thinly disguised banditry. 100 00:09:03.680 --> 00:09:09.780 Yet the mystical trappings of sovereignty have so veiled the process that only libertarians 101 00:09:09.780 --> 00:09:15.660 Libertarians are prepared to call taxation what it is—legalized and organized theft 102 00:09:15.660 --> 00:09:20.100 on a grand scale. 103 00:09:20.100 --> 00:09:25.260 Property Rights If the central axiom of the libertarian creed 104 00:09:25.260 --> 00:09:31.820 is non-aggression against anyone's person and property, how is this axiom arrived at? 105 00:09:31.820 --> 00:09:35.340 What is its groundwork or support? 106 00:09:35.340 --> 00:09:40.300 Here libertarians, past and present, have differed considerably. 107 00:09:40.300 --> 00:09:46.300 Roughly there are three broad types of foundation for the libertarian axiom, corresponding to 108 00:09:46.300 --> 00:09:55.000 three kinds of ethical philosophy, the emotivist, the utilitarian, and the natural rights viewpoint. 109 00:09:55.000 --> 00:10:00.080 The emotivists assert that they take liberty or non-aggression as their premise purely 110 00:10:00.080 --> 00:10:03.580 on subjective emotional grounds. 111 00:10:03.580 --> 00:10:09.360 While their own intense emotion might seem a valid basis for their own political philosophy, 112 00:10:09.360 --> 00:10:12.880 this can scarcely serve to convince anyone else. 113 00:10:12.880 --> 00:10:18.320 By ultimately taking themselves outside the realm of rational discourse, the emotivists 114 00:10:18.320 --> 00:10:25.040 thereby ensure the lack of general success of their own cherished doctrine. 115 00:10:25.040 --> 00:10:30.000 The utilitarians declare from their study of the consequences of liberty as opposed 116 00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:44.960 Now, no one disputes that relative consequences should be studied in assessing the merits 117 00:10:44.960 --> 00:10:48.200 or demerits of respective creeds. 118 00:10:48.200 --> 00:10:53.580 But there are many problems in confining ourselves to a utilitarian ethic. 119 00:10:53.580 --> 00:10:59.220 For one thing, utilitarianism assumes that we can weigh alternatives and decide upon 120 00:10:59.220 --> 00:11:04.460 and Policies on the basis of their good or bad consequences. 121 00:11:04.460 --> 00:11:10.780 But if it is legitimate to apply value judgments to the consequences of X, why is it not equally 122 00:11:10.780 --> 00:11:15.120 legitimate to apply such judgments to X itself? 123 00:11:15.120 --> 00:11:20.700 May there not be something about an act itself which in its very nature can be considered 124 00:11:20.700 --> 00:11:23.900 good or evil? 125 00:11:23.900 --> 00:11:29.480 Another problem with the utilitarian is that he will rarely adopt a principle as an absolute 126 00:11:29.480 --> 00:11:36.200 and consistent yardstick to apply to the varied concrete situations of the real world. 127 00:11:36.200 --> 00:11:42.880 He will only use a principle, at best, as a vague guideline or aspiration, as a tendency 128 00:11:42.880 --> 00:11:46.740 which he may choose to override at any time. 129 00:11:46.740 --> 00:11:52.180 This was the major defect of the 19th century English radicals who had adopted the laissez-faire 130 00:11:52.180 --> 00:12:05.180 The 18th Century Liberals had substituted a scientific utilitarianism for the mystical concept of natural rights as the groundwork for that philosophy. 131 00:12:05.180 --> 00:12:15.180 Hence the 19th Century laissez-faire liberals came to use laissez-faire as a vague tendency rather than as an unblemished yardstick, 132 00:12:15.180 --> 00:12:21.180 and therefore increasingly and fatally compromised the libertarian creed. 133 00:12:21.180 --> 00:12:33.180 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. 134 00:12:33.180 --> 00:12:46.180 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, 135 00:12:46.180 --> 00:13:11.340 Let us consider a stark example. 136 00:13:11.340 --> 00:13:15.940 Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the 137 00:13:15.940 --> 00:13:26.740 Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation, so few 138 00:13:26.740 --> 00:13:30.140 as to be statistically insignificant. 139 00:13:30.140 --> 00:13:36.860 The utilitarian libertarian might well reason, while the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable, 140 00:13:36.860 --> 00:13:39.520 the executions are small in number. 141 00:13:39.520 --> 00:13:45.380 The vast majority of the public as non-redheads achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from 142 00:13:45.380 --> 00:13:59.380 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. 143 00:13:59.380 --> 00:14:14.380 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. 144 00:14:14.380 --> 00:14:17.180 upon non-aggressive persons. 145 00:14:17.180 --> 00:14:23.640 The consequence of stopping the murders, depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure, 146 00:14:23.640 --> 00:14:30.140 would not influence such a libertarian, the absolutist libertarian, in the slightest. 147 00:14:30.140 --> 00:14:35.860 Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural rights libertarian cheerfully 148 00:14:35.860 --> 00:14:44.740 admits to being doctrinaire, to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines. 149 00:14:44.740 --> 00:14:50.300 Let us turn then to the natural rights basis for the libertarian creed, a basis which in 150 00:14:50.300 --> 00:14:57.060 one form or another has been adopted by most of the libertarians past and present. 151 00:14:57.060 --> 00:15:02.400 Natural rights is the cornerstone of a political philosophy which, in turn, is embedded in 152 00:15:02.400 --> 00:15:09.080 and a Greater Structure of Natural Law Natural Law Theory rests on the insight that we live 153 00:15:09.080 --> 00:15:15.840 in a world of more than one, in fact, a vast number of entities, and that each entity has 154 00:15:15.840 --> 00:15:22.080 distinct and specific properties, a distinct nature which can be investigated by man's 155 00:15:22.080 --> 00:15:26.640 reason, by his sense perception and mental faculties. 156 00:15:26.640 --> 00:15:34.240 Man therefore has a distinct nature and behaves in a certain way, and so do iron, salt, etc. 157 00:15:34.240 --> 00:15:40.520 The species man, therefore, has a specifiable nature, as does the world around him and the 158 00:15:40.520 --> 00:15:43.560 ways of interaction between them. 159 00:15:43.560 --> 00:15:50.560 To put it with undue brevity, the activity of each inorganic and organic entity is determined 160 00:15:50.560 --> 00:15:57.000 by its own nature and by the nature of the other entities with which it comes in contact. 161 00:15:57.000 --> 00:16:03.000 Specifically, while the behavior of plants, and at least the lower animals, is determined 162 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:09.840 by their biological nature or perhaps by their instincts, the nature of man is such that 163 00:16:09.840 --> 00:16:17.040 each individual person must, in order to act, choose his own ends and employ his own means 164 00:16:17.040 --> 00:16:19.480 in order to attain them. 165 00:16:19.480 --> 00:16:26.120 Possessing no automatic instincts, each man must learn about himself and the world, use 166 00:16:26.120 --> 00:16:32.760 his mind to select values, learn about cause and effect, and act purposively to maintain 167 00:16:32.760 --> 00:16:36.200 himself and advance his life. 168 00:16:36.200 --> 00:16:44.040 Since men can think, feel, evaluate, and act only as individuals, it becomes vitally necessary 169 00:16:44.040 --> 00:16:51.960 for each man's survival and prosperity that he be free to learn, choose, develop his faculties, 170 00:16:51.960 --> 00:16:55.460 and act upon his knowledge and values. 171 00:16:55.460 --> 00:16:58.420 This is the necessary path of human nature. 172 00:16:58.420 --> 00:17:04.440 To interfere with and cripple this process by using violence goes profoundly against 173 00:17:04.440 --> 00:17:10.680 what is necessary by man's nature for his life and prosperity. 174 00:17:10.680 --> 00:17:16.960 Individualist interference with a man's learning and choices is therefore profoundly anti-human. 175 00:17:16.960 --> 00:17:22.360 It violates the natural law of man's needs. 176 00:17:22.360 --> 00:17:27.700 Individualists have always been accused by their enemies of being atomistic, of postulating 177 00:17:27.700 --> 00:17:33.380 that each individual lives in a kind of vacuum, thinking and choosing without relation to 178 00:17:33.380 --> 00:17:36.280 anyone else in society. 179 00:17:36.280 --> 00:17:39.840 This however is an authoritarian strawman. 180 00:17:39.840 --> 00:17:44.220 Few, if any, individualists have ever been atomists. 181 00:17:44.220 --> 00:17:49.920 On the contrary, it is evident that individuals always learn from each other, cooperate and 182 00:17:49.920 --> 00:17:55.360 interact with each other, and that this, too, is required for man's survival. 183 00:17:55.360 --> 00:18:01.520 But the point is that each individual makes the final choice of which influences to adopt 184 00:18:01.520 --> 00:18:07.640 and which to reject, or of which to adopt first and which afterwards. 185 00:18:07.640 --> 00:18:14.080 The libertarian welcomes the process of voluntary exchange and cooperation between freely acting 186 00:18:14.080 --> 00:18:15.600 individuals. 187 00:18:15.600 --> 00:18:22.000 What he abhors is the use of violence to cripple such voluntary cooperation and force someone 188 00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:28.000 to choose and act in ways different from what his own mind dictates. 189 00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:32.520 The most viable method of elaborating the natural rights statement of the libertarian 190 00:18:32.520 --> 00:18:38.520 and Position is to divide it into parts and to begin with the basic axiom of the right 191 00:18:38.520 --> 00:18:40.740 to self-ownership. 192 00:18:40.740 --> 00:18:46.840 The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man by virtue of his or her 193 00:18:46.840 --> 00:18:55.020 being a human being to own his or her own body, that is, to control that body free of 194 00:18:55.020 --> 00:18:57.800 coercive interference. 195 00:18:57.800 --> 00:19:04.560 Since each individual must think, learn, value and choose his or her ends and means in order 196 00:19:04.560 --> 00:19:11.000 to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital 197 00:19:11.000 --> 00:19:17.160 activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation. 198 00:19:17.160 --> 00:19:23.480 Consider too the consequences of denying each man the right to own his own person. 199 00:19:23.480 --> 00:19:29.920 There are then only two alternatives, either one, a certain class of people, A, have the 200 00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:38.700 right to own another class, B, or two, everyone has the right to own his own equal quota share 201 00:19:38.700 --> 00:19:40.700 of everyone else. 202 00:19:40.700 --> 00:19:46.580 The first alternative implies that while Class A deserves the rights of being human, Class 203 00:19:46.580 --> 00:19:52.620 B is in reality subhuman, and therefore deserves no such rights. 204 00:19:52.620 --> 00:19:58.980 But since they are indeed human beings, the first alternative contradicts itself in denying 205 00:19:58.980 --> 00:20:02.460 natural human rights to one set of humans. 206 00:20:02.460 --> 00:20:09.100 Moreover, as we shall see, allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is 207 00:20:09.100 --> 00:20:15.900 allowed to exploit and therefore to live parasitically at the expense of the latter. 208 00:20:15.900 --> 00:20:22.460 But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirement for life, production 209 00:20:22.460 --> 00:20:25.100 and Exchange. 210 00:20:25.100 --> 00:20:31.360 The second alternative, what we might call participatory communalism or communism, holds 211 00:20:31.360 --> 00:20:37.760 that every man should have the right to own his equal quota share of everyone else. 212 00:20:37.760 --> 00:20:42.840 If there are two billion people in the world, then everyone has the right to own one two 213 00:20:42.840 --> 00:20:45.960 billionth of every other person. 214 00:20:45.960 --> 00:20:51.440 In the first place, we can state that this ideal rests on an absurdity, proclaiming that 215 00:20:51.440 --> 00:20:58.640 Every man is entitled to own a part of everyone else, yet is not entitled to own himself. 216 00:20:58.640 --> 00:21:05.040 Secondly, we can picture the viability of such a world, a world in which no man is free 217 00:21:05.040 --> 00:21:12.360 to take any action whatever without prior approval or indeed command by everyone else 218 00:21:12.360 --> 00:21:14.260 in society. 219 00:21:14.260 --> 00:21:20.200 It should be clear that in that sort of communist world, no one would be able to do anything, 220 00:21:20.200 --> 00:21:23.260 and the Human Race would quickly perish. 221 00:21:23.260 --> 00:21:29.480 But if a world of zero self-ownership and 100% other ownership spells death for the 222 00:21:29.480 --> 00:21:36.280 human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the natural law of what is 223 00:21:36.280 --> 00:21:39.800 best for man and his life on earth. 224 00:21:39.800 --> 00:21:47.300 Finally, however, the participatory communist world cannot be put into practice, for it is 225 00:21:47.300 --> 00:21:53.660 is physically impossible for everyone to keep continual tabs on everyone else, and thereby 226 00:21:53.660 --> 00:22:00.740 to exercise his equal quota share of partial ownership over every other man. 227 00:22:00.740 --> 00:22:08.180 In practice, then, the concept of universal and equal other ownership is utopian and impossible, 228 00:22:08.180 --> 00:22:13.740 and supervision, and therefore control and ownership of others, necessarily devolves 229 00:22:13.740 --> 00:22:43.740 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 230 00:22:43.740 --> 00:22:46.380 of Being a Human Being 231 00:22:46.380 --> 00:22:52.840 A more difficult task is to settle on a theory of property in non-human objects in the things 232 00:22:52.840 --> 00:22:54.860 of this earth. 233 00:22:54.860 --> 00:22:59.900 It is comparatively easy to recognize the practice when someone is aggressing against 234 00:22:59.900 --> 00:23:02.840 the property right of another's person. 235 00:23:02.840 --> 00:23:09.020 If A assaults B, he is violating the property right of B in his own body. 236 00:23:09.020 --> 00:23:13.660 But with non-human objects, the problem is more complex. 237 00:23:13.660 --> 00:23:19.900 If, for example, we see X seizing a watch in the possession of Y, we cannot automatically 238 00:23:19.900 --> 00:23:25.340 assume that X is aggressing against Y's right of property in the watch. 239 00:23:25.340 --> 00:23:30.940 For may not X have been the original true owner of the watch, who can therefore be said 240 00:23:30.940 --> 00:23:35.300 to be repossessing his own legitimate property? 241 00:23:35.300 --> 00:23:41.220 In order to decide, we need a theory of justice in property, a theory that will tell us whether 242 00:23:41.220 --> 00:23:47.020 Whether X or Y, or indeed someone else, is the legitimate owner. 243 00:23:47.020 --> 00:23:52.340 Some libertarians attempt to resolve the problem by asserting that whoever the existing government 244 00:23:52.340 --> 00:23:58.780 decrees has the property title should be considered the just owner of the property. 245 00:23:58.780 --> 00:24:04.040 At this point we have not yet delved deeply into the nature of government, but the anomaly 246 00:24:04.040 --> 00:24:06.660 here should be glaring enough. 247 00:24:06.660 --> 00:24:12.660 It is surely odd to find a group eternally suspicious of virtually any and all functions 248 00:24:12.660 --> 00:24:18.540 of government, suddenly leaving it to government to define and apply the precious concept of 249 00:24:18.540 --> 00:24:24.080 property, the base and groundwork of the entire social order. 250 00:24:24.080 --> 00:24:29.820 It is particularly the utilitarian laissez-faireists who believe it most feasible to begin the 251 00:24:29.820 --> 00:24:47.900 Let us illustrate with a hypothetical example. 252 00:24:47.900 --> 00:24:53.340 Suppose that libertarian agitation and pressure has escalated to such a point that the government 253 00:24:53.340 --> 00:24:56.860 and its various branches are ready to abdicate. 254 00:24:56.860 --> 00:25:00.040 But they engineer a cunning ruse. 255 00:25:00.040 --> 00:25:05.040 Just before the government of New York State abdicates, it passes a law turning over the 256 00:25:05.040 --> 00:25:12.760 entire territorial area of New York to become the private property of the Rockefeller family. 257 00:25:12.760 --> 00:25:18.420 The Massachusetts legislature does the same for the Kennedy family, and so on for each 258 00:25:18.420 --> 00:25:19.760 state. 259 00:25:19.760 --> 00:25:26.220 The government could then abdicate and decree the abolition of taxes and coercive legislation, 260 00:25:26.220 --> 00:25:30.900 But the victorious libertarians would now be confronted with a dilemma. 261 00:25:30.900 --> 00:25:36.380 Do they recognize the new property titles as legitimately private property? 262 00:25:36.380 --> 00:25:42.380 The utilitarians, who have no theory of justice in property rights, would, if they were consistent 263 00:25:42.380 --> 00:25:48.160 with their acceptance of given property titles as decreed by government, have to accept a 264 00:25:48.160 --> 00:25:55.260 new social order in which 50 new satraps would be collecting taxes in the form of unilaterally 265 00:25:55.260 --> 00:25:57.720 Imposed Rent. 266 00:25:57.720 --> 00:26:04.120 The point is that only natural rights libertarians, only those libertarians who have a theory 267 00:26:04.120 --> 00:26:10.260 of justice in property titles that does not depend on government decree, could be in a 268 00:26:10.260 --> 00:26:15.540 position to scoff at the new rulers' claims to have private property in the territory 269 00:26:15.540 --> 00:26:20.680 of the country, and to rebuff these claims as invalid. 270 00:26:20.680 --> 00:26:26.480 As the great 19th century liberal Lord Acton saw clearly, the natural law provides the 271 00:26:26.480 --> 00:26:32.980 only sure ground for a continuing critique of governmental laws and decrees. 272 00:26:32.980 --> 00:26:38.380 What specifically the natural rights position on property titles may be is the question 273 00:26:38.380 --> 00:26:41.600 to which we now turn. 274 00:26:41.600 --> 00:26:46.660 We have established each individual's right to self-ownership, to a property right in 275 00:26:46.660 --> 00:26:49.180 in his own body and person. 276 00:26:49.180 --> 00:26:51.680 But people are not floating wraiths. 277 00:26:51.680 --> 00:26:54.420 They are not self-subsistent entities. 278 00:26:54.420 --> 00:26:59.560 They can only survive and flourish by grappling with the earth around them. 279 00:26:59.560 --> 00:27:03.260 They must, for example, stand on land areas. 280 00:27:03.260 --> 00:27:08.780 They must also, in order to survive and maintain themselves, transform the resources given 281 00:27:08.780 --> 00:27:15.700 by nature into consumer goods, into objects more suitable for their use and consumption. 282 00:27:15.700 --> 00:27:24.700 Food must be grown and eaten, minerals must be mined and then transformed into capital and then useful consumer goods, etc. 283 00:27:24.700 --> 00:27:34.700 Man, in other words, must own not only his own person, but also material objects for his control and use. 284 00:27:34.700 --> 00:27:39.700 How, then, should the property titles in these objects be allocated? 285 00:27:39.700 --> 00:27:54.700 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. 286 00:27:54.700 --> 00:28:00.700 The question then becomes who owns the work of art as it emerges from the sculptor's fashioning. 287 00:28:00.700 --> 00:28:18.700 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. 288 00:28:18.700 --> 00:28:28.700 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. 289 00:28:28.700 --> 00:28:35.820 Surely, if every man has the right to own his own body, and if he must grapple with 290 00:28:35.820 --> 00:28:41.380 the material objects of the world in order to survive, then the sculptor has the right 291 00:28:41.380 --> 00:28:49.220 to own the product he has made by his energy and effort, a veritable extension of his own 292 00:28:49.220 --> 00:28:50.420 personality. 293 00:28:50.420 --> 00:28:56.180 He has placed the stamp of his person upon the raw material by mixing his labor with 294 00:28:56.180 --> 00:29:02.040 with the Clay, in the phrase of the great property theorist John Locke, and the product 295 00:29:02.040 --> 00:29:08.540 transformed by his own energy has become the material embodiment of the sculptor's ideas 296 00:29:08.540 --> 00:29:10.560 and vision. 297 00:29:10.560 --> 00:29:18.160 John Locke put the case this way, Every man has a property in his own person. 298 00:29:18.160 --> 00:29:21.800 This nobody has any right to but himself. 299 00:29:21.800 --> 00:29:28.040 The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. 300 00:29:28.040 --> 00:29:34.000 Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, 301 00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:39.600 he hath mixed his labor with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby 302 00:29:39.600 --> 00:29:42.080 makes it his property. 303 00:29:42.080 --> 00:29:48.600 It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labor 304 00:29:48.600 --> 00:29:54.460 Something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. 305 00:29:54.460 --> 00:30:01.380 For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right 306 00:30:01.380 --> 00:30:05.980 to what that is once joined to. 307 00:30:05.980 --> 00:30:12.420 As in the case of the ownership of people's bodies, we again have three logical alternatives. 308 00:30:12.420 --> 00:30:40.420 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. 309 00:30:40.420 --> 00:30:46.980 Again, put baldly, there are very few who would not concede the monstrous injustice 310 00:30:46.980 --> 00:30:52.640 of confiscating the sculptor's property, either by one or more others, or on behalf 311 00:30:52.640 --> 00:30:55.060 of the world as a whole. 312 00:30:55.060 --> 00:30:57.300 By what right do they do so? 313 00:30:57.300 --> 00:31:04.420 By what right do they appropriate to themselves the product of the creator's mind and energy? 314 00:31:04.420 --> 00:31:10.400 In this clear-cut case, the right of the creator to own what he has mixed his person and labor 315 00:31:10.400 --> 00:31:30.400 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. 316 00:31:30.400 --> 00:31:39.400 The main point however is that the case of the sculptor is not qualitatively different from all cases of production. 317 00:31:39.400 --> 00:31:46.640 The man or men who had extracted the clay from the ground and had sold it to the sculptor 318 00:31:46.640 --> 00:31:52.220 may not be as creative as the sculptor, but they too are producers. 319 00:31:52.220 --> 00:31:57.420 They too have mixed their ideas and their technological know-how with the nature-given 320 00:31:57.420 --> 00:32:01.540 soil to emerge with a useful product. 321 00:32:01.540 --> 00:32:07.820 They too are producers, and they too have mixed their labor with natural materials to 322 00:32:07.820 --> 00:32:13.420 to transform those materials into more useful goods and services. 323 00:32:13.420 --> 00:32:18.680 These persons, too, are entitled to the ownership of their products. 324 00:32:18.680 --> 00:32:21.180 Where then does the process begin? 325 00:32:21.180 --> 00:32:24.840 Again, let us turn to Locke. 326 00:32:24.840 --> 00:32:30.180 He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered 327 00:32:30.180 --> 00:32:35.980 from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. 328 00:32:35.980 --> 00:32:39.540 They can deny, but the nourishment is his. 329 00:32:39.540 --> 00:32:43.220 I ask then, when did they begin to be his? 330 00:32:43.220 --> 00:32:44.540 When he digested? 331 00:32:44.540 --> 00:32:45.800 Or when he ate? 332 00:32:45.800 --> 00:32:47.340 Or when he boiled? 333 00:32:47.340 --> 00:32:49.100 Or when he brought them home? 334 00:32:49.100 --> 00:32:51.460 Or when he picked them up? 335 00:32:51.460 --> 00:32:57.800 And tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. 336 00:32:57.800 --> 00:33:02.540 That labor put a distinction between them and common. 337 00:33:02.540 --> 00:33:08.460 That added something to the more than nature the common mother of all had done, and so 338 00:33:08.460 --> 00:33:11.620 they became his private right. 339 00:33:11.620 --> 00:33:17.500 And will anyone say he had no right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated because 340 00:33:17.500 --> 00:33:22.280 he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? 341 00:33:22.280 --> 00:33:28.480 Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? 342 00:33:28.480 --> 00:33:34.120 If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God 343 00:33:34.120 --> 00:33:36.160 had given him. 344 00:33:36.160 --> 00:33:42.360 Thus the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged 345 00:33:42.360 --> 00:33:48.700 in my place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property 346 00:33:48.700 --> 00:33:52.960 without the assignation or consent of anybody. 347 00:33:52.960 --> 00:33:58.920 The labor that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed 348 00:33:58.920 --> 00:34:01.860 my property in them. 349 00:34:01.860 --> 00:34:08.700 By making an explicit consent of every commoner necessary to any one's appropriating to himself 350 00:34:08.700 --> 00:34:14.780 any part of what is given in common, children or servants could not cut the meat which their 351 00:34:14.780 --> 00:34:20.420 father or master had provided for them in common without assigning to every one his 352 00:34:20.420 --> 00:34:22.780 peculiar part. 353 00:34:22.780 --> 00:34:28.720 So the water running in the fountain be everyone's, yet who can doubt but that in the pitcher 354 00:34:28.720 --> 00:34:31.860 is his only who drew it out? 355 00:34:31.860 --> 00:34:37.600 His labor hath taken it out of the hands of nature where it was common, and hath thereby 356 00:34:37.600 --> 00:34:41.380 appropriated it to himself. 357 00:34:41.380 --> 00:34:47.420 Thus the law of reason makes the deer that Indians who killed it, tis allowed to be his 358 00:34:47.420 --> 00:35:01.140 And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind, this original law of nature 359 00:35:01.140 --> 00:35:07.940 for the beginning of property in what was before common still takes place, and by virtue 360 00:35:07.940 --> 00:35:15.940 thereof, what fish anyone catches in the ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind, 361 00:35:15.940 --> 00:35:21.740 For what ambergris anyone takes up here is by the labor that removes it out of that common 362 00:35:21.740 --> 00:35:28.860 state nature left it in, made his property who takes that pains about it. 363 00:35:28.860 --> 00:35:35.700 If every man owns his own person, and therefore his own labor, and if by extension he owns 364 00:35:35.700 --> 00:35:42.420 whatever property he has created or gathered out of the previously unused, unowned state 365 00:35:42.420 --> 00:35:51.140 of Nature, then what of the last great question, the right to own or control the earth itself? 366 00:35:51.140 --> 00:35:56.860 In short, if the gatherer has the right to own the acorns or berries he picks, or the 367 00:35:56.860 --> 00:36:03.460 farmer the right to own his crop of wheat or peaches, who has the right to own the land 368 00:36:03.460 --> 00:36:06.680 on which these things have grown? 369 00:36:06.680 --> 00:36:11.420 It is at this point that Henry George and his followers, who have gone all the way so 370 00:36:11.420 --> 00:36:17.480 so far with the libertarians leave the track and deny the individual's right to own the 371 00:36:17.480 --> 00:36:24.120 piece of land itself, the ground on which these activities have taken place. 372 00:36:24.120 --> 00:36:30.680 The Georgists argue that while every man should own the goods which he produces or creates, 373 00:36:30.680 --> 00:36:37.340 since nature or God created the land itself, no individual has the right to assume ownership 374 00:36:37.340 --> 00:36:39.580 of that land. 375 00:36:39.580 --> 00:36:45.220 But if the land is to be used at all as a resource in any sort of efficient manner, 376 00:36:45.220 --> 00:36:50.340 it must be owned or controlled by someone or some group. 377 00:36:50.340 --> 00:36:54.240 And we are again faced with our three alternatives. 378 00:36:54.240 --> 00:36:59.920 Either the land belongs to the first user, the man who first brings it into production, 379 00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:05.920 or it belongs to a group of others, or it belongs to the world as a whole, with every 380 00:37:05.920 --> 00:37:09.760 Every Individual Owning a Quotal Part of Every Acre of Land 381 00:37:09.760 --> 00:37:16.100 Georgia's option for the last solution hardly solves his moral problem. 382 00:37:16.100 --> 00:37:21.840 If the land itself should belong to God or nature, then why is it more moral for every 383 00:37:21.840 --> 00:37:28.720 acre in the world to be owned by the world as a whole than to concede individual ownership? 384 00:37:28.720 --> 00:37:34.520 In practice, again, it is obviously impossible for every person in the world to exercise 385 00:37:34.520 --> 00:37:50.880 In practice, of course, a small oligarchy would do the controlling and owning, and not 386 00:37:50.880 --> 00:37:53.120 the world as a whole. 387 00:37:53.120 --> 00:37:58.240 But apart from these difficulties in the Georgist position, the natural rights justification 388 00:37:58.240 --> 00:38:03.860 for the ownership of ground land is the same as the justification for the original ownership 389 00:38:03.860 --> 00:38:06.180 of All Other Property. 390 00:38:06.180 --> 00:38:11.420 For as we have seen, no producer really creates matter. 391 00:38:11.420 --> 00:38:17.220 He takes nature-given matter and transforms it by his labor energy in accordance with 392 00:38:17.220 --> 00:38:19.920 his ideas and vision. 393 00:38:19.920 --> 00:38:25.980 But this is precisely what the pioneer, the homesteader, does when he brings previously 394 00:38:25.980 --> 00:38:30.140 unused land into his own private ownership. 395 00:38:30.140 --> 00:38:35.500 Just as the man who makes steel out of iron ore transforms that ore out of his know-how 396 00:38:35.500 --> 00:38:40.980 and with his energy, and just as the man who takes the iron out of the ground does the 397 00:38:40.980 --> 00:38:48.200 same, so does the homesteader who clears, fences, cultivates, or builds upon the land. 398 00:38:48.200 --> 00:38:53.540 The homesteader, too, has transformed the character of the nature-given soil by his 399 00:38:53.540 --> 00:38:56.400 labor and his personality. 400 00:38:56.400 --> 00:39:01.760 The homesteader is just as legitimately the owner of the property as the sculptor or the 401 00:39:01.760 --> 00:39:03.420 manufacturer. 402 00:39:03.420 --> 00:39:06.960 He is just as much a producer as the others. 403 00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:14.400 Furthermore, if the original land is nature or God-given, then so are people's talents, 404 00:39:14.400 --> 00:39:16.400 health and beauty. 405 00:39:16.400 --> 00:39:22.720 And just as all these attributes are given to specific individuals and not to society, 406 00:39:22.720 --> 00:39:26.480 So then are land and natural resources. 407 00:39:26.480 --> 00:39:32.520 All of these resources are given to individuals and not to society, which is an abstraction 408 00:39:32.520 --> 00:39:35.240 that does not actually exist. 409 00:39:35.240 --> 00:39:39.020 There is no existing entity called society. 410 00:39:39.020 --> 00:39:42.240 There are only interacting individuals. 411 00:39:42.240 --> 00:39:48.320 To say that society should own land or any other property in common then must mean that 412 00:39:48.320 --> 00:39:54.200 a group of oligarchs, in practice, government bureaucrats should own the property, and at 413 00:39:54.200 --> 00:39:59.720 the expense of expropriating the creator or the homesteader who had originally brought 414 00:39:59.720 --> 00:40:02.520 this product into existence. 415 00:40:02.520 --> 00:40:09.520 Moreover, no one can produce anything without the cooperation of original land, if only 416 00:40:09.520 --> 00:40:11.560 as standing room. 417 00:40:11.560 --> 00:40:16.540 No man can produce or create anything by his labor alone. 418 00:40:16.540 --> 00:40:22.580 He must have the cooperation of land and other natural raw materials. 419 00:40:22.580 --> 00:40:28.420 Man comes into the world with just himself and the world around him, the land and natural 420 00:40:28.420 --> 00:40:31.240 resources given him by nature. 421 00:40:31.240 --> 00:40:37.260 He takes these resources and transforms them by his labor and mind and energy into goods 422 00:40:37.260 --> 00:40:39.260 more useful to man. 423 00:40:39.260 --> 00:40:45.940 Therefore, if an individual cannot own original land, neither can he in the full sense own 424 00:40:45.940 --> 00:40:48.320 any of the fruits of his labor. 425 00:40:48.320 --> 00:40:54.740 The farmer cannot own his wheat crop if he cannot own the land on which the wheat grows. 426 00:40:54.740 --> 00:41:01.160 Now that his labor has been inextricably mixed with the land, he cannot be deprived of one 427 00:41:01.160 --> 00:41:04.100 without being deprived of the other. 428 00:41:04.100 --> 00:41:10.900 Moreover, if a producer is not entitled to the fruits of his labor, who is? 429 00:41:10.900 --> 00:41:16.580 It is difficult to see why a newborn Pakistani baby should have a moral claim to a quotal 430 00:41:16.580 --> 00:41:22.260 share of ownership of a piece of Iowa land that someone has just transformed into a wheat 431 00:41:22.260 --> 00:41:28.940 field, and vice versa, of course, for an Iowan baby and a Pakistani farm. 432 00:41:28.940 --> 00:41:32.940 Land in its original state is unused and unowned. 433 00:41:32.940 --> 00:41:39.200 Georgists and other land communalists may claim that the whole world population really 434 00:41:39.200 --> 00:41:45.800 owns it, but if no one has yet used it, it is in the real sense owned and controlled 435 00:41:45.800 --> 00:41:47.620 by no one. 436 00:41:47.620 --> 00:41:53.900 The pioneer, the homesteader, the first user and transformer of this land is the man who 437 00:41:53.900 --> 00:41:59.960 first brings this simple valueless thing into production and social use. 438 00:41:59.960 --> 00:42:05.220 It is difficult to see the morality of depriving him of ownership in favor of people who have 439 00:42:05.220 --> 00:42:21.220 The moral, natural rights issue involved here is even clearer if we consider the case of animals. 440 00:42:21.220 --> 00:42:27.220 Animals are economic land, since they are original nature-given resources. 441 00:42:27.220 --> 00:42:33.220 Yet will anyone deny full title to a horse, to the man who finds and domesticates it? 442 00:42:33.220 --> 00:42:39.220 Is this any different from the acorns and berries that are generally conceded to the gatherer? 443 00:42:39.220 --> 00:42:50.220 Yet in land, too, some homesteader takes the previously wild, undomesticated land and tames it by putting it to productive use. 444 00:42:50.220 --> 00:42:57.220 Mixing his labor with land sites should give him just as clear a title as in the case of animals. 445 00:42:57.220 --> 00:43:14.220 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. 446 00:43:14.220 --> 00:43:23.220 The libertarian theory of property was eloquently summed up by two 19th century laissez-faire French economists. 447 00:43:23.220 --> 00:43:31.380 If man acquires rights over things, it is because he is at once active, intelligent, and free. 448 00:43:31.380 --> 00:43:35.400 By his activity, he spreads over external nature. 449 00:43:35.400 --> 00:43:39.780 By his intelligence, he governs it and bends it to his use. 450 00:43:39.780 --> 00:43:45.960 By his liberty, he establishes between himself and it the relation of cause and effect and 451 00:43:45.960 --> 00:43:48.540 makes it his own. 452 00:43:48.540 --> 00:43:54.220 Where is there, in a civilized country, a clod of earth, a leaf, which does not bear 453 00:43:54.220 --> 00:43:58.260 this impress of the personality of man? 454 00:43:58.260 --> 00:44:01.580 In the town, we are surrounded by the works of man. 455 00:44:01.580 --> 00:44:04.940 We walk upon a level pavement or a beaten road. 456 00:44:04.940 --> 00:44:10.660 It is man who made healthy the formerly muddy soil, who took from the side of a faraway 457 00:44:10.660 --> 00:44:14.940 hill the flint or stone which covers it. 458 00:44:14.940 --> 00:44:16.580 We live in houses. 459 00:44:16.580 --> 00:44:23.100 It is man who has dug the stone from the quarry, who has hewn it, who has planed the woods. 460 00:44:23.100 --> 00:44:28.140 It is the thought of man which has arranged the materials properly and made a building 461 00:44:28.140 --> 00:44:31.780 of what was before rock and wood. 462 00:44:31.780 --> 00:44:36.720 And in the country, the action of man is still everywhere present. 463 00:44:36.720 --> 00:44:42.540 Men have cultivated the soil, and generations of laborers have mellowed and enriched it. 464 00:44:42.540 --> 00:44:47.260 The works of man have dammed the rivers and created fertility where the waters had brought 465 00:44:47.260 --> 00:44:49.460 only desolation. 466 00:44:49.460 --> 00:44:55.340 Everywhere a powerful hand is divined, which has molded matter, and an intelligent will 467 00:44:55.340 --> 00:45:01.440 which has adapted it to the satisfaction of the wants of one same being. 468 00:45:01.440 --> 00:45:07.660 Nature has recognized her master, and man feels that he is at home in nature. 469 00:45:07.660 --> 00:45:11.460 Nature has been appropriated by him for his use. 470 00:45:11.460 --> 00:45:15.780 She has become his own, she is his property. 471 00:45:15.780 --> 00:45:17.780 This property is legitimate. 472 00:45:17.780 --> 00:45:24.200 It constitutes a right as sacred for man as is the free exercise of his faculties. 473 00:45:24.200 --> 00:45:31.200 It is his because it has come entirely from himself and is in no way anything but an emanation 474 00:45:31.200 --> 00:45:33.600 from his being. 475 00:45:33.600 --> 00:45:37.460 Before him there was scarcely anything but matter. 476 00:45:37.460 --> 00:45:44.500 Against him and by him there is interchangeable wealth, that is to say, articles having acquired 477 00:45:44.500 --> 00:45:53.580 a value by some industry, by manufacture, by handling, by extraction, or simply by transportation. 478 00:45:53.580 --> 00:45:58.740 From the picture of a great master, which is perhaps of all material production that 479 00:45:58.740 --> 00:46:04.540 in which matter plays the smallest part, to the pail of water, which the carrier draws 480 00:46:04.540 --> 00:46:33.540 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. 481 00:46:33.540 --> 00:46:48.540 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. 482 00:46:48.540 --> 00:46:55.540 Who shall dare contest his title of ownership, so clearly marked by the seal of his personality? 483 00:46:55.540 --> 00:47:02.540 It is then to the human being, the creator of all wealth, that we must come back. 484 00:47:02.540 --> 00:47:07.980 It is by labor that man impresses his personality on matter. 485 00:47:07.980 --> 00:47:13.820 It is labor which cultivates the earth and makes of an unoccupied waste an appropriated 486 00:47:13.820 --> 00:47:14.820 field. 487 00:47:14.820 --> 00:47:20.220 It is labor which makes of an untrodden forest a regularly ordered wood. 488 00:47:20.220 --> 00:47:26.200 It is labor, or rather a series of labors, often executed by a very numerous succession 489 00:47:26.200 --> 00:47:33.560 of Workmen, which brings hemp from seed, thread from hemp, cloth from thread, clothing from 490 00:47:33.560 --> 00:47:40.460 cloth, which transforms the shapeless pyrite picked up in the mine into an elegant bronze 491 00:47:40.460 --> 00:47:47.680 which adorns some public place and repeats to an entire people the thought of an artist. 492 00:47:47.680 --> 00:47:53.960 Property, made manifest by labor, participates in the rights of the person whose emanation 493 00:47:53.960 --> 00:47:55.720 it is. 494 00:47:55.720 --> 00:48:01.760 Like him, it is inviolable, so long as it does not extend so far as to come into collision 495 00:48:01.760 --> 00:48:04.000 with another right. 496 00:48:04.000 --> 00:48:10.440 Like him, it is individual, because it has origin in the independence of the individual, 497 00:48:10.440 --> 00:48:16.320 and because when several persons have cooperated in its formation, the latest possessor has 498 00:48:16.320 --> 00:48:22.760 purchased with a value the fruit of his personal labor, the work of all the fellow laborers 499 00:48:22.760 --> 00:48:25.080 who have preceded him. 500 00:48:25.080 --> 00:48:29.560 This is what is usually the case with manufactured articles. 501 00:48:29.560 --> 00:48:36.720 When property has passed by sale or by inheritance from one hand to another, its conditions have 502 00:48:36.720 --> 00:48:38.360 not changed. 503 00:48:38.360 --> 00:48:44.800 It is still the fruit of human liberty manifested by labor, and the holder has the rights as 504 00:48:44.800 --> 00:48:50.920 the producer who took possession of it by right. 505 00:48:50.920 --> 00:48:53.880 Society and the Individual 506 00:48:53.880 --> 00:48:56.800 We have talked at length of individual rights. 507 00:48:56.800 --> 00:49:00.380 But what, it may be asked, of the rights of society? 508 00:49:00.380 --> 00:49:04.240 Don't they supersede the rights of the mere individual? 509 00:49:04.240 --> 00:49:07.320 The libertarian, however, is an individualist. 510 00:49:07.320 --> 00:49:13.080 He believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat society as if it 511 00:49:13.080 --> 00:49:17.040 were an actually existing entity. 512 00:49:17.040 --> 00:49:23.160 Society is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding rights 513 00:49:23.160 --> 00:49:30.160 of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money 514 00:49:53.160 --> 00:49:59.640 If in a small community ten people band together to rob and expropriate three others, then 515 00:49:59.640 --> 00:50:05.320 this is clearly and evidently a case of a group of individuals acting in concert against 516 00:50:05.320 --> 00:50:07.240 another group. 517 00:50:07.240 --> 00:50:13.500 In this situation, if the ten people presumed to refer to themselves as society acting in 518 00:50:13.500 --> 00:50:18.040 its interest, the rationale would be laughed out of court. 519 00:50:18.040 --> 00:50:23.060 Even the ten robbers would probably be too shame-faced to use this sort of argument. 520 00:50:23.060 --> 00:50:28.820 But let their size increase and this kind of obfuscation becomes rife and succeeds in 521 00:50:28.820 --> 00:50:31.140 duping the public. 522 00:50:31.140 --> 00:50:37.460 The fallacious use of a collective noun like nation, similar in this respect to society, 523 00:50:37.460 --> 00:50:42.720 has been trenchantly pointed out by the historian Parker T. Moon. 524 00:50:42.720 --> 00:50:49.640 When one uses the simple monosyllable France, one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. 525 00:50:49.640 --> 00:50:56.680 When we say, France sent her troops to conquer Tunis, we impute not only unit but personality 526 00:50:56.680 --> 00:50:58.360 to the country. 527 00:50:58.360 --> 00:51:03.940 The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama 528 00:51:03.940 --> 00:51:09.680 in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh and 529 00:51:09.680 --> 00:51:14.240 blood men and women who are the true actors. 530 00:51:14.240 --> 00:51:20.280 If we had no such word as France, then we should more accurately describe the Tunis Expedition 531 00:51:20.280 --> 00:51:22.920 in some such way as this. 532 00:51:22.920 --> 00:51:29.880 A few of these 38 million persons sent 30,000 others to conquer Tunis. 533 00:51:29.880 --> 00:51:36.160 This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. 534 00:51:36.160 --> 00:51:37.840 Who were the few? 535 00:51:37.840 --> 00:51:40.720 Why did they send the 30,000 to Tunis? 536 00:51:40.720 --> 00:51:43.520 And why did these obey? 537 00:51:43.520 --> 00:51:47.680 Empire building is done not by nations, but by men. 538 00:51:47.680 --> 00:51:53.240 The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each 539 00:51:53.240 --> 00:52:00.280 nation who are directly interested in imperialism, and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities 540 00:52:00.280 --> 00:52:07.820 pay the expense and fight the war necessitated by imperialist expansion. 541 00:52:07.820 --> 00:52:13.600 The individualist view of society has been summed up in the phrase, society is everyone 542 00:52:13.600 --> 00:52:15.860 but yourself. 543 00:52:15.860 --> 00:52:22.100 Put thus bluntly, this analysis can be used to consider those cases where society is treated 544 00:52:22.100 --> 00:52:27.500 not only as a superhero with super-rights, but as a super-villain on whose shoulders 545 00:52:27.500 --> 00:52:30.620 massive blame is placed. 546 00:52:30.620 --> 00:52:36.080 Consider the typical view that not the individual criminal, but society, is responsible for 547 00:52:36.080 --> 00:52:38.040 for His Crime. 548 00:52:38.040 --> 00:52:42.680 Take for example the case where Smith robs or murders Jones. 549 00:52:42.680 --> 00:52:47.460 The old-fashioned view is that Smith is responsible for his act. 550 00:52:47.460 --> 00:52:52.120 The modern liberal counters that society is responsible. 551 00:52:52.120 --> 00:52:58.880 This sounds both sophisticated and humanitarian until we apply the individualist perspective. 552 00:52:58.880 --> 00:53:04.640 Then we see that what liberals are really saying is that everyone but Smith, including 553 00:53:04.640 --> 00:53:09.240 Putting of course the victim Jones is responsible for the crime. 554 00:53:09.240 --> 00:53:14.920 Put this baldly, almost everyone would recognize the absurdity of this position. 555 00:53:14.920 --> 00:53:20.900 But conjuring up the fictive entity society obfuscates this process. 556 00:53:20.900 --> 00:53:27.200 As the sociologist Arnold W. Green puts it, it would follow then that if society is responsible 557 00:53:27.200 --> 00:53:33.760 for crime and criminals are not responsible for crime, only those members of society who 558 00:53:33.760 --> 00:53:37.960 who do not commit crime can be held responsible for crime. 559 00:53:37.960 --> 00:53:45.440 Nonsense, this obvious, can be circumvented only by conjuring up society as devil, as 560 00:53:45.440 --> 00:53:50.080 evil being, apart from people and what they do. 561 00:53:50.080 --> 00:53:55.400 The great American libertarian writer Frank Chaturov stressed this view of society when 562 00:53:55.400 --> 00:54:00.300 he wrote that society are people. 563 00:54:00.300 --> 00:54:03.680 Society is a collective concept and nothing else. 564 00:54:03.680 --> 00:54:07.360 It is a convenience for designating a number of people. 565 00:54:07.360 --> 00:54:15.860 So too is family or crowd or gang or any other name we give to an agglomeration of persons. 566 00:54:15.860 --> 00:54:18.520 Society is not an extra person. 567 00:54:18.520 --> 00:54:24.080 If the census totals a hundred million, that's all there are, not one more, for there cannot 568 00:54:24.080 --> 00:54:29.300 be any accretion to society except by procreation. 569 00:54:29.300 --> 00:54:36.260 The concept of society as a metaphysical person falls flat when we observe that society disappears 570 00:54:36.260 --> 00:54:42.060 when the component parts disperse, as in the case of a ghost town or of a civilization 571 00:54:42.060 --> 00:54:46.160 we learn about by the artifacts they left behind. 572 00:54:46.160 --> 00:54:49.940 When the individuals disappear, so does the whole. 573 00:54:49.940 --> 00:54:53.540 The whole has no separate existence. 574 00:54:53.540 --> 00:54:59.340 Using the collective noun with a singular verb leads us into a trap of the imagination. 575 00:54:59.340 --> 00:55:04.660 We are prone to personalize the collectivity and to think of it as having a body and a 576 00:55:04.660 --> 00:55:09.260 psyche of its own. 577 00:55:09.260 --> 00:55:13.020 Free Exchange and Free Contract 578 00:55:13.020 --> 00:55:18.500 The central core of the libertarian creed, then, is to establish the absolute right to 579 00:55:18.500 --> 00:55:25.560 to Private Property of Every Man, first, in his own body, and second, in the previously 580 00:55:25.560 --> 00:55:31.480 unused natural resources which he first transforms by his labor. 581 00:55:31.480 --> 00:55:37.320 These two axioms, the right of self-ownership and the right to homestead, establish the 582 00:55:37.320 --> 00:55:41.400 complete set of principles of the libertarian system. 583 00:55:41.400 --> 00:55:47.080 The entire libertarian doctrine then becomes the spinning out and the application of all 584 00:55:47.080 --> 00:55:55.080 For example, a man, X, owns his own person and labor, and the farm he clears on which he grows wheat. 585 00:55:55.080 --> 00:55:59.080 Another man, Y, owns the fish he catches. 586 00:55:59.080 --> 00:56:05.080 A third man, Z, owns the cabbages he has grown and the land under it. 587 00:56:05.080 --> 00:56:13.080 But if a man owns anything, he then has the right to give away or exchange these property titles to someone else. 588 00:56:13.080 --> 00:56:20.040 or exchange these property titles to someone else, after which point the other person also has 589 00:56:20.040 --> 00:56:26.440 absolute property title. From this corollary right to private property stems the basic 590 00:56:26.440 --> 00:56:34.040 justification for free contract and the free market economy. Thus, if X grows wheat, he may 591 00:56:34.040 --> 00:56:39.640 and probably will agree to exchange some of that wheat for some of the fish caught by Y, 592 00:56:39.640 --> 00:56:57.640 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. 593 00:56:57.640 --> 00:57:09.640 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. 594 00:57:09.640 --> 00:57:19.640 Further, a man may exchange not only the tangible objects he owns, but also his own labor, which of course he owns as well. 595 00:57:19.640 --> 00:57:46.640 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. 596 00:57:46.640 --> 00:57:57.640 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. 597 00:57:57.640 --> 00:58:05.640 That prime reason is moral and is rooted in the natural rights defense of private property we have developed above. 598 00:58:05.640 --> 00:58:20.640 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. 599 00:58:20.640 --> 00:58:31.640 Fortunately, as in so many other areas, the utilitarian and the moral, natural rights and general prosperity go hand in hand. 600 00:58:31.640 --> 00:58:51.640 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. 601 00:58:51.640 --> 00:58:58.640 Thus, when I buy a newspaper for a dime, a mutually beneficial two-person exchange takes place. 602 00:58:58.640 --> 00:59:05.640 I transfer my ownership of the dime to the news dealer, and he transfers ownership of the paper to me. 603 00:59:05.640 --> 00:59:12.640 We do this because, under the division of labor, I calculate that the paper is worth more to me than the dime, 604 00:59:12.640 --> 00:59:16.640 while the news dealer prefers the dime to keeping the paper. 605 00:59:16.640 --> 00:59:31.640 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. 606 00:59:31.640 --> 00:59:39.640 If the news dealer insisted on charging 50 cents for the paper, I might well decide that it isn't worth the price. 607 00:59:39.640 --> 00:59:47.640 Similarly, if I should insist on triple my present salary, the university might well decide to dispense with my services. 608 00:59:47.640 --> 00:59:54.640 Many people are willing to concede the justice and propriety of property rights and the free market economy, 609 00:59:54.640 --> 01:00:00.640 to concede that the farmer should be able to charge whatever his wheat will bring from consumers, 610 01:00:00.640 --> 01:00:05.640 or the worker to reap whatever others are willing to pay for his services. 611 01:00:05.640 --> 01:00:09.640 But they balk at one point, inheritance. 612 01:00:09.640 --> 01:00:21.640 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. 613 01:00:21.640 --> 01:00:33.640 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? 614 01:00:33.640 --> 01:00:40.540 The libertarian answer is to concentrate not on the recipient, the child Rockefeller or 615 01:00:40.540 --> 01:00:48.240 the child Rothbard, but to concentrate on the giver, the man who bestows the inheritance. 616 01:00:48.240 --> 01:00:53.440 For if Smith and Jones and Stargel have the right to their labor and property, and to 617 01:00:53.440 --> 01:00:59.060 exchange the titles to this property for the similar property of others, they also have 618 01:00:59.060 --> 01:01:06.260 have the right to give their property to whomever they wish, and of course most such gifts consist 619 01:01:06.260 --> 01:01:12.420 of the gifts of the property owners to their children, in short, inheritance. 620 01:01:12.420 --> 01:01:18.020 If Willie Stargel owns his labor and the money he earns from it, then he has the right to 621 01:01:18.020 --> 01:01:21.820 give that money to the baby Stargel. 622 01:01:21.820 --> 01:01:27.060 In the developed free market economy then, the farmer exchanges the wheat for money. 623 01:01:27.060 --> 01:01:32.440 The wheat is bought by the miller, who processes and transforms the wheat into flour. 624 01:01:32.440 --> 01:01:36.480 The miller sells the flour to the baker, who produces bread. 625 01:01:36.480 --> 01:01:41.120 The baker sells the bread to the wholesaler, who in turn sells it to the retailer, who 626 01:01:41.120 --> 01:01:44.060 finally sells it to the consumer. 627 01:01:44.060 --> 01:01:48.880 And at each step of the way, the producer may hire the labor services of the workers 628 01:01:48.880 --> 01:01:51.480 in exchange for money. 629 01:01:51.480 --> 01:01:57.620 How money enters the equation is a complex process, but it should be clear that conceptually 630 01:01:57.620 --> 01:02:04.440 the use of money is equivalent to any single or group of useful commodities that are exchanged 631 01:02:04.440 --> 01:02:07.920 for the wheat, flour, etc. 632 01:02:07.920 --> 01:02:13.500 Instead of money, the commodity exchanged could be cloth, iron, or whatever. 633 01:02:13.500 --> 01:02:19.140 At each step of the way, mutually beneficial exchanges of property titles are agreed upon 634 01:02:19.140 --> 01:02:22.000 and Transacted. 635 01:02:22.000 --> 01:02:29.640 We are now in a position to see how the libertarian defines the concept of freedom or liberty. 636 01:02:29.640 --> 01:02:34.600 Freedom is a condition in which a person's ownership rights in his own body and his legitimate 637 01:02:34.600 --> 01:02:40.060 material property are not invaded, are not aggressed against. 638 01:02:40.060 --> 01:02:46.140 A man who steals another man's property is invading and restricting the victim's freedom, 639 01:02:46.140 --> 01:02:52.300 As does the man who beats another over the head. Freedom and unrestricted property right 640 01:02:52.300 --> 01:02:59.160 go hand in hand. On the other hand, to the libertarian, crime is an act of aggression 641 01:02:59.160 --> 01:03:06.160 against a man's property right, either in his own person or his materially owned objects. 642 01:03:06.160 --> 01:03:12.160 Crime is an invasion by the use of violence against a man's property and therefore against 643 01:03:12.160 --> 01:03:35.920 The Libertarian, then, is clearly an individualist, but not an egalitarian. 644 01:03:35.920 --> 01:03:41.440 The only equality he would advocate is the equal right of every man to the property in 645 01:03:41.440 --> 01:03:47.040 and His Own Person, to the property in the unused resources he homesteads, and to the 646 01:03:47.040 --> 01:03:55.820 property of others he has acquired either through voluntary exchange or gift. 647 01:03:55.820 --> 01:03:59.980 Property Rights and Human Rights 648 01:03:59.980 --> 01:04:04.940 Liberals will generally concede the right of every individual to his personal liberty, 649 01:04:04.940 --> 01:04:11.340 to his freedom to think, speak, write, and engage in such personal exchanges as sexual 650 01:04:11.340 --> 01:04:18.060 Activity between consenting adults. In short, the liberal attempts to uphold the individual's 651 01:04:18.060 --> 01:04:24.300 right to the ownership of his own body, but then denies his right to property, that is, 652 01:04:24.300 --> 01:04:31.340 to the ownership of material objects. Hence the typical liberal dichotomy between human rights, 653 01:04:31.340 --> 01:04:38.620 which he upholds, and property rights, which he rejects. Yet the two, according to the libertarian, 654 01:04:38.620 --> 01:04:46.540 are inextricably intertwined. They stand or fall together. Take, for example, the liberal socialist 655 01:04:46.540 --> 01:04:51.980 who advocates government ownership of all the means of production while upholding the human 656 01:04:51.980 --> 01:04:59.580 right of freedom of speech or press. How is this human right to be exercised if the individuals 657 01:04:59.580 --> 01:05:05.740 constituting the public are denied their right to ownership of property? If, for example, the 658 01:05:05.740 --> 01:05:13.740 If all the government owns all the newsprint and all the printing shops, how is the right to a free press to be exercised? 659 01:05:13.740 --> 01:05:20.740 If the government owns all the newsprint, it then necessarily has the right and the power to allocate that newsprint, 660 01:05:20.740 --> 01:05:28.740 and someone's right to a free press becomes a mockery if the government decides not to allocate newsprint in his direction. 661 01:05:28.740 --> 01:05:33.740 And since the government must allocate scarce newsprint in some way, 662 01:05:33.740 --> 01:05:41.740 The right to a free press of, say, minorities or subversive antisocialists will get short shrift indeed. 663 01:05:41.740 --> 01:05:50.740 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. 664 01:05:50.740 --> 01:06:00.740 Or, for example, if the government of Soviet Russia, being atheistic, decides not to allocate many scarce resources to the production of matzes, 665 01:06:00.740 --> 01:06:05.780 For Orthodox Jews, the freedom of religion becomes a mockery. 666 01:06:05.780 --> 01:06:11.780 But again, the Soviet government can always rebut that Orthodox Jews are a small minority 667 01:06:11.780 --> 01:06:17.140 and that capital equipment should not be diverted to matzah production. 668 01:06:17.140 --> 01:06:22.740 The basic flaw in the liberal separation of human rights and property rights is that people 669 01:06:22.740 --> 01:06:26.420 are treated as ethereal abstractions. 670 01:06:26.420 --> 01:06:31.540 If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real 671 01:06:31.540 --> 01:06:37.340 world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming 672 01:06:37.340 --> 01:06:38.780 resources. 673 01:06:38.780 --> 01:06:43.560 He must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he 674 01:06:43.560 --> 01:06:45.360 must use. 675 01:06:45.360 --> 01:06:51.740 In short, to sustain his human right, or his property rights in his own person, he must 676 01:06:51.740 --> 01:06:58.600 Most also have the property right in the material world, in the objects which he produces. 677 01:06:58.600 --> 01:07:03.780 Property rights are human rights, and are essential to the human rights which liberals 678 01:07:03.780 --> 01:07:05.880 attempt to maintain. 679 01:07:05.880 --> 01:07:13.140 The human right of a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint. 680 01:07:13.140 --> 01:07:18.620 In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights. 681 01:07:18.620 --> 01:07:23.620 The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from 682 01:07:23.620 --> 01:07:26.980 the owners or to own one oneself. 683 01:07:26.980 --> 01:07:32.420 The human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets 684 01:07:32.420 --> 01:07:36.620 or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy. 685 01:07:36.620 --> 01:07:42.380 There is no extra right of free speech or free press beyond the property rights we can 686 01:07:42.380 --> 01:07:45.180 enumerate in any given case. 687 01:07:45.180 --> 01:07:50.540 And furthermore, discovering and identifying the property rights involved will resolve 688 01:07:50.540 --> 01:07:55.220 any apparent conflicts of rights that may crop up. 689 01:07:55.220 --> 01:08:00.500 Consider for example the classic example where liberals generally concede that a person's 690 01:08:00.500 --> 01:08:06.260 right of freedom of speech must be curbed in the name of the public interest. 691 01:08:06.260 --> 01:08:11.780 Justice Holmes' famous dictum that no one has the right to cry fire falsely in a crowded 692 01:08:11.780 --> 01:08:13.700 theater. 693 01:08:13.700 --> 01:08:19.140 Mises and his followers have used this illustration again and again to prove the supposed necessity 694 01:08:19.140 --> 01:08:25.540 for all rights to be relative and tentative, rather than precise and absolute. 695 01:08:25.540 --> 01:08:31.180 But the problem here is not that rights cannot be pushed too far, but that the whole case 696 01:08:31.180 --> 01:08:37.260 is discussed in terms of a vague and woolly freedom of speech, rather than in terms of 697 01:08:37.260 --> 01:08:40.240 the rights of private property. 698 01:08:40.240 --> 01:08:44.400 Suppose we analyze the problem under the aspect of property rights. 699 01:08:44.400 --> 01:08:50.400 The fellow who brings on a riot by falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater is necessarily 700 01:08:50.400 --> 01:08:55.880 either the owner of the theater or the owner's agent or a paying patron. 701 01:08:55.880 --> 01:08:59.800 If he is the owner, then he has committed fraud on his customers. 702 01:08:59.800 --> 01:09:04.840 He has taken their money in exchange for a promise to put on a movie or play, and now 703 01:09:04.840 --> 01:09:11.640 Now instead, he disrupts the show by falsely shouting fire and breaking up the performance. 704 01:09:11.640 --> 01:09:17.900 He has thus welshed on his contractual obligation, and has thereby stolen the property, the money, 705 01:09:17.900 --> 01:09:22.320 of his patrons, and has violated their property rights. 706 01:09:22.320 --> 01:09:26.820 Suppose on the other hand that the shouter is a patron and not the owner. 707 01:09:26.820 --> 01:09:31.240 In that case, he is violating the property right of the owner, as well as of the other 708 01:09:31.240 --> 01:09:34.540 guests to their paid-for performance. 709 01:09:34.540 --> 01:09:40.420 As a guest, he has gained access to the property on certain terms, including an obligation 710 01:09:40.420 --> 01:09:45.580 not to violate the owner's property or to disrupt the performance the owner is putting 711 01:09:45.580 --> 01:09:46.820 on. 712 01:09:46.820 --> 01:09:51.820 His malicious act, therefore, violates the property rights of the theater owner and of 713 01:09:51.820 --> 01:09:54.500 all the other patrons. 714 01:09:54.500 --> 01:09:59.420 There is no need, therefore, for individual rights to be restricted in the case of the 715 01:09:59.420 --> 01:10:01.660 false shatter of fire. 716 01:10:01.660 --> 01:10:08.000 The rights of the individual are still absolute, but they are property rights. 717 01:10:08.000 --> 01:10:13.640 The fellow who maliciously cried fire in a crowded theater is indeed a criminal, but 718 01:10:13.640 --> 01:10:19.640 not because his so-called right of free speech must be pragmatically restricted on behalf 719 01:10:19.640 --> 01:10:21.800 of the public good. 720 01:10:21.800 --> 01:10:27.320 He is a criminal because he has clearly and obviously violated the property rights of 721 01:10:27.320 --> 01:10:28.320 of Another Person.