Related:
- Libertarian Answer Man: Eminent Domain and Ownership of State Monetary Payments
- On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library
- Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society
- Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…
Dear Dr. Hoppe, and Stephan:
I just finished having a debate with someone over the idea that receiving State welfare is aggression. I defended the stance that it is not inherently aggression (for the aggression is committed by the State when it taxes people, not by the welfare recipient), while he defended the idea that it is aggression. His argument was that when one receives money from the State, that money has a legitimate owner, and that at the very least one cannot receive more from the State than one has paid to it.
The debate then shifted to the nature of stolen property, restitution claims, and restitution chains. I always recall Murray Rothbard’s “Restitution and the Homestead Principle” on this:
Suppose, for example, that A steals B’s horse. Then C comes along and takes the horse from A. Can C be called a thief? Certainly not, for we cannot call a man a criminal for stealing goods from a thief. On the contrary, C is performing a virtuous act of confiscation, for he is depriving thief A of the fruits of his crime of aggression, and he is at least returning the horse to the innocent “private” sector and out of the “criminal” sector. C has done a noble act and should be applauded. Of course, it would be still better if he returned the horse to B, the original victim. But even if he does not, the horse is far more justly in C’s hands than it is in the hands of A, the thief and criminal.
Let us now apply our libertarian theory of property to the case of property in the hands of, or derived from, the State apparatus. The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called “taxation” and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable as B, the horse-owner. All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrific tangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State?
He repudiated part of this later: see Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…
Now, while I have a predilection to adhere to Rothbard’s idea of confiscation, I also find it to probably be flawed, because it implies that one can confiscate property from a thief, and then become its legitimate owner. I am sure Dr. Hoppe would not agree with this, at least according to my understanding of his texts. It would then be imperative that C returns the horse to B, provided that B can prove he is the owner of the horse, since otherwise one could end up legitimizing stolen property in as long as the the thief transfers it to someone else or allows for it to “stolen.”
Criminals cannot be true owners. Someone else is–the original owner, or someone else since the thief has unclean hands.
The state can never compensate everyone because it is destructive so there is never enough resources to compensate all the victims.
So any true victim of the state is entitled to take what they can to try to get some partial restitution.
This is the case with property generally owned by the state which is purchased with stolen tax dollars. If the state takes B’s horse or house and pays him for it using tax dollars, then if C liberates the house or horse he can re-homestead and keep it. If the state merely stolen the horse from B then C has B’s implicit permission to take it on the condition that he tries to return it to B; if B is lost or cannot be found we can presume B would rather C have the horse than the state that stole ie. I don’t see that this is that difficult. See Libertarian Answer Man: Eminent Domain and Ownership of State Monetary Payments and On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library, where I explicitly deal with this issue. see the part beginning with:
Also, regarding the stolen wallet example, where Sally discovers a wallet stolen by a mugger, she does not own it unless the owner cannot be identified. But she has permission to “liberate” it based on the presumed consent of the original owner, who presumably would welcome her liberating it from the mugger, or even keeping it if the owner cannot be found because the original owner would prefer an innocent person, who has “clean hands,” to have it rather than the mugger, who has unclean hands. This is, by the way, another problem with one argument Walter Block makes to argue that state property is unowned as it may be “liberated”. The example he gives is that of Ragnar Danneskjold, the pirate from Atlas Shrugged: …
But then I thought: if the original owner has a claim against the current owner to get his property back, then this can effectively cause a massive, unworkable chain of restitution claims! A steals B’s book, then later sells it to C, who is a bona fide purchaser of the book. C then sells it to D, who sells it to E, who sells it to F, and so on until we reach Z. If B can then prove that Z’s book is his book—the one stolen by A—, then Z would be obliged to return the book to B, but then Z already spent his money when he bought the book from Y, and one could then argue that Y is then a fraudster, for he sold a stolen item to Z—unknowingly—, without transferring a legitimate property title over the book to him. Z should then demand restitution from Y, and Y could then remand restitution from X, and X from W, and so on and so forth. If at any point in the chain, someone is not capable of obtaining restitution (for instance, the previous owner died), then there remains an injustice unsolved; an injustice caused by a long chain of events of bona fide actors which tie to an original aggressive event.
This is worsened when one considers money being stolen. If A steals $1000 from B, and then buys something from C, then C buys something from D, and so on, the restitution becomes arguably impossible, since each person will spend different parts of those $1000 on different persons, who will spend those parts on different other persons, and it will create massive trees of transactions. While my opponent argued that B can demand the $1000 from C, I’d argue that money, being homogeneous, can only be demanded from A, because it would become impossible to trace every single transaction done with stolen funds, and the funds that C comes to own are not necessarily “tainted” as for him to owe B the value of the money. Similar trees of many transactions can be created when someone steals many items from another person. If A steals 50 books from B, and sells them to different people, then it basically becomes logistically impossible for B to get back all those books.
While this may sound like armchair theorizing, such things are undeniably common in real life. Likely, at least a few things that we three own were stolen at some point. The land we live on was likely owned by someone who had it stolen, and whose heirs perhaps still exist. It would then be ridiculous for the three of us if someone came knocking one day and said “please, hand over that painting on your wall, for it was stolen from my great-grandfather 120 years ago, and here’s proof.” The person we bought the paint from might as well be deceased now! While this would be consistent, it’d certainly be absurd, and it could, theoretically speaking, create a regression chain going back to the very first act of thievery in recorded history.
There is no problem. If a legitimate heir shows up they might have a claim but this is increasinglly unlikely. If this was a real problem people would use property title insurance. See Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society.
I and/or my opponent might have very well been ignorant of certain theory, or might have blown this out of proportion, or might just be armchair-theorizing too hard, but I believe that anything that works in theory must work in practice, and if our theory says “in these cases, you may have an irrationally-long chain of restitution claims,” then I feel like there’s got to be a better deontologically-consistent solution to this issue, and perhaps you two would know it. I was thinking, perhaps, that private or communal restitution funds seeded by penalties on proven aggressors could be used to reinstitute victims, for instance. Or perhaps I’m simply overthinking it, or misinterpreting sources.
