Q: Hello. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in his book “Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis:
the anarchist/communist who claims that property is theft is not wrong in principle. To take any piece of land on this planet and trace its ownership history, you will have to come to some point in history when it was forcibly taken or plundered from someone. And before that, the previous owner did it to the one before him.
Do you maybe know why did Mises—who otherwise had healthy views – have this particular view? Why did he not recognize homesteading? Thank you.
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Note: The sender did not provide a link or page number so I am doubtful this is an accurate quote. A search of the text does not find it. However, I found a couple passages that the sender, or his confused AI, may have had in mind:
From Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Part I, ch. 1, §2, p. 32:
All ownership derives from occupation and violence. When we consider the natural components of goods, apart from the labor components they contain, and when we follow the legal title back, we must necessarily arrive at a point where this title originated in the appropriation of goods accessible to all. Before that we may encounter a forcible expropriation from a predecessor whose ownership we can in its turn trace to earlier appropriation or robbery. That all rights derive from violence, all ownership from appropriation or robbery, we may freely admit to those who oppose ownership on considerations of natural law. But this offers not the slightest proof that the abolition of ownership is necessary, advisable. or morally justified.
Natural ownership need not count upon recognition by the owners’ fellow men. It is tolerated, in fact, only as long as there is no power to upset it and it does not survive the moment when a stronger man seizes it for himself. Created by arbitrary force it must always fear a more powerful force. This the doctrine of natural law has called the war of all against all. The war ends when the actual relation is recognized as one worthy to be maintained. Out of violence emerges law.
From Human Action, ch. XXIV, §4:
Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. The history of private property can be traced back to a point at which it originated out of acts which were certainly not legal. Virtually every owner is the direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent spoilation of their predecessor.
However, the fact that legal formalism can trace back every title either to arbitrary appropriation or to violent expropriation has no significance whatever for the conditions of a market society. Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day. For in an unhampered market society the consumers daily decide anew who should own and how much he should own. The consumers allot control of the means of production to those who know how to use them best for the satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers. Only in a legal and formalistic sense can the owners be considered the successors of appropriators and expropriators. In fact, they are mandataries of the consumers, bound by the operation of the market to serve the consumers best. Under capitalism, private property is the consummation of the self-determination of the consumers.
A: All this means is there is some taint in ownership chains but this does not invalidate property rights at all.
- Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights
- Rothbard on the “Original Sin” in Land Titles: 1969 vs. 1974
- Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society
Mises was somewhat of a legal positivist and also recognized the reality that there is force intermixed with property claims and enforcement, but he did recognize the distinction between possession (factual; descriptive; economic; “catallactic” or “sociological”) and ownership (normative; legal; juristic; moral; prescriptive).
- Libertarian Answer Man: Self-ownership for slaves and Crusoe; and Yiannopoulos on Accurate Analysis and the term “Property”; Mises distinguishing between juristic and economic categories of “ownership”
- On Property Rights in Superabundant Bananas and Property Rights as Normative Support for Possession
In addition, as I note elsewhere, there is something to the claim that (legal) property (rights), in the way enclosure extinguished pre-existing partial property rights (easements for hunting, travel etc.) are “theft,” but this is a condemnation of the state and its monopolizing legitimate private functions (like assigning and protecting property rights), not of the institution of property rights per se. See:
- Robin Hood, Magna Carta, and the Forest Charter
- Rand on the Injuns and Property Rights
- Conversation with Block: Binding Promises, Voluntary Slavery
Incidentally, as I noted in the links above re Mises’s comments in Socialism on property rights and possession etc., I had long assumed that most of his significant comments on such issues from previous books would also be in Human Action, but there is interesting stuff in Socialism on property that is not in Human Action, e.g. some of the comments in Part I, ch. 1, §1, on “The Nature of Ownership.”
Of course, mutualist and leftist criticisms of property rights are still confused and wrong.
- Egads, I hate Georgism
- What Libertarianism Is, App. II: Mutualist Occupancy, in LFFS
- A Critique of Mutualist Occupancy
