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.
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
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
