He got some answers — the best of them from us free market libertarians of the left, who consider ourselves critics of corporate capitalism. Roderick Long wrote (“The Myth of 19th-Century Laissez-Faire: Who Benefits Today?,”):

The question is silly because the libertarian answer is obvious: Libertarianism is great for ordinary people, but not for the power elites that control countries and determine what policies they implement, and who don’t welcome seeing their privileged status subjected to free-market competition. And ordinary people don’t agitate for libertarian policies because most of them are not familiar with the full case for libertarianism’s benefits, in large part because the education system is controlled by the aforementioned elites.

Lind’s question is analogous to ones that might have been asked a few centuries ago: If religious toleration, or equality for women, or the abolition of slavery are so great, why haven’t any countries tried them? All such questions amount to asking: If liberation from oppression is so great for the oppressed, why haven’t their oppressors embraced it?

My own response (“The Only Thing Dumber Than Libertarianism’s Critics are its Right-Wing Defenders,” C4SS, June 22, 2013) was that Lind would

be answered by an equally profound silence if he challenged advocates of social and economic justice to name one country without economic exploitation by a privileged class. Every country in the world has an interventionist state. Every country in the world has class exploitation. Every country in history with a state, since states first arose, has also had classes and economic exploitation. The correlation is one hundred percent.

Lind wasn’t satisfied with our answers (“Libertarians: Still a Cult,” Salon, June 11).

An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored.

But Lind is no less utopian than us “utopian anarchists.” As I pointed out in response to his original challenge, Lind frames the question as if the historical range of political systems reflected a collective judgement in which “we,” “society,” or a “nation” decided what would be the best way of organizing things in the common interest. “We” tried that other thing and it didn’t work, then “we” tried this and it worked better. But this is naive, ahistorical nonsense.

In the Gospel, the chief priests, scribes and elders came to Jesus and demanded to know by what authority he preached to the people. Jesus, in response, said “I will also ask you one thing; and answer me.”

So to Michael Lind I pose a counter-question: Show me one single state, in all of human history, that wasn’t controlled by an economic ruling class and used to enforce their economic exploitation of and extraction of rents from the working or productive classes in the society it ruled? Show me one state that wasn’t an instrument of extraction on behalf of patrician landowners, the owners of slave-worked latifundia, feudal lords, capitalist corporations and banks, or — as in the USSR — the state bureaucracy itself. Show me one state whose primary purpose hasn’t been to enforce the artificial property rights and artificial scarcities that enable a propertied ruling class to live at the expense of everyone else.

To repeat what I and other left-libertarians said in response to Lind’s original article, a libertarian state is a contradiction in terms. The state came into existence, for the last 5000 years or so of our 200,000 year history as homo sapiens, in areas with productive enough agriculture for a ruling class to skim rents off the top. That’s what states do. No one can find a state in human history without a ruling class in charge of it, either. So Lind’s argument proves too much.

But perhaps Lind agrees with slavery apologist John Calhoun, and sees state-enforced class rule as a good thing: “There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.”

In fairness to Lind, I doubt this. I don’t think it’s even a question that appears on his radar. For Lind, left-wing libertarian critiques of the state and of corporate capitalism don’t even exist.

The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard.

Lind makes no secret of the fact that, in his view, high-overhead managerial capitalism is natural and inevitable. Ideally it should be accompanied by Progressive/New Deal/Social Democratic modifications to make it more palatable. But any criticism of centralization, hierarchy or bureaucracy of such is inherently right-wing. I criticized his unstated assumptions at length here.

But the fact remains that, if anyone is guilty of “weak logic and bad scholarship” or an unwillingness to answer questions directly, it’s Lind himself.

It’s time for Michael Lind to put up or shut up.

C4SS trustee and senior fellow Gary Chartier is a Professor of Law and Business Ethics, and Associate Dean of the School of Business, at La Sierra University. He is the author of Economic Justice and Natural Law (Cambridge University Press 2009), The Analogy of Love (Imprint Academic 20007), The Conscience of an Anarchist and Anarchy and Legal Order (Cambridge 2012), as well as articles in journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Theory, Religious Studies, and the Journal of Social Philosophy. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a JD from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

It’s vital not to forget Joseph’s wonderfully put and absolutely correct argument that private property is the only method by which people can peacefully interact and allocate scarce resources. It would be odd indeed if we ignored the volumes of work, such as Human Action or Man, Economy, and State, showing how and why property rights are important, indeed necessary, for a functioning and prosperous society. Still, it would be similarly odd if we ignored the volumes of work explaining why people have an inherent moral right to private property, such as The Ethics of Liberty or Two Treatises of Government.

Before answering if there is good reason to respect private property beyond just consequential considerations, we have to ask, is there good reason to respect individual sovereignty beyond just consequential considerations? It seems evident that there is. Arguably the entire libertarian and anarchist project is predicated on the idea of a certain moral worth that each individual is entitled to, by their very nature, which makes states and oppressive hierarchies unjust.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

We would be much better off if we weren’t tormented by scarcity. There would be no conflict or potential for conflict over physical goods. This hypothetical world — one of superabundance or post-scarcity or infinite supply or infinite reproducibility or whatever you want to call it — is preferable to both options presented in the libertarian dichotomy. Superabundance would also obviate and overcome other undesirable corollaries of scarcity, including opportunity cost, supply and demand, and ultimately economy itself. Unfortunately, this world doesn’t exist.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: They seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works” — implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit the present system isn’t a free market, and includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations in terms of “free market principles.”

Stossel’s piece does that in spades. He begins by conceding Thomas Piketty’s claim, in Capital in the 21st Century, that the concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich is at an all-time high. It’s true, he says, that “the wealth gap has grown. Now the top 1 percent own more assets than the bottom 90 percent!” But not to worry!

Stossel begins by arguing that what matters is not the relative shares of wealth between various percentiles of the population, but the mobility between those percentiles. And moving up is just as easy as ever. Just look at Oprah Winfrey (once on welfare)! And Sam Walton (a former fieldhand)!

Actually this is a load of buncombe. First of all, Stossel in my opinion unjustifiably minimizes path dependency. For example, there are persistent structural differences between the economic security and well-being of black families generations later, depending on whether they lived in areas where the U.S. army granted land to former slaves during Reconstruction — not to mention ongoing structural injustices like black sharecroppers being tractored off their land after WWII, or bank redlining.

But even leaving that aside, there’s been a significant amount of social mobility in most class societies in history. Without such mobility, they would ossify into caste systems incapable of adapting to change. That’s why Orwell’s Inner Party in 1984 is a complete meritocracy that recruits talent from the Outer Party and Proles in each new generation. The Soviet class system was probably more mobile than the American; most of the Party apparatus and the state economy’s managerial establishment, in the mid-20th century, were populated by the millions of workers and peasants (and their children) who swarmed into the Party in the ’20s and ’30s and got sent to vocational schools. Even under Roman chattel slavery, there were more enterprising or cunning slaves than average who bought their freedom and eventually became slave-owners themselves. Does this mobility mean that the dominance of the Ingsoc Party in 1984, or the dominance of the Soviet apparatchik over the average citizen, or the Roman slave-owner over the slave, was legitimate? It’s just an amazingly stupid argument.

But the real vulgar libertarianism comes in when Stossel dismisses considerations of justice or injustice in the distribution of wealth: “Also, the rich don’t get rich at the expense of the poor (unless they steal or collude with government).”

Um, that’s a big “unless.” Stossel writes as if the legitimacy of the super-rich’s fortunes were the rule, and collusion with the government were some sort of rare exception. To be sure, Stossel occasionally writes about some government boondoggle for the rich (like subsidized insurance for their beach homes) or corporate welfare. But his instinctive reaction, when someone attacks the polarization of wealth or the power of big business, is to interpret it as a leftist attack on the “free market,” and to circle the wagons in defense of the rich and powerful.

But in fact corporate capitalism as we know it is defined by statism to its very core, and the overwhelming majority of the income of the super-rich consists of rents on artificial property rights and artificial scarcities enforced by the state. I doubt it would be possible to accumulate a fortune of 100 million on the free market — let alone 100 billion. The Fortune 500 corporations, without any exception I can think of, owe their profits and market shares to government-subsidized inputs, government-enforced monopolies, entry barriers and regulatory cartels.

Stossel isn’t defending against government intervention. He’s defending a system based on it.

It would be odd, indeed, to declare, following some rigorous ethical constructivism, that property in anything is legitimate. I fear that is what I did in my first response because I never included a key part of libertarian property theory. That is, external property is only legitimate, only an extension of self-ownership, in the case of scarce goods.

You can’t homestead or acquire a good that is superabundant, such as air. To have a fully fleshed out theory of property, you need to account for the difference between scarce and non-scarce goods. I couldn’t claim a certain “area” of air as being rightfully mine since it is, for all intents and purposes, not scarce. As Rothbard puts it in “Man, Economy, and State,” air is “In most situations in unlimited abundance. It is therefore not a means and is not employed as a means to the fulfillment of ends….Air, then, though indispensable, is not a means, but a general condition of human action and welfare.”

Air, and other things of super abundance, are not goods in the economic sense. They are simply there. Therefore, they aren’t proper subjects of homesteading. That is, they can’t be owned. Suppose that we lived on the Enterprise and had access to the replicator: a machine which creates whatever we want out of thin air, at no cost (besides the few seconds it takes to work). In the world of Star Trek, everything is in super abundance (well, technically not everything since the replicator can’t create living organisms or dark matter, but it can create any economic good we know of).

Now, once I used the replicator to create a delicious pizza for me for lunch, and I am sitting down to eat it, I think it is rightfully mine. If Worf tried to come over and take it, I believe that would be, in effect, stealing. So, in a sense that pizza is rightfully mine since I made it part of my ongoing projects. However, Worf is able to use the replicator and make his own pizza, or whatever Klingons eat. There is no conflict since the resources are not scarce (ignore for the purposes of this discussion the scarcity and/or availability of the replicator itself).

This is exactly Joseph’s point. Without scarcity in goods, conflict over resources is impossible and the notion of external property becomes meaningless. He succinctly uses this point to argue against intellectual property. Let’s go back to the original quote, “At best, private property is a neutral concept in itself; based on given natural conditions, it can be either good or bad.” The theory of property is this: People have claim rights to external, scarce goods by mixing their labor with them and making them part of their ongoing uses. This is the part concerned with normative ethics.

We must delve deeper into each specific situation to apply this theory, to do applied ethics. We must first determine what is or isn’t scarce in the real world before we can see what property applies to. Pizzas and comics are scarce goods that can be legitimate property. Air and ideas are superabundant “goods” that can’t be legitimate property. The world of Star Trek, because of the “natural (the replicator isn’t really natural) conditions,” external property doesn’t really make sense. In our world, external property is a valid concept since there are scarce goods, but there are also things it doesn’t apply to.

Ultimately I believe Joseph and I are in full agreement on this issue. It only took some clarification to realize it. The issue is not consequential vs deontological reasons for external property. The issue is looking at the real world and seeing where valid property exists. It is conceivable that a world exists where they don’t. A world of superabundance. A world where I live on the Enterprise. However, I can only dream of that world. Scarcity, so far, is a fact of our world. Joseph and I agree that property only applies to those scarce objects.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange began as a feature by Joseph S. Diedrich, Private Property, the Least Bad Option. Cory Massimino and Diedrich have prepared a series of articles challenging and exploring the themes presented in Driedrich original article. Over the next week, every other day, C4SS will publish one of their responses. The final series can be followed under the title: Private Property: How, When and Why. 

In response to my recent article, “Private Property, the Least Bad Option,” Cory Massimino has penned a well-articulated rebuttal. I find myself in agreement (more or less) with everything he says, yet I don’t believe my article is in any way contradicted or undermined. In my opinion, Cory asserts that my article claims more than it actually does, and for that, I am at least partially responsible. Allow me to clarify my positions.

My central argument is as follows. Many libertarians operate under the assumption that private property alone fosters peaceful interaction. From there, many conclude that its structure and function — viz., exclusive control of resources — make private property inherently good. They assign to it the status of a universally applicable ethic (valid in all cases, regardless of given conditions).

There are two problems with that: First, private property is not sufficient to promote peaceful interaction; however, under certain circumstances, it is necessary. I say “certain circumstances” because another factor must be considered. There are two classes of resources: scarce and non-scarce. Scarce resources are excludable, and absent a system of exclusive control, conflict over their use is unavoidable. Non-scarce resources are not excludable, and therefore no conflict over their use naturally occurs. Only if we attempt to apply private property norms to them does conflict over their use become a reality.

Second, as a corollary, private property cannot be assigned the status of a universally applicable ethic. Rather, its status is contingent upon the uncontrollable dictates of nature. Its structure and function (exclusive control) dissuades conflict over scarce resources, but actually promotes conflict over non-scarce resources.

Moreover, in the realm of scarcity, private property is not only necessary for peaceful interaction. It is also logically unavoidable. There are various theories that demonstrate the logical necessity of private property, including “rights-skepticism,” Stephan Kinsella’s “estoppel” theory, and Hans-Herman Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics,” to name a few.

Hoppe begins by proposing that rational discourse (argumentation) proves self-ownership, “Justification — proof, conjecture, refutation — is argumentative justification. Anyone who denied this proposition would become involved in a performative contradiction because his denial would itself constitute an argument.” To engage in rational argumentation presupposes exclusive control over one’s own physical body:

No one could propose anything and expect the other party to convince himself of the validity of this proposition or deny it and propose something else unless his and his opponent’s right to exclusive control over their respective bodies and standing rooms were presupposed.

From there, Hoppe proceeds to deduce the logical validity of private property rights in “other scarce means.”

There are other ways to arrive at the same general conclusions; argumentation ethics is but one example. Yet all valid arguments and theories of this sort have at least one fundamental commonality—a consideration of scarcity. Hoppe mentions it explicitly. Self-ownership is a priori justified only because our bodies and standing room are scarce. In other words, private property attains validity and becomes just only because the possibility of conflict exists.

Private property in scarce resources, then, is a universally applicable human ethic. It allows each individual to assess his or her actions prior to acting. We can determine ex ante whether or not the actions we intend to take will be just or unjust.

Consider the other class of resources—those that are non-scarce. In this case, private property (exclusive control) has the opposite effect. It promotes conflict where none would otherwise arise. In addition, from an abstract theoretical viewpoint, private property is ultimately logically impossible in non-scarce resources. I argue this in an article at the MacIver Institute:

[I]f indeed property, [non-scarce] resources can be sold, rented (licensed), given away, or stolen…

To be sold, rented, given away, or stolen, however, property must obviously be owned, a requisite that makes necessary the consideration of unowned proprietary resources…

If the prognostication of universal appropriation is fulfilled, eventually a world will exist in which all [non-scarce] resources are appropriated. Every idea will be owned—every concept, every design, every plan, every thought. Indeed, even the abstract idea of an “idea” will be owned. In other words, the concept of action will be under exclusive control.

As a corollary, anyone who uses the concept of action—i.e., acts—without prior permission from its owner would be engaging in an illegitimate form of property acquisition, viz., theft. In order to seek said permission to use (or rent or buy) the concept of action, one must talk or write using words and concepts—in other words, one must act…

Via reduction ad absurdum, we expose an undeniable contradiction. Nevertheless, even though theoretically impossible in the long-run, we still have the ability to impose private property onto non-scarce resources. And we do it all the time, most notably with intellectual “property.”

My intention with “Private Property, the Least Bad Option,” was to be both descriptive and prescriptive. Hence, when I wrote, “Scarcity doesn’t govern the non-physical world, and thus it is unnecessary, imprudent, and patently foolish to impose coercive private property strictures onto it,” I was making not a theoretical observation but a precise recommendation. We should never impose artificial scarcity upon the non-scarce world of ideal resources and digital “space.”

Furthermore, when I said, “private property isn’t morally meritorious or great in itself,” I meant that in a very specific sense. Merit can only be interpersonally determined based on the ability of a means to lead to an end. Private property (which, even when it is our only logically coherent possibility, is still only a means) can be morally meritorious and great, but only insofar as it aligns with our ultimate ends.

If our ultimate end is increased social welfare and a higher standard of living (a desire predicated on peaceful interaction), then private property in scarce resources must be upheld. On the other hand, private property (or the attempt thereat) in non-scarce resources must be rejected. At best, private property is a neutral concept in itself; based on given natural conditions, it can be either good or bad.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange began as a feature by Joseph S. Diedrich, Private Property, the Least Bad Option. Cory Massimino and Diedrich have prepared a series of articles challenging and exploring the themes presented in Driedrich original article. Over the next week, every other day, C4SS will publish one of their responses. The final series can be followed under the title: Private Property: How, When and Why.

What reasons do people have to respect property rights, if any? It’s not an easy conundrum considering political theorists and moral philosophers have been grappling with it for centuries. In an excellent and ideologically significant article, Joseph Diedrich argues,

The right to private property isn’t some intuitive, natural axiom… on the contrary, private property evolved as the best and only method of peacefully allocating scarce resources.

I agree with this conclusion. Libertarians often wrongfully treat private property as a foundational rule, which presupposes all their arguments. This is the wrong approach since we need to justify private property on some grounds. Joseph says, “Private property isn’t morally meritorious or great in itself, but only insofar as it is the best and only way to avoid conflict given the reality of scarcity in the physical world.” However, I believe there are reasons to respect property rights beyond just its socially positive consequences.

It’s vital not to forget Joseph’s wonderfully put and absolutely correct argument that private property is the only method by which people can peacefully interact and allocate scarce resources. It would be odd indeed if we ignored the volumes of work, such as Human Action or Man, Economy, and State, showing how and why property rights are important, indeed necessary, for a functioning and prosperous society. Still, it would be similarly odd if we ignored the volumes of work explaining why people have an inherent moral right to private property, such as The Ethics of Liberty or Two Treatises of Government.

Before answering if there is good reason to respect private property beyond just consequential considerations, we have to ask, is there good reason to respect individual sovereignty beyond just consequential considerations? It seems evident that there is. Arguably the entire libertarian and anarchist project is predicated on the idea of a certain moral worth that each individual is entitled to, by their very nature, which makes states and oppressive hierarchies unjust.

Certainly the only reason I don’t drive to Joseph’s house and punch him in the face isn’t just that I have figured out the consequences would be harmful to me and/or society. I ought to respect his autonomy because of his nature and mine. Resorting to coercion and abandoning reason would go against my nature as a rational creature. It would be acting subhuman. I shouldn’t treat him as a means to my ends, even if I could get good effects out of doing so. Whether we call this idea “self-ownership” or not is not of huge importance here. I simply want to establish there are moral reasons to respect personal autonomy and not cross peoples’ “boundaries” without their permission, beyond the consequential considerations.

But why does this mean people are also morally obligated to respect property? Suppose I decided I was really in the mood for some pizza. I even got the dough, the cheese, and the sauce all together and made it step by step. I toiled for hours putting the ingredients together. Now, right when I was about to take a big bite out of the pizza Joseph sneaks in and takes it. He takes all eight slices. Now it could be that he ought not to do this because that action, along with the rule associated with that action, would result in bad social consequences. But, aside from that, did, in some way, Joseph violate my personal autonomy? Did he invade my “boundary,” despite never laying a hand on me?

It seems implausible to say that he didn’t just because the pizza was external to my physical body. I spent the whole day cooking that pizza just to have it taken away from me. I altered physical matter to create something new, something delicious. While we do this all the time with external objects, we also do it with our own body. The particles that make up our bodies currently weren’t always there. We constantly gain new ones and lose old ones. We take external matter and make it part of us. We make it part of our ongoing projects.

This is exactly what I’ve done with the dough, cheese, and sauce. I utilized previously unclaimed or traded particles and made them part of my ongoing project. That project being eating pizza. External property that we mix our labor with, and make part of our ongoing uses, is an extension of our individual boundary. If you don’t respect my justly acquired property, you aren’t respecting my personal autonomy.

Joseph is right in that we have good reason to respect private property because of its social consequences. The system of private property is vital to social cooperation and the efficient allocation of resources. However, that isn’t the whole story. We have other reasons to respect private property, too. Matter that is altered and made part of one’s ongoing uses is an extension of their person. Just as we have good reason to respect peoples’ individual autonomy regardless of the consequences, we have good reason to respect peoples’ property claims regardless of the consequences.

Private property is a coercive stricture. It is not coercive in the sense of putting a gun to someone’s head or stealing wealth in the form of taxes, but coercive in the sense that it circumscribes, dictates, and restricts our interaction with the natural, physical world. The realities of scarcity coerce us into choosing between private property and dismal alternatives.

We would be much better off if we weren’t tormented by scarcity. There would be no conflict or potential for conflict over physical goods. This hypothetical world – one of superabundance or post-scarcity or infinite supply or infinite reproducibility or whatever you want to call it – is preferable to both options presented in the libertarian dichotomy. Superabundance would also obviate and overcome other undesirable corollaries of scarcity, including opportunity cost, supply and demand, and ultimately economy itself. Unfortunately, this world doesn’t exist.

A superabundant world does exist, however, in ideal resources – ideas, patterns, concepts, words, expressions, information, knowledge, etc. (in other words, products of the mind). My use of a chicken soup recipe doesn’t interfere with or exclude anyone else’s ability also use it. The same goes for the design of an internal combustion engine, the arrangement and expression of words in a novel, the colors and patterns of a painting, the notes and rhythms of a musical composition, and anything that exists beyond the constraints of physical goods.

The fact that a superabundant supply of ideal resources exists does not imply that everyone has infinite knowledge. The process of discovery converts ignorance into awareness, but it has no effect on excludability or scarcity. When Pythagoras discovered his famous theorem, he was initially the only one who knew of it. Yet just because everyone else was ignorant of it didn’t mean that it was scarce. Anyone else was free to independently discover it or learn of it from Pythagoras (if he shared it) and in turn make use of it without excluding anyone else from doing the same.

Ideal resources do, of course, interact with scarce objects. For example, thoughts are communicated as arrangements of words, which are often written on or displayed via scarce objects, such as paper or computer screens. On a more abstract level, the scarcity of neurons, time, and space also come into play.

The way that non-scarce, ideal resources interact with scarce, physical resources has changed and continues to change. The first great revolution occurred with the advent of written language. The second great revolution involved the supplanting of copyists by publishers upon the invention of the Gutenberg press. The third great revolution, which we are all witness to, has been the transformation from print to digital. The cloud effectively eliminates scarcity as it relates to the distribution of recorded information.

Think about radiation therapy for a moment. Patients afflicted with cancer can often turn to radiation as a beneficial treatment. It purges their bodies of malignant cells and overcomes the horror of disease. However, if a healthy person is exposed to radiation, or if radiation is applied to a sick person improperly, the results are ghastly. Instead of promoting healing and prolonging life, the bad radiation engenders suffering and induces mortality.

As with radiation, the imposition of unnecessary and indiscriminate private property strictures inhibits human progress. Where scarcity doesn’t exist, the necessity of making that infamous dichotomic choice isn’t coerced upon us. When we choose to apply private property strictures to non-scarce ideal resources in the form of intellectual property, for example, we leave the realm of natural coercion (uncontrollable elements of the physical world requiring us to make undesirable choices) and enter into the realm of artificial coercion (humans coercing other humans).

This is what libertarians often miss. We can become so attached to the idea of private property that we believe we have to create it or impose it or legislate it even when it is unnecessary. Scarcity doesn’t govern the non-physical world, and thus it is unnecessary, imprudent, and patently foolish to impose coercive private property strictures onto it. Remember the old adage that says you shouldn’t fix what’s not broken?

In an Edenesque superabundant world, space, time, and self would still be scarce. Even if I were able to conjure up anything that I wanted, I would still be limited by time, by my physical body and the space it occupies, and by my own mortality. These conditions, however, undermine neither self-ownership nor the argument that private property is undesirable. Immortality, unlimited space, and unlimited time would seem to be preferable to the opposite.

The right to private property isn’t some intuitive, natural axiom, come down from the Heavens as an eternal law of all human interaction. On the contrary, private property evolved as the best and only method of peacefully allocating scarce resources. As the commons became smaller and smaller this undeniable fact became more and more evident. While private property is preferable to all available alternatives, it is not inherently desirable or good. Recognizing this clarifies and enhances libertarian theory.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Propriedade privada, dos males o menor.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

“A free market is not a society in which all of soc­i­ety’s functions are performed by private, for-profit business corporations. It’s a society where all fun­c­t­ions are performed by free, voluntary assoc­iat­ions. That means people get whatever services they need by organiz­ing them cooperatively with other willing partici­p­ants, or persuading someone to volunt­ar­ily supply them. And nobody is forced to pay for services they don’t want. . . .

“Capitalists don’t get rich by actually making things or providing services. They get rich by controlling – with the help of the state – the circumstances under which people are allowed to make things or provide services. If they do actually make things or provide services, they do so under carefully con­trolled circumstances where they get their money from involuntary customers who are conscripted into pay­ing by the state, or the state limits the ability of other firms to compete with them. You know, like Halli­b­urton and those military con­tractors. Or the private health insurance people have to buy under Obama­care. Under cap­i­tal­ism, privileged businesses make mon­ey by doing stuff on other people’s nickel. Big busi­ness gets its profits by external­iz­ing its operating expenses on the taxpayer. . . .

“Who cares if a corporation like Halliburton is nominally ‘private’ or ‘public?’ If it makes its money through force, it’s really just a part of the state. . . .”

This article was originally published as “‘Privatization’ or Cor­poratism?” in December 2013, as a syndicated column for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

Kevin A. Carson is a mutualist writer living and working in northwest Arkansas, and the author of several incredibly influential works on contemporary mutualist anarchism, including “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand,” Studies in Mutualist Political Economy,Organization Theory: A Libertarian Per­spect­ive, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, and numerous articles and research reports for the Center for a Stateless Society.