Hans-Hermann Hoppe on private property

Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition.  But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster.  For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them.  To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified. 

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989)

Kevin Duffy on the meaning of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has become a personal reminder that the early settlements started out as failures in common ownership, but succeeded by adopting private property, laying the foundation for the prosperity we enjoy today.

~ Kevin Duffy

Sheldon Richman on the Capitol breach and the difference between public and private property

Perhaps most annoying of all about the coverage was the barely veiled premise that the Capitol is a temple on sacred ground. Let’s not fall for that nationalist bunk. I find it ironic that those who speak in such tones say they oppose nationalism, which is nothing but a body of state-worshiping dogma, sacraments, and rituals. They just don’t like a particular branch of the church, that’s all. So what’s new? 

Let’s be clear: there is no sacred ground or holy buildings. The posers who are called “representatives” and who occupy such places have no more access to the Will of The People than the high priests had to Yahweh back in the day. 

[...]

So, again, if we have to talk in such terms — and really we don’t — Starbucks and the corner hardware store are more sacred than any government building, which was built with the proceeds from extortion, otherwise known as taxation. This doesn’t justify or excuse what Trump’s infantile horde did on Jan. 6, but it’s a fact nonetheless.

~ Sheldon Richman, "No Sacred Ground," The Libertarian Institute," January 11, 2021

Stephan Kinsella on the Capitol breach and the difference between public and private property

Q: You don’t find any difference between the Capitol and a Target? 

Kinsella: I think it's far worse to vandalize private property.  The state owns the capitol, which means we are its natural, real owners, and for my part, I hereby consent to my share of the Capitol being used to burn it to the ground.

~ Stephan Kinsella, Facebook post, January 9, 2021

Ludwig von Mises on the importance of private ownership to the market economy

Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy.  It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such.  Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.  Ownership means full control of the services that can be derived from a good.

~ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Michael Tomasky on why mask mandates are compatible with freedom

Freedom emphatically does not include the freedom to get someone else sick. It does not include the freedom to refuse to wear a mask in the grocery store, sneeze on someone in the produce section and give him the virus. That’s not freedom for the person who is sneezed upon. For that person, the first person’s “freedom” means chains — potential illness and even perhaps a death sentence. No society can function on that definition of freedom.

~ Michael Tomasky, "There's a Word For Why We Wear Masks, and Liberals Should Say It," The New York Times, October 17, 2020

Kevin Duffy tweet: This is a property rights issue. Grocery stores, restaurants, your neighbors, grandma... they all make the rules once you step on their property. If they require masks, abide by the rules or leave. But this also applies to businesses and customers who agree not to mask. 

Government lockdowns violate the rights of the latter group and destroy freedom of association in the process. They are tyranny plain and simple, and incompatible with freedom.

Michael Tomasky tweet: You are silly. And muted.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe on how exclusion is required to achieve a free society

Libertarians, in their attempt to establish a free natural social order, must strive to regain from the state the right to exclusion inherent in private property.  Yet even before they accomplish this and in order to render such an achievement possible, libertarians cannot soon enough begin to reassert and exercise, to the extent that the situation still permits them to do so, their right to exclusion in everyday life.  Libertarians must distinguish themselves from others by practicing (as well as advocating) the most extreme form on intolerance and discrimination against egalitarians, democrats, socialists, communists, multiculturalists, environmentalists, ill manners, misconduct, incompetence, rudeness, vulgarity, and obscenity.  Like true conservatives,... true libertarians must visibly and ostentatiously dissociate themselves from the false multicultural and anti-authoritarian egalitarian left-libertarian impostors.

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, p. 219

Hans-Hermann Hoppe on how egalitarianism and cultural relativism threaten the family and private property

[A] community always faces the double and related threat of egalitarianism and cultural relativism.  Egalitarianism, in every shape and form, is incompatible with the idea of private property.  Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference.  And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental - indeed foundational - fact of families and intergenerational kinship relations.  Families and kinship relations imply cultural absolutism.  As a matter of socio-phychological fact, both egalitarian and relativistic sentiments find steady support among newer generations of adolescents... Adolescence is marked by regular (and for this stage normal) outbreaks of rebellion by the young against the discipline imposed on them by family life and parental authority.  Cultural relativism and multiculturalism provide the ideological instrument of emancipating oneself from these constraints.  And egalitarianism - based on the infantile view that property is "given" (and thus distributed arbitrarily) rather than individually appropriated and produced (and hence, distributed justly, i.e., in accordance with personal productivity) - provides the intellectual means by which the rebellious youths can lay claim to the economic resources necessary for a life free of and outside the disciplinary framework of families.

[...]

[S]o long as the threat of moral relativism and egalitarianism is restricted to a small proportion of juveniles and young adults for only a brief period in life (until they settle back into family-constrained adulthood), it may well be sufficient to do nothing at all.  The proponents of cultural relativism and egalitarianism would represent little more than temporary embarassments or irritations...  A small dose of ridicule and contempt may be all that is needed to contain the... threat.  The situation is very different, however, and rather more drastic measures might be required, once the spirit of moral relativism and egalitarianism has taken hold among adult members of society: among mothers, fathers, and heads of households and firms.

As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society.

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy - The God That Failed, pp. 217-218

Ludwig von Mises on private property

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will…. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and… material progress are rooted.

~ Ludwig von Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth, p. 67

Gustave de Molinari on property

Private property is redundant.  Public property is an oxymoron.  All legit property is private.  If property isn't private it's stolen.

~ Gustave de Molinari

Stephan Kinsella on libertarianism and property rights

[U]nless you are pro-market, pro-private property, you have no basis to oppose the state, for the state is simply the agency of institutionalized aggression against private property rights.  To oppose the state is to support property rights, since opposing aggression means opposing the invasion of property.  Conversely, those who oppose property rights inevitably support the state or other forms of aggression.

~ Stephan Kinsella, "Down with anti-market "anarchists," LewRockwell.com Blog, September 9, 2008

Orri Vigfússon on privatizing rivers

Governments shouldn't be in the business of managing or marketing a river. They might as well be opening up a Chinese restaurant. They should leave fishing to the private sector.

~ Orri Vigfússon, 65-year old Icelandic businessman, conservationist and world-renowned angler, "Privatize U.S. Rivers?," Forbes, January 28, 2008

(See also "The Leaping Fish," Forbes, January 28, 2008)

Hayek on the link between private property and freedom

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all the means of production were vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of "society" as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Governor William Bradford on how common ownership of property failed at Plymouth Plantation

At last after much debate of things, the governor gave way that they should set corn everyman for his own particular... That had very good success for it made all hands very industrious, so much [more] corn was planted than otherwise would have been ... The experience that has had in this common course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst Godly and sober men, may well evince the Vanities of the conceit of Plato's and other ancients, applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of propertie, and bringing into commone wealth, would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.

~ Governor William Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation: 1620-1647 (1650)

Pilgrim Tercentenary
Signing of the Compact
1620-1920