Private Property

In the eyes of the parties who style themselves progressive and leftist the main vice of capitalism is the inequality of incomes and wealth.

It is private property and market prices or the law of the jungle, and no amount of fashionable cynicism about the market or romantic delusions about how nice life would be without it can obscure this fundamental choice.

Paradoxical as it might first seem, the more liberal a state is internally, the more likely it will engage in outward aggression. Internal liberalism makes a society richer; a richer society to extract from makes the state richer, and a richer state makes for more and more successful expansionist wars

But it should be clear that what distinguishes libertarianism from all competing political theories is its scrupulous adherence — informed by sound, i.e., Austrian, economics — to the idea that property rights in scarce resources must be assigned to the person with the best, objective link to the resource in question; and that, in the case of bodies, the link is the natural connection to and relationship between the occupant and the body, while for all other resources, the objective link is first use.

In sum, protection and security contracts would come into existence. Furthermore, as a result of the continual cooperation of various insurers and arbitrators, a tendency toward the unification of property and contract law and the harmonization of the rules of procedure, evidence, and conflict resolution would be set in motion.

So we all like the Norwood decision (

Bastiat believed that protectionism of all kinds was evil.

Hans Hoppe is a thinker of striking originality, and this excellent collection of his essays is filled with arguments: it is, as my great teacher Walter Starkie used to say, "packed with matter."

We have a right not to be aggressed against. Any other right has to be an application of my right not to have force initiated against me. Now, we need to do this with property rights. We need to treat the violation of property as aggression against self.

Mutualism claims to oppose the exploitation of labor, i.e., the theft of any part of its product.