Good fences make good neighbours. - Robert Lee Frost.
The recognition of property solves the conflict that arises over the control of any good that may have alternative uses.
Private Property goes hand in hand with the principles of rights, freedom and peace.
Rights are inherent abilities of the human being that demand respect.
In a civilized society, rights are natural and self-evident, sensed by conscience.
Property is the right of exclusion over a scarce resource.
It is the standard from which all other rights are
derived; if not, rights would become fuzzy and contradictory.
Everyone has the right to preserve and enjoy their property, encompassing their
own life and peacefully acquired possessions.
Respect for life lies in the recognition that each person is the owner of his body
and the fruits of his labor, acquired through voluntary exchange, production, or homesteading.
The condition in which rights are respected is known as Justice.
Freedom is the individual ability to dispose of and use one's own property.
Freedom and property rights are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. - George Washington.
Rights don't imply positive obligations or the duty to act, as that would violate freedom. This realization leads to the principles of non-aggression and the right to self-defense.
Don't tread on me.
Nothing requiring others' labor is a human right; for instance, there exists a moral obligation to assist the
needy, yet the needy does not possess the right to coerce others into providing help.
One person's rights can only imply negative obligations for others.
Live and let live.
Trade thrives on respect for Private Property and induces social cohesion through spontaneous cooperation.
Free trade is God's diplomacy and there is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace. - Richard Cobden.
Voluntary exchange turns strangers familiar with each other, creating benefits for honest participants and disincentivizing hostile attitudes.
It is almost a general rule that where there are mild customs, there is trade and that where there is trade, customs are mild. - Montesquieu noticed in 1748.
A man without a smiling face must not open a shop. - Chinese Proverb.
Beyond ethics, the respect for Private Property facilitates economic development by enabling economic calculation and incentivizing the creation of value.
Economic calculation:
Economic freedom and sound money are essential conditions for the existence of a
reliable price system.
Prices enable the quantification of value by comparing the scarcity of any good with
that of monetary units.
The price system works as a mechanism for transmiting dispersed economic knowledge.
Free-Market economies are knowledge economies about consumer preferences.
The accounting of revenue and cost makes it possible to estimate profits and losses,
informing goods'
providers whether they are creating more economic value than they are destroying.
Profit compared to the value of the tools that were utilized to produce it, is called
interest.
Interests guide the allocation of resources and activities, attracting entrepreneurs to
expand those sectors
with higher ratios.
Therefore, in the long run, and in the absence of coercion, no
economic sector tends to earn
more per unit of accumulated value.
Incentives for the creation of economic value:
Private property fosters cultures of long-term orientation,
as entrepreneurs, driven by the pursuit of higher interests, accumulate capital,
experiment, and cooperate to better compete in satisfying consumers' desires.
Economic development is a natural consequence of Private Property.
Virtually all economic growth comes from innovation. New technologies, new habits, new ideas are what drive up living standards. Innovation is the parent of prosperity but it is the child of freedom. - Matt Ridley.
Economic growth acts as a scarcity-liberating mechanism, transforming what was once considered scarce into abundance. This progression signifies an increase in the availability and quality of goods, leading to an improvement in the standard of living and a rise in real incomes.
Private property also entails responsibility, fostering self-monitoring and resource maintenance.
Of all 36 ways to get out of trouble, the best way is...to leave. - Chinese proverb.
The wrongdoing of an isolated act of aggression by an individual is easily identifiable. However, when the same action is systematically carried out on a large scale by an organized group in a position of domination, then the evil may be masked with a semblance of morality.
Such aggressions are often justified as a means to achieve some abstraction that is assigned a higher status than that of any individual.
The more they "love" these abstractions (world, community, nature, etc…), the more they hate real individual human beings. - Nick Szabo.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. - H.L. Mencken.
To reduce resistance, aggressors may channel hatred towards the affected individuals, portraying them as scapegoats and vilifying them.
Nonetheless, no goal justifies any infringement of rights. Respecting individuals and their
freedom is always the paramount good and the most important end.
As the old medical doctrine says: First, do not harm.
Nowadays, a prevalent abstraction is that of wealth equality, often used to institutionalize the greed for others' goods by appealing to the instinct of envy.
This abstraction wrongfully associates natural economic inequality with poverty, portraying the economy as a
static zero-sum game where all wealth comes at the expense of someone else.
Such theories fail to acknowledge the expansion and dynamism of free economic systems that create and mobilize
prosperity.
Not all equality is desirable; forced wealth equality is certainly not.
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. - Friederich Hayek.
In a civilized and peaceful society, the only equality pursued is the equality of rights.
A society that puts economic equality ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. - Milton Friedman.
The main source of material inequality is one's own being. Economic value naturally differs among people as
different preferences and choices imply unequal economic outcomes.
Human beings are not even equal to themselves on
different days, and they are conditioned by externalities like the place, time and community in which they
are born.
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the Law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time. - Friederich Hayek.
If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected when conditions are not nearly so comparable?. - Thomas Sowell.
Diversity is something to be celebrated with tolerance.
Socialism is sometimes wrongly defined as the political system that tries to achieve wealth equality; however, any political system should be explained by the measures it carries out, not by the hopes that inspired it.
All pure socialist experiments, including the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia,
North Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, resulted in a misallocation of resources, turning economies
into humanitarian disasters.
While the political class thrived through confiscation, the majority of people were impoverished.
Instead of wealth, these experiments redistributed poverty, creating extreme inequality in living
standards between civilians and politicians.
What belongs to everybody belongs to nobody; or rather to the few who exercise the property right in the name of "everybody".
Thus, all regimes that initially claim to be real socialism end up being labeled as
"not real socialism."
This scenario is comparable to defining a rain dance as a dance
that induces rainfall, only to dismiss it as "not a real rain dance" when the desired outcome
fails to materialize.
The term "social" is often used to justify large-scale, coercive actions attempting to replicate systems that have been demonstrated to work only in small and homogeneous communities based on trust.
"We and we alone have the best social welfare measures" was said by the Propaganda Minister of National Socialist
German Workers' Party, Joseph Goebbels in 1944.
If the term "social" is understood to refer to voluntary human interactions, then socialism can
be considered the most anti-social political system, as its core ideology involves forcefully
replacing voluntary interactions with mandated obedience.
Socialism is the political system that abolishes private property.
Socialist ideology is rooted in the state ownership of the means of production.
In pure socialism, also known as communism, all goods are owned by the state,
as any good can be considered a means of production.
The distinctions between democratic socialism, socialism, and communism lie in degrees rather
than fundamental principles.
If a State is defined as the organized group with a monopoly of violence over a certain territory, and considering a mafia as an organized armed group extracting income through violence, one could argue that under socialism, the State is a sofisticated mafia that justifies its criminal activity as good and necessary.
If politics is the art and science of managing centralized coercion, then socialism is the increasing
of political inequality. It is the empowerment of a bureaucratic elite that exercises control over
all economic activities.
An extreme concentration of power is required to systematically violate private property, so absolutism and
despotism are inherent to socialism, as it can never be anything other than a hierarchical technocratic
system.
Well-organized aggressors corrupt the term "Law" by inventing alleged laws that go against human rights.
They set up legislation to codify injustice by establishing their own will in the form of written mandates, norms,
decrees, statutes, bills, rules of conduct, and so on.
Therefore, violating certain rights will simply consist of applying corrupt legislation.
Lex injusta non est lex (Unjust law is not law). - San Agustín de Hipona.
Justice is codified through norms based on Natural Law, which is simple: any aggression
against rights is wrong.
Therefore, the immensity of any regulation tends to imply the existence of rules contrary to Justice.
As the representation of Justice by a girl with blinded eyes suggests, Law applies equally to all regardless of
particular circumstances.
Human rights are universal.
On the contrary legislation frequently consists of norms that apply to particular subjects, such as privileges.
Good people disobey bad "laws".
One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. - Martin Luther King Jr.
In any case, it is important to note that there is no government of laws but rather a government of people.
As Mao Zedong used to say, "Power comes from the muzzle of a gun".
Any norm can be interpreted and amended in multiple ways. Legislation is made, executed and sanctioned by a
dominating group of people that tends to not make any norm that harms them.
And in cases where such a rule exists, they may change or breach it.
Beyond ethics, aggression against private property impedes economic development by hindering economic calculation and disincentivizing wealth creation.
A central entity will never be able to approach the level of knowledge that is acquired in a decentralized manner.
The price system makes possible to communicate the combined knowledge from people each of whom possessed only a portion of it. Based on that divided knowledge people coordinate the utilization of resources, producing a solution. - F.A. Hayek.
State aggressions against free exchanges are called economic interventions.
Intervened economies replace the coordination that occurs naturally through knowledge, with mandates.
Like any aggression, economic interventions benefit specific individuals at the expense of others who
are harmed.
Frequently, these interventions bring consequences opposite to the intended goals, as seen
in the "cobra effect" during colonial India, where the British, facing a cobra infestation in Delhi, offered
a bounty for cobra skins to reduce the snake population. However, people began breeding cobras for their
skins. When the British canceled the bounty, cobra farmers released the snakes, worsening the infestation.
Price Controls
Interventions involving price controls provide another clear example of the cobra effect:
Political propaganda often argues that intervened prices are "fair" rates; however, the only fair rates are those mutually agreed upon by the two consenting parties involved in the exchange.
Other interventions show much more clearly from the outset who the main victims are:
Protectionism
Protectionism consists of a set of government interventions that favor certain businesses by imposing restrictions on their competitors. It hinders cooperation by prohibiting the implementation of competitive advantages.
Competition is the ultimate form of cooperation. - Antonio Escohotado.
We compete to be better cooperators, and we cooperate to be better competitors.
Competition between service providers ensures service quality, lowers prices, and promotes job quality while increasing wages.
Mercantilism
The type of protectionism that imposes restrictions specifically on foreign companies to reduce imports is called mercantilism. It particularly harms foreign producers and domestic consumers.
What "economic protection" teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war. - Henry George.
Denying the possibility of voluntary exchange is prohibiting the only peaceful means of acquiring other people's goods.
When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. - Frederich Bastiat.
Political clientelism
So-called political clientelism is a form of protectionism that favors large established companies by imposing restrictions on competitors without political ties. This leads to the consolidation of monopolies and oligopolies.
Hyper-regulation
Hyper-regulation has similar consequences as it creates economies of scale in complying with regulations, thereby raising barriers to entry for small innovators.
Intellectual Property
Some legislation aims to create intellectual monopolies, such as intellectual "property" laws,
which forbid the reproduction of knowledge. This forces individuals to treat easily
reproducible concepts as if they were scarce physical goods, violating actual property rights.
This is an obstacle to competition and a slowdown in progress, since emulation of
success is an essential part of economic development.
Violence against vices
Interventionism is also employed to coercively punish services satisfying the demand for what may be considered risky or not virtuous, such as vices.
Vices are acts in which one person is considered to harm oneself in the long run, but in which no one uses aggression against anyone, unlike crimes.
Treating peaceful voluntary exchanges as crimes leads to the formation of gangs and mafias around the
prohibited service.
The increase in profits caused by the shortage of supply due to prohibition attracts
real criminals who are already accustomed to the high cost of illegal activities:
the threat of incarceration.
If two adults enter into a voluntary agreement in which they both hope to improve their situation, why should a third person be legitimized to prevent such an exchange through the use of violence?
Not everything immoral should be illegal.
Violent interference against the peaceful actions of others is unethical, even if the aggressor believes it is for the welfare of those people.
Interventionist spiral
An interventionist spiral occurs when the solution to the problems created by interventions is considered to be more intervention.
The perpetuation of any intervention may encourage the misconception that certain services are impossible without such intermediation.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a British economist was asked by the director of bread production in the Russian City of St. Petersburgs: "Please understand that we are keen to move towards a market system, but we need to understand how such a system works. Tell me, for example, who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?" Soviet mind was astonished by the notion that the economy could operate without a planner to coordinate it. - Christian Niemietz.
There have always been alternatives to each of the functions performed by the state.
Taxes
Nowadays, from the so-called welfare states, petty theft is combated, but resisting the constant confiscation of income and savings is branded as fraud.
If stealing is the taking of another's property without consent, then income taxes
are a recurrent theft.
Extortion is that theft that occurs by threatening the owner to surrender his or her
belongings in order to avoid potential harm.
Thus, income taxes consist of extortions to obtain private information to be used in
further extortions to confiscate economic value.
Preparing your accounts for the taxman is, in essence, no different from tidying yourself up for burglars.