Introducing the Rights Institute initiative

Tags

Top Highlights

• “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

• Ayn Rand explained it best: “Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave. Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.” [18]

• Classical etymology recognizes that the true sense of certain words may be found in the words themselves, and differs from modern etymology which is the study of the historical development of words.

• For example, if a person or a collective such as a tribe or a nation claims to have property in land or resources, the question must be asked: how did the person’s or collective’s efforts give rise to the value of the land or resources over and above what nature supplies gratis? In other words, how has the person’s or collective’s mental and/or physical efforts transformed the land or resources into something more valuable than it was previously?

• But if the answer is that the person or the collective has merely had a custom of collecting, consuming, or otherwise exploiting what nature produces effortlessly, such as hunting its game, picking its wild fruits, cutting down its trees without replanting any, collecting water from streams, or foraging, then the claim to having property in the land or its resources is unfounded.

• d. It is unfounded because no value has been created in the land or its resources by the effort of the person or collective. Living off land or resources without farming, developing, or otherwise positively transforming them to satisfy human wants or needs does not create property in anything other than the individual items hunted, picked, collected, or foraged. A forager has property in the apple he or she picked from the wild, but not in the apple tree, and not even in the picked apple if someone else planted the tree.

• When privileged individuals such as monarchs or tribal leaders claim sovereignty over land and resources untransformed for the better by their own efforts, what they are really claiming is dominion, not property.

• Bastiat further observed that there are two kinds of utility or satisfactions of wants: utility resulting from valuable effort (i.e. effort that results in property), which he called onerous utility, and utility that comes free of charge from “Providence,” which he called gratuitous utility.

• Bastiat’s concept of communal wealth denotes the aggregate of nature’s bounty together with any extinguished property, meaning, intellectual property that has entered the public domain (see diagram below).

• Bastiat concluded that “the spirit of property, is continually to enlarge the communal domain,” with private property being the “pioneer” of communal wealth, and the source of an ever-expanding pool of gratuitous utility, whereby ample communal wealth or gratuitous utility enables mankind to move ever closer to an effortless existence.

• The idea of an ever-expanding gratuitous utility resulting from property expiration is expressed in an observation by economist Thomas Sowell: “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.” [23]

• In a capitalistic and therefore free society, onerous utility is constantly being replaced by gratuitous utility as obstacles preventing effortless living are removed because of the expiry of intellectual property, which results in freely available knowledge. In a socialistic society the reverse happens: gratuitous utility is constantly replaced by onerous utility as new obstacles are introduced in the form of regulations, licenses, taxes, and prohibitions, all of which introduce artificial costs and burdens, causing a depletion of gratuitous utility, and the creation of the phenomenon known as the Tragedy of the Commons.

• For the man who has no valuable services to offer, he or she has just two alternatives to survive: to seek alms from those who do have valuable services to offer, or to plunder property.

• Mankind cannot afford to lose the most important lesson of the last century: liberty and private property rights are inextricably linked.