Fight for Your (Property) Rights!

The expression “fight for your rights” is usually associated with socialism. Socialists and statists fought—and still fight—for positive rights, as in FDR’s famous “freedom from want,” which suggests that the people have the right to receive from the state the material conditions necessary for an arbitrarily defined “dignified” life, such as housing, healthcare, education, pension, and various kinds of economic security. But human wants are endless, which explains why rights to water and air have been added to the list, and why public funding will eventually run out. New positive “rights” are emerging, e.g., rights related to the environment, to artificial intelligence, to indigenous populations, to climate, to gender identity, and on and on.

The fight for positive rights has been tremendously successful, not least because it has suited the ruling minority to make it its battle as well, for political reasons. More positive rights mean more power to the state and its cronies. But this fight has also been successful because negative rights (i.e., property rights, freedom of association, etc.) have not been sufficiently defined and protected. Indeed, the introduction of ever-more positive rights always happens at the expense of negative rights. There is a fundamental injustice when the state forces redistribution towards some at the expense of others. Positive rights are a violation of negative rights, meaning the right not to be coerced, however subtly or indirectly this happens.

It becomes clear then that though “rights” are the same whether positive or negative: the two concepts are radically different since in the former case it only comes at a cost to third parties. Thus, Rothbard wrote that “the concept of ‘rights’ only makes sense as property rights. For. . .there are no human rights which are not also property rights.” In this sense, freedom of speech is an owner’s right to decide what can be expressed on his property. Freedom of movement and of immigration is the owner’s right to decide who may enter and stay on his property, and so forth.

The fight for negative rights is thus not only morally superior to the fight for positive rights; the two are antagonistic to each other; one undermining the other. The more property rights are insisted upon and respected in society the less positive rights can be established. Yet, for over a century, positive rights have won out at the expense of negative rights, precisely because of the lack of respect and recognition for property rights.

The fight for property rights is understandably often fueled by indignation related to specific cases. This is fine, but this fight becomes politically significant when it is underpinned by the general sense of injustice mentioned above. It is not enough to fight for one’s own violated property rights or those of friends and family; the principle should also be fought for. The state’s violation of property rights impoverishes all of society. The fight for property rights must therefore be as principled a fight as the pernicious one fought successfully for over a century by statists and socialists for the establishment of positive “rights.” Private property rights are the bedrock of a complex, modern society; violating them is not only fundamentally unjust, but also inevitably leads to crisis and social decline. This can clearly be seen in the West today.

Two Fights for Property Rights

A closer look showed that the fight for negative rights contains two distinct battles. The first concerns the reduction of illegal violations of property by private actors. These occur in every society and must be handled by a functioning system of criminal justice, whatever its institutional forms. Thus, this first struggle is for the rule of law. In the modern period, rule of law has at times been quite successfully established, but vigilance is always necessary, not least because the state is an inefficient agent and uninterested in reining in crimes on person and property.

The second fight for property rights is political: it is the fight against state coercion—its systematic aggression against private property and its lack of sufficiently defined property rights. This political struggle differs fundamentally from the fight against private wrongdoing, it is the fight against the legalized violation of property by the state—what Bastiat called “legal spoliation” in his work The Law (1850).

The first fight, for the rule of law, is relatively straight-forward and easily understood. Even if a crime can sometimes be complex to grasp for the layman (for instance, financial crimes), the nature and wrongness of the crime—whether it be theft, burglary, fraud, or assault—is not.

However, the second kind of property rights violation, by the state, is far less often recognized in society. It is difficult to discern because it often consists of indirect and diffused violations, like monetary inflation. Also, almost all individuals objectively do receive something in return from the state when it violates their property, though they cannot quantify it. At a minimum, they get the proverbial roads to drive on (in reality, far more than that), which makes it intellectually and emotionally easier to call it a “semi-voluntary exchange” according to a supposed “social contract,” and not go so far as to call it property rights violation.

But the most important reason why this violation by the state can continue unimpeded, however much it hurts the wellbeing and living standards of society, is that the state is never presented as being a violator, but on the contrary as a guarantor of property rights, however preposterous that sounds to libertarian ears. In other words, the first fight for property rights in which the state plays a starring role in ineffectually prosecuting private criminals, eclipses the second fight for property rights, which is the fight against the power of the state itself.

This makes it difficult for individuals unfamiliar with libertarianism to correctly qualify the state. Public education and oligarchic media are institutions protecting state power by hiding the truth, often unwittingly. Only an empirical critique of the state is tolerated by these institutions, such as complaints about administration efficiency or civil servant corruption, which serve also to defuse popular discontent. The serious, and far more devastating, normative critique of the state, the one which questions state power itself, is always omitted, thereby assuring that societies are made up mostly of individuals indoctrinated in statism, insensitive to the property rights violations by the state.

To understand how to dismantle this systemic blindness, it is necessary to look beyond the mere mechanics of state-approved narratives and recognize a fundamental paradox: how a human instinct so universal like property has been so subverted throughout history.