In the beginning, there was nothing.
But who created the earth worth living in?
Westerners today enjoy luxuries that the kings of the past could not even dream of. You would fill a library if you tried to enumerate all the human achievements that underlie modern life, so I’ll just list a few basics:
Delicious food from all over the world is readily available at all times of the year.
You can walk into any convenience store and pick which mountain on earth your bottled water was harvested from.
Clothing is cheap, comfortable, and stylish.
The temperature and humidity of every room is carefully tuned for human comfort.
A trip across the world can be coordinated in a day and traveled in as much time.
The entertainment industry has trillions of dollars dedicated to making your resting hours more pleasurable.
Most importantly, you can earn your living doing almost anything — you do not have to farm.
But in the context of history, this way of life is exceptional. For thousands of years, men merely subsisted, barely producing enough to sustain themselves. See for yourself1.
Historically, obtaining food and water was an arduous task that required careful planning at the risk of starvation. The vast majority of people were born to farmers, and after a short lifetime of toil, died as farmers. To heat their homes, early colonial Americans could not dial in the thermostat — they chopped, hauled, and burned through an average of 20,000 pounds of wood each year.2 Even something as basic as milk required many acres of pasture for a single cow that needed to be tended to multiple times per day.
Today, in the United States, subsistence farming doesn’t even exist, and the 2%3 of people who are farmers have the option to choose any other occupation — unlike the 90%4 who were farmers during the colonial period. Food, heat, entertainment, and virtually anything else you’d like can be commanded through your phone from the comfort of your bed. So what explains such a dramatic shift in the quality of our lives over such a short span?
The answer lies in the philosophic fundamentals accepted in that period. After a crippling millennium of authoritarian mysticism, Europe was slowly recovering. John Locke recognized the supremacy of reason, and the metaphysical equality of all men, which formed the basis for his theory of inalienable rights. The Founding Fathers, with careful attention to avoid the countless follies of the past, implemented for the first time in history a government on those principles of individual rights.
The recognition of man’s rights as absolutes secured the conditions required for the American to lead his life, with his own happiness as his primary purpose, with his own capabilities as his only limit. For the first time in history, man was free on principle, and for the first time in history, we glimpsed man’s unlimited productive potential. Among man’s rights, his right to property is uniquely important because, as Ayn Rand writes5, it’s what makes all his other rights possible:
The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation. 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.
The motive power fueling the productive giants that bridged the chasm between the material world they inherited and the one they bequeathed — the men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Ford — was their desire to make a better life for themselves. This is a powerful but delicate desire, which could only flourish under the protection of rights afforded by the Founders’ efforts.
It is to this lineage — the brilliant minds that theorized rights, the dauntless courage of those who implemented them, and the pride of every man who took on the responsibility of living the best life possible to him — that we owe our material abundance and exceptional way of life. Without them, we’d still be farming.
Given the mortal importance of property rights in shaping our lives today, you’d expect to see a deep, solemn respect for these achievements — but when examining the culture, that is not what we will find. Not at all. What we see is a vicious attack on property from all parties and all angles, with no effective defenders.
There is much to be said about how heinous the Left is on this topic, but for the purposes of this article it will have to suffice to remark that they are avowedly opposed to property on principle. The Right is unprincipled and inconsistent about property. They claim to be pro-capitalist, but they’re quick to wield antitrust against any business that grows “too big” — i.e. anyone who is highly successful. (The Sherman Act, by the way, passed unanimously a little over 100 years ago.)
What about libertarians? They’re perceived in the culture as the pure, idealistic, and absolute defenders of property rights — but as we will see, the entire libertarian theory functions as an attack on property rights, because they do not understand what property is and where it comes from. I am focusing on libertarians as the foremost enemies of property rights, precisely because they occupy the cultural position of its defenders. To serve as a reference for my criticism on libertarian thought, I present this passage from Stephen Kinsella, a respected libertarian theorist who writes extensively on property.
[T]he nature and reasons for property rights […] lie in the undeniable fact of scarcity. Given scarcity and the correspondent possibility of conflict in the use of resources, conflicts are avoided and peace and cooperation are achieved by allocating property rights to such resources. And the purpose of property rights dictates the nature of such rules. For if the rules allocating property rights are to serve as objective rules that all can agree upon so as to avoid conflict, they cannot be biased or arbitrary. For this reason, unowned resources come to be owned—homesteaded or appropriated—by the first possessor. The general rule, then, is that ownership of a given scarce resource can be identified by determining who first occupied it.
A theory of politics relies on a theory of ethics. You cannot even validly ask the question “what is the role of government,” before you answer “should men live in society,” which you can’t ask before you answer “how should man live,” which is the central question of ethics — but that question depends on a more fundamental epistemological question: “what are the requirements of man’s life,” which requires an answer to the metaphysical question: “what is the nature of man.” These deeper questions are not exhaustive, but representative of the fact that the derivative conclusions are consequences of earlier facts and conclusions. If you do not explicitly answer the earlier questions, you still necessarily accept some implicit answer to them. Refusing to answer simply means refusing to recognize the nature of your own ideas.
Ignoring this, the libertarian argument begins mid-stream with a compound error, declaring that “because ‘resources’ are scarce, men are inherently in conflict.” One man’s desire to use a plot of land is “in conflict” with the fact that someone else has already made use of it — but merely desiring something doesn’t give you any claim to it, even if you’re a libertarian. To treat this as a conflict of anything other than the libertarian’s wishes and reality, is to raise desire to the status of desert — to treat “I want” as “I deserve.” This error derives from the fact that the libertarian does not recognize man as a producer.
The “resources” in question — rather than being recognized as the values that other men have produced in order to sustain their lives — are “just there.” To the libertarian, property is not produced, but allocated, and it is not earned, but merely claimed. The libertarian argument depends on the idea that property already exists, and it begins as unowned. But “unowned property” is a contradiction in terms: what is unowned is not property. “Property” is not a metaphysical, but a political concept — it is the political analogue of “value” in ethics. Just as there is no such thing as a value to no one in particular, there is no such thing as property that belongs to no one in particular. What exists by default is unowned material to which no one has an automatic claim.
The libertarian views this in reverse: by arguing that everyone has an equal claim to the “unowned property” that exists, he accepts that anyone who acts on that claim deprives the rest. In order to mitigate this “inherent conflict,” the libertarian proposes that we should all agree that ownership is to be decided up front, that whoever first claims something owns it in perpetuity regardless of their actions or purposes. He improperly calls this process “homesteading” to graft some historical credibility to the idea.6
In order for unowned material to become property, one must earn it by integrating it with his value pursuits. In principle, that’s all that property is: the exclusive right to that which you’ve earned. Locke’s labor-mixing theory, which libertarians on this “scarcity theory” reject, names the mechanism by which a person earns the right to property in what was previously unowned. Homesteading, as Rand elaborates, was a proper implementation of Locke’s ideas:
A notable example of the proper method of establishing private ownership from scratch, in a previously ownerless area, is the Homestead Act of 1862, by which the government opened the western frontier for settlement and turned “public land” over to private owners. The government offered a 160-acre farm to any adult citizen who would settle on it and cultivate it for five years, after which it would become his property. Although that land was originally regarded, in law, as “public property,” the method of its allocation, in fact, followed the proper principle (in fact, but not in explicit ideological intention). The citizens did not have to pay the government as if it were an owner; ownership began with them, and they earned it by the method which is the source and root of the concept of “property”: by working on unused material resources, by turning a wilderness into a civilized settlement. Thus, the government, in this case, was acting not as the owner but as the custodian of ownerless resources who defines objectively impartial rules by which potential owners may acquire them.
By using what was unowned in the pursuit of their values, men create property. Government, as an institution for the better protection of man’s life, simply recognizes and secures it on that standard — it doesn’t allocate and distribute it. The libertarian does not understand this. To him, property is that which the government (or the social contract) grants you, and rather than being something that’s earned, it’s something everyone else has lost. As will become clear later on, this is a total inversion of the nature and purpose of property.
Thomas Hobbes is perhaps the primary philosophical influence on “scarcity theory” libertarians.7 Libertarians surely would reject this on the grounds that Hobbes advocated for an absolute monarchy, but their theory merely swaps the ruler for a contract. In Leviathan, Hobbes too remarks that in the state of nature, men are inherently in conflict:
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.
Hobbes is rejecting the fact that man is the rational animal: that reason is what makes man’s life possible, and that reason compels man to adhere to certain specific moral principles. As Locke recognized, men bound by reason respect each other as equals. Unbound, men live as Hobbesian brutes, scrambling to eat their neighbor before their neighbor eats them. Hobbes argues that the law is the ultimate source of right and wrong — indeed, for Hobbes, there are no moral standards absent the law. On what basis do we create laws, then? Whim. Freedom, according to Hobbes, “consists in finding no resistance to doing what one desires,”8 and because men in this state of “freedom” will destroy each other, we need to impose law — any law, so long as it’s law — so that men can be saved from this “freedom.” Sound familiar? Libertarians argue that the base of their political theory is the non-aggression principle, but without an ethical foundation, it serves as nothing but the sanction for their whim-worship.
Because libertarians don’t recognize property as something that is earned through the productive effort of man, they have condemned themselves to the absurdities of rejecting intellectual property and standards for determining abandoned property, among others. Having excised property from the conceptual hierarchy and dropped all the relevant context, the libertarian conception of property most closely resembles a communist’s — except the communist at least has the decency to explicitly condemn property, rather than contorting it to justify whim-worship. The libertarian and the communist agree that property is a zero-sum distribution problem, but they disagree about how to distribute it: the libertarian says that it goes to whoever claims it first; the communist says it goes to whoever needs it the most.
To fully appreciate the importance of property, we must understand its nature. Since rights pertain to men in a social context, the first question we have to answer is: “what is the nature of man?” Man is, as Aristotle identified thousands of years ago, the rational animal. The faculty of reason endows man simultaneously with the responsibility and the means of discovering his values (the specific things that make his life possible and worth living). While other animals have their values built into them, men do not — no man is born knowing what course of action he needs to survive and be happy. As Ayn Rand writes, men have to create their values through the use of their mind:
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons — a process of thought. From his simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind.
The benefits of cooperating with others are so perceptually evident that men have sought some level of cooperation from time immemorial; however, the potential dangers of others are just as evident. Men can choose to cooperate to mutual benefit, or war to mutual destruction. In order to better preserve his life and happiness, reason compels man to figure out how to cooperate. This is precisely what a theory of rights is for: to define the terms that enable the beneficial coexistence of men. Rand explains that “a right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.”9 But on what basis can we determine what a man should be free to do?
The free exercise of man’s mind is the basic requirement of his life. If he is prevented from using his mind, he is left as a spectator in his own life, with his choices impotent to guide the actions that his survival depends on. But what constitutes a violation of that condition? Is man’s mind limited because gravity prevents him from floating around as he wishes? What about if he must defend himself against a bear? Or a virus? Or if he gets hungry after skipping breakfast, does that constitute a violation of his freedom? No, of course not. These are examples of the nature of reality, about which man has no choice. These types of immutable facts are exactly what man must be left free to judge and respond to in order to live — but left free from what?
The nature of reality is outside of man’s control, but what he does about it is fully within his control. In other words, given the facts of reality, the actions men take in response are chosen. It is for this reason that man’s actions can be morally judged, and why we can set the terms and conditions for interacting with each other. “It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.”10 This means that, as they could have chosen otherwise, only other men can violate a particular man’s freedom. “Freedom,” properly understood, is then too a political concept: it is the freedom to act according to your independent judgment without coercive interference from other men. Any other meaning ascribed to freedom amounts to seeking “freedom from reality,” which is obviously senseless. So then we must ask, which actions constitute the violation of another’s rights?
The proper delineation of rights crucially depends on the fact that men are metaphysical equals, i.e., that they are all the same type of being, with the same fundamental nature and conditions of survival — men are equal, independent, and equally independent. Properly listed as the foremost “self-evident truth” in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal” means that there can be no justification for one man to rule another — that man lives by right rather than by permission — that each man is the authority over his own life — and a proper government is one that recognizes men as political equals.
All men are born with rights, but no man is born with rights to any particular property. Yet man can only sustain his life by making use of the material around him. Man’s right to his life must extend somehow into this material or else he would have no means to sustain his life, and his so-called “right to life” would be an impracticable theory. The question of how man’s rights extend beyond his immediate person is the purview of property rights.
The raw, unowned material of the earth becomes property when an individual imbues it with a human purpose by utilizing it in the pursuit of his values. By investing himself in the creation of his property, a man integrates it into his life. Appropriating his property is morally equivalent to any other attack on his life. Locke makes this point in his Second Treatise of Government as follows:
But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth, and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest[.][…]As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common. […H]is reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that […] subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.
Property rights are the recognition of the fact that property is created, and the principle underlying the creation and recognition of property is that property is purposeful. A man walking through the snow has not created property in his footprints, but if he builds a road to make his travels easier, he has. Purposeful effort begins in a man’s mind when he chooses his values and charts his course towards their attainment — or as Theodosius Dhobzansky eloquently expresses the point:
Before you build a house, construct a machine, write a book, or go on a vacation, you have already built, constructed, or written them, or gone vacationing in your mind. The adaptive value of [reason] is too evident to need demonstration. It has raised man to the status of the lord of creation.
The effort of a man’s mind is what has been embedded into that which we call his property: it is the “soul” that transforms the unowned into his property. It is precisely the effort of man’s mind that property rights protect. In this sense, we can even say that “all property is intellectual property,”11 because all property is at root, the product of the mind. “[T]he legal implementation of the base of all property rights [is] a man’s right to the product of his mind.”12 It makes absolutely no difference morally or politically whether a man chooses to grow wheat, write a book, build a house, or invent a life-saving medicine. The legal implementation of these different forms of property may be completely different, but the purpose beneath the law is all the same: to protect that which man has earned through the effort of his mind in the pursuit of his values.
Morally, men have rights whether or not they are recognized politically. Rights are facts derived from the nature of man. Property is the recognition of the fact that man earns the exclusive right to what he produces. As facts, rights are inalienable in the same way that mortality is inalienable from man. It is the task of a proper government to define a system that protects rights — and such a system is called capitalism. If you understand property in this way, you will understand the vital importance property rights have to the world we live in.
A brief look at recent trends and events reveals that the ignorance of and resentment towards property rights is a metastatic problem that has spread through the whole culture:
The left’s defense of Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. Plagiarism is theft in the form of taking credit for others’ intellectual work. It represents the basic pattern of all property rights violations.
A Delaware judge denying Elon Musk the payment he earned for his work at Tesla on the grounds that “No CEO has been paid this much” — as if what others haven’t achieved has any bearing on what he has.
Piracy is widely considered to be acceptable — leftists argue that stealing from a big company is fine; libertarians argue that they’re not “stealing,” they’re “copying.” If you dissect these arguments into fundamental terms, you will find that they are in fact the same argument.
The argument from both the left and the right during the hotly debated Twitter acquisition that Twitter’s popularity subjects it to being a “public utility” rather than private property — as if property rights are decided by popular vote. This argument is of course a trivial rehash of antitrust laws — which actually have nothing to do with being “too big” (as if creating a product that everyone wants to use makes you their enemy), and everything to do with legally implementing altruism, i.e., that man must work for the benefit of anyone other than himself — which is the polar opposite of the ethical system that the concept of property comes from.
Subsistence farming belongs in the past, but without a serious course correction, it is in our future, too. Do not indulge in the inertial comfort of “automatic progress,” as there is no such thing. Progress, even just the maintenance of a proper western lifestyle, requires that men are free to achieve it, which means that they’re free to keep the fruits of their labor. Like the great oak tree in Atlas Shrugged, the great achievements we depend on today exist in a precarious state — a “lightning-strike” away from total collapse absent the property rights that made them possible. The Dark Ages — a thousand-year span of human subsistence — came after a long stretch of human flourishing that ended with the fall of the Roman Empire. If you enjoy the world around you, remember that it isn’t possible without property rights — something which no one cares to defend any longer. If you are able to understand this, take up these moral-intellectual arms and fight for property rights.
Your life depends on it.
I have compiled a list of reading material that is relevant to this subject for anyone who would like to further engage with these ideas.
Specific to property:
“The Property Status of Airwaves” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)
A Companion to Ayn Rand (chapters 7 & 8)
Specific to rights:
Ethics & the nature of man:
“The Metaphysical vs The Man-Made” (Philosophy: Who Needs It)
“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interets” (The Virtue of Selfishness)
“For The New Intellectual” (For The New Intellectual)
Epistemology:
Locke & Hobbes:
Many of the ideas in this article come from discussions I had with Claire McKinnon. This article wouldn’t have been possible without her insights.
While I’m not convinced that GDP is a valid measure, I think it’s meaningful enough for the purpose of this visualization. In any event, the exponential flourishing of man beginning in the 18th century is visible in many other metrics like life expectancy, and world population.
Volume estimate from “American Forests: A History of Resiliency and Recovery,” weight estimate based on the weighted average of popular tree densities from this period.
Stephen Kinsella makes it clear that by “homesteading” he merely means “first occupying” when he says “[O]wnership of a given scarce resource can be identified by determining who first occupied it. [...] Thus, I can pluck an apple from the wild and thereby homestead it, or I can fence in a plot of land for a farm.” For Kinsella, you simply have to prove you were the first.
I owe my awareness of this point to a discussion with Claire McKinnon.
Ayn Rand writes extensively on this topic in many of her essays. See: “Man’s Rights,” “Textbook of Americanism,” “Nature of Government,” and “Conservatism: An Obituary.”
This particular formulation, that “all property is intellectual property,” I learned from Adam Mossoff, though I have not been able to find his justification for this point, so I can’t say if we agree.
Well done