How Not to Defend Private
Property
Introduction:
The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze an
article written by the Frontier Centre, an independent Western Canadian
public policy think tank, from a market anarchist perspective in order to challenge
its claim that it has defended private property rights in Alberta. The article to be analyzed is called Property
Report Should Generate Wider Property Debate, dated March 23, 2012.
The link to the article is as follows: http://www.fcpp.org/publication.php/4137
To briefly summarize the Frontier Centre's article,
the government of Alberta engages in some relatively large public consultations
regarding land expropriation as a reaction to the concerns raised by some
Albertans over their fears of arbitrary and unjustified private property
expropriations by that government. The Frontier
Centre downplays the threat to private property throughout the article, and
it even go so far as to explicitly claim that "credible legal authorities
who care about property rights argue that these concerns are
'overblown.'" Therefore, there is
no need for anybody to panic with regard to the behavior of the government of
Alberta. "There's nothing wrong
with the province's stated intentions," the article tells the readers in
order to placate their fears. The
government is full of great intentions including the following:
- More public consultation
- Clear compensation for the victims of expropriation by the state
- Access to dispute resolution mechanisms, including the courts
- A property rights advocate
- Alberta's democratic government will be called in to protect private property
- Compensation rights will be enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
- The constitutional amendment guaranteeing compensation will protect property because the Alberta amendment will contain clear and non-vague language unlike the American Constitution
On the surface, it appears as though the Frontier Centre
has provided a well-rounded and balanced solution to the expropriation problem
in Alberta implying, of course, that Albertans can stop worrying about their
property and can therefore go on with their lives.
I will argue that the Frontier Centre has provided
Albertans with a false sense of security mainly because the proposed solutions
will not protect private property at all.
In some cases, such as those of calling for democracy to protect private
property and of demanding that taxpayers fund compensation for expropriation victims,
the proposed solutions will undermine private property rights in
Alberta, thus negating the article's intention to protect private
property. The major gap in the article
is that the Frontier Centre's proposals fail to address the inherently
exploitative nature of the state caused by the state's unique ability to
acquire property non-productively and/or non-contractually; consequently, the
article cannot possibly achieve its stated objective of protecting private
property. What the article actually accomplishes
is to offer a laundry list of "legitimizing" procedures and
"justifications" that are meant to justify the state's inherent
exploitative behavior. By legitimizing
and justifying the state, i.e., the right for the hypostatization of society to
seizure property non-contractually and/or non-productively, the Frontier
Centre has taken a position that is closer to conservative socialism and
social democracy than to laissez-faire capitalism. Therefore, I conclude that the Frontier Centre not only completely
fails to achieve its stated objective, which is to protect private property
from the state, but also aggravates the problem by actually making further
private property rights violations more likely to occur because of its
interminable justifying and legitimizing of the state. Contrary to its claim that "there's nothing
wrong with the province's stated intentions" (emphasis mine), I
conclude that the Frontier Centre's proposals are inherently unjust when
I subject its proposals to the Kantian categorical imperative.
The Self-Refuting Nature of the Proposed Compensation
Solution:
The Frontier Centre's article refers on numerous
occasions to government compensation as an integral part of a feasible solution
for protecting private property owners from the actions of their
government. The author seems to take it
for granted that the government can atone for its sin of expropriating private
property by simply paying compensation "that reflects current values and
impacts." The author's position is
captured nicely when he writes:
"government is empowered to confiscate private property for 'public
use' if it is compensated."
The author's argument neglects to ask the pertinent
question, namely, how does the government get the resources in the first
place to pay for these subsequent compensation claims? In his book The Ethics of Liberty,
Murray Rothbard demonstrates that governments, unlike ordinary citizens or
subjects, receive their income through extortion, i.e., through an organized
process of private property rights violations:
For there is one crucially
important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in
society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and
bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily:
either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or
by voluntary gift...Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by
threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as "taxation"...Taxation
is theft...even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no
acknowledged criminals could hope to match.
It [Taxation] is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's
inhabitants, or subjects. (162,
italics in the original, underlined emphasis mine)
To further illustrate why taxation, the means of paying for
the compensation, is theft of private property, consider Lysander Spooner's No
Treason: The Constitution of No
Authority. Spooner writes that
the government, like a highwayman,
says to a man: "Your money, or
your life." And many, if not most,
taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
Spooner adds,
as taxation is made compulsory on
all, whether they vote or not, a large proportion of those who vote, no doubt
do so to prevent their own money being used against themselves.
The self-refuting nature of the compensation scheme is that
it tries to rectify the injustice of one private property rights violation (the
initial expropriation) by engaging in another private property rights violation
(the compulsory taxation of the people who are forced against their will to pay
for the initial compensation).
The Discrimination Problems in the Proposed
Compensation Plan:
Moreover, this proposed compensation arrangement by the Frontier
Centre is inconsistent with the classical liberal idea of the Rule of Law
because this compensation scheme implies legalized discrimination. To begin, consider the discussion of F. A.
Hayek, in his classic work The Road to Serfdom in which he compares the
legal theory of liberalism to that of National Socialism (Italics in the
original, underlined emphasis mine):
It is therefore not altogether
false when the legal theorist of National Socialism, Carl Schmitt, opposes to the
liberal Rechststaat (i.e., the Rule of Law) the National Socialist ideal
of the gerechte Staat ("the just state")--only that the sort
of justice which is opposed to formal justice necessarily implies
discrimination between persons. (117, footnote 5)
The Frontier Centre's proposal to enshrine
compensation rights in the constitution, which will then be paid from
taxpayers' coercively seized property creates a legalized discrimination
problem by favoring the group of tax consumers (the receivers of the compensation)
at the expense of the group of taxpayers (those who are forced to pay for the
compensation). This discrimination
problem, highlighted by John C. Calhoun in his important 1851 work entitled A
Disquisition on Government and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government
of the United States, necessarily produces conflict between these two
groups over which group is the victim and which is the beneficiary of the
state. A strong incentive has been
created to seize control of the state in order to protect one group's interests
from the invasions of all other interests.
The tax consumers want to maintain their privileged relationship with
the state, and the tax producers want to seize the state in order to defend
themselves from the tax consumers or maybe even make themselves into tax
consumers too. Calhoun writes that
the right of suffrage, by placing
the control of the government in the community must, from the same constitution
of our nature which makes government necessary to preserve society, lead to
conflict among its different interests,--each striving to obtain possession of
its powers, as the means of protecting itself against the others;--or of
advancing its respective interests, regardless of the interests of others. (16, emphasis mine)
In other words, the Frontier Centre's proposal sounds
as if it wants to advance the interests of the tax consumers, i.e., the
compensation receivers, at the expense of the taxpayers. Assume that there are some taxpayers who do
not own land and so never fear the threat of land expropriation, and note that
land expropriation seems to be the biggest worry in the article. Maybe these taxpayers earn all of their
income from labor. If the government
now engages in a land expropriation, then the constitutional compensation plan
will transfer wealth from labor income (taxpayers) to land income (tax
consumers) thus establishing a form of legalized discrimination against one
group in order to favor the other.
Since the article specifically mentions that it is addressing "a
series of 'land bills' that many said erode property rights," one has to
wonder whether the Frontier Centre's proposal for enshrined compensation
will result in nothing but permanent conflict between land income on the one
hand and labor and capital incomes on the other.
The first point to make is that what the Frontier Centre is
proposing to do cannot be classified as a cooperative social philosophy. Ludwig von Mises, in a 1945 paper entitled Economics
as a Bridge for Interhuman Understanding, calls this discriminatory process
of benefiting the initial expropriation victims at the expense of the others
taxpayers the Montaigne fallacy:
The Leitmotiv of social
philosophy up to the emergence of economics was: The profit of one man is the damage of another; no man profits
but by the loss of others. This is
not a philosophy of social cooperation, but of dissociation and social
disintegration.... In the light of this Montaigne fallacy, human
intercourse cannot consist in anything but the spoliation of the weaker by the
stronger. (italics in the original,
underlined emphasis mine)
The second point to make is that what the Frontier Centre
is proposing to do should be classified as unjust because the proposed
solution violates the Kantian categorical imperative. In A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism,
Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains that just rules must never be
"particularistic" in nature:
the Kantian categorical imperative,
requires that in order to be just, a rule must be a general one applicable
to every single person in the same way.
The rule cannot specify different rights or obligations for different
categories of people (one for the red-headed, and one for others, or one for
women and a different one for men), as such a "particularistic"
rule, naturally, could never, not even in principle, be accepted as a fair rule
by everyone. (14, italics in the
original; underlined emphasis mine)
When the Kantian categorical imperative is applied to the Frontier
Centre's proposal, the unjust nature of this proposal becomes
self-evident. On the one hand, the land
owners, the victims of the land expropriation, are to be made whole through
compensation provided by the state. On
the other hand, the non-land owners are not compensated for the taxes
they have to pay to the state so that the state can pay for the compensation
claims. The land owners are made whole;
the non-land owners are not made whole (since taxpayers do not receive
compensation payments for the taxes they pay!)
Therefore, the "making
people whole rule" or the "compensate the victim
rule" is NOT APPLIED to everybody in the same way;
consequently, the proposed solution is "particularistic" in nature
thus rendering it unjust.
The Faulty Assumption Underlying the Claim that
Compensation Discourages Expropriation:
The article's repetitive discussion of the value of
government compensation to the victims of property expropriate is probably
because the author makes a spurious assumption concerning the punitive
properties of compensation. The author
claims that
one major way to force
governments...to think twice about property seizure is the reality they will
have to compensate private citizens.
This argument assumes that the government legitimately owns
property; consequently, forcing the government to pay compensation will be
painful for it because it will have to part with some of its property. The "cost" of expropriation to the
government will be the compensation that it will have to pay the victim. The problem is that this assumption is false;
the government does not and cannot legitimately own property. Therefore, the government does not suffer
any pain from having to pay out compensation claims to expropriation victims. As Murray N Rothbard trenchantly observed in
his book The Ethics of Liberty, the state owns no legitimate property;
hence, compensation imposes no cost on the state since the state as a
non-producing is not losing anything that it had to earn in the first place:
If the State, then, is a vast
engine of institutionalized crime and aggression, the "organization of the
political means" to wealth, then this means that the State is a criminal
organization, and that therefore its moral status is radically different from
any of the just property-owners that we have been discussing in this volume.
... For, as a criminal organization with all of its income and assets derived
from a crime of taxation, the State cannot possess any just property. (183, emphasis in the original)
Therefore, the author of the article is naive when he thinks
that government will feel pain by having to pay compensation. What the author is actually doing is
proposing in the name of property rights the implementation of a
constitutionally enshrined social democratic principle, i.e., the complete
opposite of property rights.
Social democracy, at least the social democracy practiced in
West Germany, has, I think, some parallels with what the Frontier Centre is
doing here in this article. Notice how
in both cases, i.e., in the West German social democracy case study and in the
think tank's article, they both pay lip service to private ownership and to the
possibility of socialization, while permitting and even favoring redistribution
of property titles (the compensation scheme, which redistributes property
titles from the taxpayers to the victims of the government's initial
expropriation). As Hans-Hermann Hoppe
explains in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism,
Here [i.e., in West Germany], in
1959, the social democrats adopted (or rather were forced by public opinion to
adopt) a new party program in which all obvious traces of a Marxist past were
conspicuously absent, that rather explicitly mentioned the importance of
private ownership and markets, that talked about socialization only as a mere
possibility, and that instead heavily stressed the importance of redistributive
measures. (59)
The Frontier Centre is following the West German
social democratic model in its article in all regards. First, the article mentions repeatedly the
importance of private ownership. For
example, the article states: "They want governments to make it harder, not
easier, to seize their property."
Notice that the recommendation still permits socialization as a
possibility because the recommendation did not say "ban" seizure property
unequivocally but rather just said "make it harder to do." Finally, the article proposes a guaranteed
income redistribution scheme under the name of "compensation" when it
mentions that "they want compensation that reflects current values and
impacts."
Why then is the Frontier Centre advocating social
democracy, i.e., what Hoppe refers to as Type II Socialism (See A Theory of
Socialism and Capitalism, 12)?
Notice that the policy recommendation made by the Frontier Centre
is to utilize a written constitution in order to protect private property. The article is rather explicit on this
point: "The answer may be to take
the issue out of the hands of provincial legislatures by enshrining rights to
compensation in our Charter."
This, of course, is consistent with classical liberal thought. To cite one of the great classical liberal
minds, Ludwig von Mises, writing in his 1927 book:
All these disadvantages [of being a
member of a national minority] are felt to be very oppressive even in a state
with a liberal constitution in which the activity of the government is
restricted to the protection of the life and property of the citizens. (89)
The problem is that classical liberal thought is a dead end
philosophically. Not only does
classical liberalism have an implementation problem, but it also is
unsustainable because it will naturally degrade into social democracy. The liberal philosopher Ludwig von Mises
understands that an implementation problem exists in classical liberal
thought. These ideas sound good on
paper, but they just cannot be implemented even by those who subscribe to
liberal ideas in the first place:
Even liberal politicians, on
gaining power, have usually relegated their liberal principles more or less to
the background. The tendency to impose
oppressive restraints on private property, to abuse political power, and to
refuse to respect or recognize any free sphere outside or beyond the dominion
of the state is too deeply ingrained in the mentality of those who control the
governmental apparatus of compulsion and coercion for them ever to be able to
resist it voluntarily. (44)
Even more menacing is how classical liberalism has a
built-in self-destruct mechanism in the sense that liberalism will naturally
fall apart and will be supplanted by social democracy. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in Democracy: The God that Failed, summarizes this
self-destruct mechanism of liberalism by emphasizing that the fundamental error
committed by liberals is assigning a moral status to the state:
Because of its own fundamental
error regarding the moral status of government, liberalism actually contributed
to the destruction of everything it had originally set out to preserve and
protect: liberty and property. Once the principle of government had been
incorrectly accepted, it was only a matter of time until the ultimate triumph
of socialism over liberalism....liberalism in its present form has no
future. Rather, its future is social
democracy, and the future has already arrived (and we know that it does not work).
Therefore, despite the use of classically liberal ideas by
the Frontier Centre--especially the idea of chaining a government down
with a written constitution so that the government is solely a life and
property protector, they are ultimately, in the final analysis,
advocating for social democracy whether or not they decide to do so. This explains why the article from the Frontier
Centre is the same as the policy proposals of the social democratic West
Germany.
The Impossibility of Protecting Private Property
through a Written Constitution:
The article references the Canadian Charter with a new
compensation amendment as an integral part of the Frontier Centre's
solution to the property expropriation problem in Alberta. The author seems to think that his
constitutional mandatory compensation proposal is feasible because, unlike the
Americans, his constitutional amendment will avoid the pitfall of
"vague" language. For
example, the author of the article states (all emphasis mine):
- The answer may be to take the issue out of the hands of provincial legislatures by enshrining rights to compensation in our Charter, but also avoiding the situation in the U.S. where vague wording in their Constitution leaves property vulnerable.
- At the same time they could clearly define "public use" to avoid the problems U.S. landowners discovered.
The most obvious objection to raise against the Frontier
Centre's proposed solution is to look at the case study of the German
reunification and conclude that what the Frontier Centre is proposing to
do in Alberta has been tried before and it failed lamentably. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in Democracy: The God that Failed, the German
reunification explicitly guaranteed private property rights, thereby satisfying
the Frontier Centre's demand for non-vague language. Moreover, as Hoppe observes, there was a
specific constitutional requirement to provide compensation in (the now former)
East Germany. Despite the non-vague and
literal constitutional requirements for compensation to be paid to the victims
of expropriation, i.e., despite fulfilling all of the Frontier Centre's requirements,
the German experiment demonstrates that neither of these provisions work in the
real world (emphasis mine):
Despite the constitutional guarantee
of private property by the (West) German constitution, for instance, the
German supreme court, after the German reunification in 1990, declared all
communist expropriations prior to the founding of the East German state in 1949
"valid." Thus, more than 50
percent of former East Germany's land used for agriculture were appropriated by
the (West) German state (rather than being returned to the original private
owners, as required by a literal interpretation of the constitution). (110-111, footnote 7)
So even a "literal interpretation" of the
constitutional "guarantee" does not ensure anything because the
Supreme Court can simply follow the German example and "declare"
arbitrarily that expropriations are "valid." Consequently, one must ask, if "explicit
constitutional guarantees" and "literal interpretations of the
constitution" are of tenuous value because of the credible threat of court
tyranny (i.e., arbitrary actions, see Democracy: The God that Failed, page 42, footnote 46), then has the Frontier
Centre merely offered us a paper tiger solution to the problem of property
expropriation in Alberta?
What is going on here is simply the fact that the Frontier
Centre is using the wrong means to achieve its desired end. To achieve the desired end of justice (i.e.,
compensation for the victims), the Frontier Centre proposes to use the
means of the court system. The problem
is that for this proposal to work, the court system must make decisions
objectively not subjectively. The
German case study suggests that the courts can very well behave subjectively by
"declaring" expropriations "valid" despite what a literal
interpretation of the constitution requires.
The means of appealing to the court system in order to enforce a
constitutional protection of property will result not in justice but rather in
injustice because of the danger of subjectivity with regard to property
titles. Notice in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's
discussion of this subjective-objective problem in A Theory of Socialism and
Capitalism that the German Supreme Court behaves exactly in the manner of
someone holding a subjective view toward property. Just as the German Supreme Court "declared" the
communist expropriations in East Germany as "valid," so too the
subjective allocation of property "declares" what should be
(italics emphasis in the original; underlining emphasis is mine):
[Claims to property] would be based
exclusively on subjective opinion, i.e., on a merely verbal declaration that things should be this or that way. Of course, such verbal claims could (and
very likely always will) point to certain facts, too ("I am bigger,
I am smarter, I am poorer or I am very special, etc.!"), and could thereby
try to legitimize themselves. But
facts such as these do not (and cannot) establish any objective link
between a given scarce resource and any particular person(s). Everyone's ownership of every particular
resource can equally well be established or excluded on such grounds. It is such property claims, derived from
thin air, with purely verbal links between owners and things owned, which,
according to the natural theory of property, are called aggressive. (24)
In summary, the Frontier Centre's proposal fails
because it contradicts the underlying theory of the above discussion, namely,
the natural theory of property.
The Failure to Address the Natural Theory of Property:
To further illustrate how the Frontier Centre has
totally ignored the natural theory of property, consider how they permit the
government to expropriate property as long as... and they give certain
qualifications such as mandatory compensation and non-vague language for
"public use" and so on.
Notice that they never question the legitimacy of expropriation in the
first place; the legitimacy of "forced sales" of private property to
government is never questioned.
The concept of property includes the important fact that
property owners have exclusive jurisdiction over how to dispose of their
property. "Every individual has
the right to dispose of his property as he sees fit," argues Benjamin
Tucker (see David Osterfeld, Freedom, Society, and the State, Article 33
in Anarchy and the Law, 515). Or
as Murray Rothbard states in Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market
that "'Economic power,' then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse
to make an exchange" (1,327). Consequently, a property owner can sell his
or her property or not; a property owner can agree to transfer his property or
not to someone else. As Hans-Hermann
Hoppe writes in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, property is
something that is transferred non-aggressively; there is no such concept in the
natural theory of property that permits aggressive seizure followed by
compensation:
This system [of pure capitalism and
of pure private property] is based on the idea that to be nonaggressive, claims
to property must be backed by the "objective" fact of an act of
original appropriation, of previous ownership, or by a mutually beneficial
contractual relationship. This
relationship can either be a deliberate cooperation between property owners or
the deliberate transfer of property titles from one owner to another. (29)
This "forced sale" of private property, which the
government supposedly "thinks twice about," (which of course is also
impossible because a "government" cannot "think"), is a non-cooperative transfer of private
property titles. This is certainly not
an "exchange" since it is not only involuntary in its nature but
also, as mentioned earlier, the state does not own any just property and hence
owns nothing that could be used to facilitate an exchange. But as Hoppe said above, the relationship
must be a "transfer of property titles from one owner to another." This definition, then, precludes the state
from engaging in exchanges because the state is, also by definition, a
non-owner of property.
(it says: deliberate
transfer of property titles from one owner to another--but as Rothbard
says: governments don't own
anything--so an "exchange" with the government doesn't exist)
The Fallacy of Hypostatization:
The article engages in confused epistemology as demonstrated
by its reliance on the public good or common good type language. The article repeatedly makes this
epistemological error (emphasis is mine):
- Albertans want a more rigorous consultation process...[and a list of all the other things that Albertans apparently want]
- The provincial government should not feel it can now shut down debate
- The power is inescapably necessary in the interests of government
- The government said they will review
- Government is empowered to confiscate private property for "public use" purposes
In all of these examples, the author has erroneous assigned
real existence to or has personified government and society, i.e., the
collective. "In the sciences of
human action," writes Ludwig von Mises in The Ultimate Foundation of
Economic Science, "the most conspicuous instance of this fallacy is
the way in which the term society is employed by various schools of
pseudo science" (71). In direct
contradistinction to the claim made by the Frontier Centre, Mises
stresses that society "does not have 'interests' and does not aim at
anything" (71). The reason why
Mises denies the claims of the Frontier Centre, i.e., the claims about
the "interests" of government and the "actions" of
government is because these claims violate the fundamental axiom of
action. As Murray Rothbard explains in
his magnum opus Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market,
The first truth to be discovered
about human action is that it can be undertaken only by individual
"actors." Only
individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by
"groups," "collectives," or "States," which do
not take place as actions by various specific individuals. (2, emphasis in the
original)
The epistemological inconsistency in the Frontier Centre
article is that the author seems to take collectivism as a given with his
multiple references to the "acting" collective and to the
"interests" of the collective and hence falls into the
epistemological fallacy of hypostatization, but then he also claims to support
individuals and hence methodological individualism when he writes, "the
power of government to expropriate at any level may be a scary exercise of
power over individuals." But if he
takes the first position, the collectivist one, then he necessarily cannot take
the second one as well since they are mutually exclusive positions:
In the so-called social sciences it
more often than not serves definite political aspirations in claiming for the
collective as such a higher dignity than for the individual or even ascribing
real existence only to the collective and denying the existence of the
individual, calling it a mere abstraction.
(Mises 2006, 71)
So this creates an insoluble problem for the author of the Frontier
Centre article. How does he expect
to resolve disputes between the "collective," which supposedly is
represented by the government, the plenipotentiary of the "common
good," and the individual, the victim of the state's aggressive act of
property expropriation? How is the
dispute between the hypostatization of the collectivists and the methodological
individualism of the victim individual to be resolved? The author of the article claims that the
solution is to take the dispute to a monopoly government court. As well shall see next, this is no solution
at all to the problem of the "collective" versus the individual.
The Meaninglessness of Offering Victims of
Expropriation Access to the Courts:
The article seems to take it for granted that offering
victims of expropriation access to the courts will somehow make this entire
process of property expropriation legitimate.
The most obvious problem with this recommendation is that the victim of
expropriation has only one choice, namely, to go to the government's approved
dispute resolution mechanism or court system.
The victim has no choice here due to the monopoly nature of the judicial
system.
This solution might very well lead to an injustice because
the government might end up functioning as both the defendant in the
expropriation case and the adjudicator over its own trial. As Murray N Rothbard points out in The
Anatomy of the State, such an arrangement in which the government serves as
both defendant and judge is inherently unjust:
Black admits that this means that
the State has set itself up as a judge in its own cause, thus violating a basic
juridical principle for aiming at just decisions. (34)
In addition, the logical inconsistency problem raised by
Gustave de Molinari most likely exists in the Frontier Centre's proposals. They claim that private property ought to be
protected by a written constitution, which implies a classical liberal view
with regard to property. This strongly
implies that their position will tend to be consistent with that of liberal
economists. But now when discussing the
court system, the Frontier Centre is most likely falling into the
logical inconsistency problem that French liberals also fell into by assuming that
the public's demand for "access to courts" means access to government
monopoly courts. Nobody is going to
assume that when they write "access to courts" they really mean
access to private and competing courts as existed, for example, in
English history (see footnote 3 of The Production of Security with de
Molinari's reference to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations) especially
given their website's consistently statist comments such as "strengthening
democracy," "popularizing public choices, and "high performance
government." The logical
inconsistency problem de Molinari observes in his book entitled The
Production of Security is that economists tend to favor free markets i.e.,
a non-monopoly world in most areas but then contradict themselves by supporting
a state-monopoly over the justice system:
True economists are generally
agreed, on the one hand, that the government should restrict itself to
guaranteeing the security of its citizens, and on the other, that the freedom
of labor and of trade should otherwise be whole and absolute. But why should there be an exception
relative to security? What special
reason is there that the production of security cannot be relegated to free
competition?...On this point, the masters of the science are silent, and [Charles]
Dunoyer, who has clearly noted this exception, does not investigate the grounds
on which it is based (Chapter 3 of The Production of Security).
The inconsistency in liberal thought was put starkly by
Hans-Hermann Hoppe in Democracy: The
God that Failed when he writes that
the liberal solution to the eternal
human problem of security--a constitutionally limited government--is a
contradictory, praxeologically impossible ideal. Contrary to the original liberal intent of safeguarding liberty
and property, every minimal government has the inherent tendency to become a
maximal government. (229)
Conclusion:
The Frontier Centre's article appears to be a
well-reasoned defense of private property rights in Alberta. The fundamental error that the author makes,
which then causes him to make all of his other errors, is that the author
assumes that the existence of government is compatible with private
property. It appears as if the purpose
for writing this paper was not so much to defend private property rights as to
legitimize the State's expropriation of property. Probably the best quotation from the Frontier Centre's
article that clearly demonstrates this fact is this unbelievably sycophantic
statement, a statement no true defender of private property would ever utter
because it effectively justifies exploitation, at least in the pre-Marxian
sense of the term:
More public consultation, clear
compensation, and access to dispute resolution mechanisms, and access to
dispute resolution mechanisms, including courts, are all important, so on the
surface there's nothing wrong with the province's stated intentions. Once we figure out exactly how a real-life
property rights advocate works that could be positive.
From this quotation in particular and from the article in
general, the author reveals that he has fallen into the "naive mainstream
economist" trap, thus rendering his entire paper rather useless for the
defense of property because the underlying views are starry-eyed and utopian. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his paper entitled Marxist
and Austrian Class Analysis (Journal of Libertarian Studies, Fall
1990) puts it best when he observes
that
Marxism, because it correctly
interprets the state as exploitative (unlike, for example, the public choice
school, which sees it as normal firm among others), is onto some important
insights regarding the logic of state operations. (86)
However, the "naive mainstream economist" problem
is the least of our concern. The
article is ultimately a defense of exploitation in the pre-Marxian
French radical laissez-faire sense of the term "exploitation." (This qualification is necessary because the
term "exploitation" has been misconstrued by socialist and Marxian
authors ever since). In The
Economics and Ethics of Private Property, Hoppe writes that
the traditional, correct
pre-Marxist view on exploitation was that...antagonistic interests do not exist
between capitalists as owners of factors of production and laborers, but
between, on the one hand, the producers in society, i.e., homesteaders,
producers and contractors, including businessmen as well as workers, and
on the other hand, those who acquire wealth nonproductively and/or
noncontractually, i.e., the state and state-privileged groups, such as
feudal lords. (96, footnote 18, italics
in the original; underlined emphasis mine)
Or to put this point more starkly, Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes
in his paper Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis (Journal of Libertarian
Studies, Fall 1990) that the state is exploitative precisely because it can
acquire property through expropriation:
The state is not exploitative
because it protects the capitalists' property rights, but because it itself is exempt
from the restriction of having to acquire property productively and
contractually. (86, emphasis mine)
The Frontier Centre fails completely to address the
exploitation problem. In fact, their
entire article seems to pre-suppose that the inherent exploitative nature of
the state is acceptable as long as certain "legitimizing factors"
are added into the equation after the fact.
In my paper, I have tried to demonstrate, again and again, how this is
the essence of their paper. To
recapitulate some of the pertinent examples:
- The tax and compensate discussion was an attempt to justify the state's right to involuntarily tax citizens by claiming that taxation is acceptable because it is doing something good, i.e., providing compensation.
- The claim that compensation is "punitive" to the state is meant to legitimize the state's claim of being a just owner of property in the first place. This allegedly "legitimate" property owner is then "punished" by being forced to pay compensation.
- The appeal to the written constitution as the means for protecting private property is meant to legitimize the idea that a contract has been entered into by the population. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe mentions in Democracy: The God that Failed, "since Locke, liberals have tried to solve this internal contradiction through the makeshift of 'tacit,' 'implicit' or 'conceptual' agreements, contracts, or constitutions" (228).
- The article goes to great length to stress that the government's process is "legitimate" by almost obsessively mentioning phrases such as: "public consultation," "democratically-elected legislature," and "don't shut down debate." The language implies that the government's behavior is legitimate because it has procured the consent of the governed. Notice further how the Frontier Centre bends over backwards to imply that the government has gone out of its way in order to ensure the consent of the governed. As an example of this point, they write that "the Alberta Government has completed a landmark consultation with almost 1,500 Albertans."
- The reason why the Frontier Centre has to establish the legitimacy of the government's behavior through such means as "public consultation," "democratically-elected legislation," "written constitutions with enshrined rights," "access to the courts," "hypostatization of the state," and "public debates," is because it has to convince people first that the government has legitimate consent so that it can then justify the subjective (not objective) transfers of property by the Alberta government. Carl Watner writes in his paper "Oh, Ye Are For Anarchy!": Consent Theory in the Radical Libertarian Tradition," that there exists a strong link between the government's perceived consent and private property rights. Watner writes that "[William] Molyneux clearly understood the relationship between property rights and consent. 'Consent is a necessary condition for the transfer of title. To use or dispose of another person's property without his consent is the fundamental act of injustice.'"
In summary, what the Frontier Centre has done in this
article is it has legitimized the State by implying that Albertans have given
their consent to the government's expropriation of property and to its
aggressive transfers of property titles.
The Frontier Centre has not succeeded at all in defending private
property because it has defended the State, the biggest and most dangerous
threat to property. Therefore, the Frontier
Centre's article is self-refuting because one does not defend property by
first defending its opposite, i.e., the state.
The entire article boiled down to its most fundamental essence is
simply, as Murray Rothbard put it in his book Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of
Economic Thought, a textbook example of "the preposterous necromancy
of the 'dialectic'" (334).
Neil Matthew Tokar
Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario
May 5, 2012
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