Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy. FULL ARTICLE by Ludwig von Mises
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/14940/private-property/
Private Property
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Well, so much for agrarian reform.
I do take one minor point of disagreement with your article, at the same time admitting my bias in this point. You refer to property rights as a man-made device. I disagree. As a Christian, I look at my Bible and simple Divine admonishments like ‘Thou shalt not steal’ sets the idea forth that your neighbor may possess things that you do not have equal access to. In my mind, God is definitely in favor of property rights, being the Author of them. This dovetails nicely with Jefferson’s idea, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that all of our rights are derived from God. Just a thought.
I believe the word is Creator, not God. Take it as you will.
Good point, RTB. Jefferson’s ideas about a “Creator” were not Trinitarian, and he wasn’t a Jew. Also telling about Jefferson’s thinking at the time of the DoI is that the date given there reads “July 4, 1776″, without addition of A.D., for example. But in the “Constitution for the United States of America”, one reads “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven”. (My source is Senate Document 111-4, published pursuant to a resolution of the Senate, with the House concurring, given on July 29, 2009.)
Michael, possession may be 9/10 of the law, but possession is neither necessary nor sufficient for ownership. For example, joint ownership might require that not all of the owners of something have possession of it. And a criminal who possesses goods that he stole surely does not own them.
Michael
Yes! And God also told a father, in the process of mutilating his daughter’s genitalia, “Cut but do not destroy!” Must be that young women don’t have right to their sexual organs- God says so.
Sione
Interesting comment, but was Spann’s thinking representative of the Nazis after, say, the Roehm purge, in June 1934, and throughout the period of Hitler’s rule? For all I know, Spann’s remarks were the wishful thinking of a naive dupe who didn’t understand Hitler’s intentions. Maybe he was like the socialistic brothers Gregor Strasser and Otto Strasser. Otto left the NSDAP disgrunteld that Hitler was not the sort of socialist sympathetic to Marxism, and Gregor was pushed out of the party after having seen his influence decline due to ideological incompatibility with Hitler and upon Hitler learning that Gen. Schleicher had offered Gregor the vice-chancellorship. Both departures were before Hitler was nominated chancellor. Gregor was killed in the Roehm purge.
Well, I can’t find any reference whatever to Spann in Nazi Germany: A New History by Klaus P. Fischer, who spoke and read German. Not in the endnotes, not in the index, not in the “Glossary of Names, Terms, and Abbreviations”, and not in the bibliography. Altogether these take up >150pp.
So I checked the index of the The Holocaust Chronicle where one can find Alfred Rosenberg mentioned, as in most sources I checked, but no Spann. So I checked Inside Nazi Germany by Detlev Peukert. Again, no Othmar Spann.
Quick search on Google brings up numerous interesting hits.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Othmar+Spann&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
At Wikipedia it reads near the top that Spann was “…a conservative Austrian philosopher, sociologist and economist whose radical anti-liberal and anti-Socialist views…” It also states that he is notable for “corporate statism” and, as I found at another site, “German Romantic Nationalism”. For a Marxist or a Fabian that would make him appear to be an extreme rightwinger, which would be ridiculous to believe given Spann’s affinity for the Nazis and their tolerance for welfare statism.
Supposedly Spann had Friedrich Hayek as a student, though the Wikipedian who added that tidbit didn’t explain why that’s notable. Some of the comments make Spann sound like an idealist with murky thoughts about Volksgemeinschaft, mystical communion with nature, asf. There’s no comment about his upbringings in very Catholic Austria, but he was popular with youth while teaching, if that provides you with any clue. Reminds me of a Polish magical thinker and thespian who taught ethics after his ordination.
It also reads at Wikipedia that
Not exactly what I would expect if Spann was a “Nazi philosopher” in step with Hitler and Goebbels, the propaganda minister who stayed with Hitler until the bitter end in that bunker. Like the Strassers, he became disillusioned that Hitler was not the champion for working families that he at first seemed to be.
The European Journal of International Law published an essay that looks interesting, although the phrase “International Law” should be sufficient reason to treat their work with caution unless, perhaps, the usage is sarcastic. They tell their readers that “the Editors’ original vision remains unchanged and distinguished by…its continuing interest in the historical origins of the ‘European tradition’ (in the best and broadest sense) in international law.”
That said, it seems that Spann was indeed a socialist of some kind, just not the Marxist kind. Like pious Catholics. (Even Mises observed that Christianity regularly both supports and opposes socialism, though I think by “socialism” he means only Marxism, Fabianism, etc.) Maybe we will find that Spann was not a Catholic, thus helping the RCC to innoculate itself just a little from the charge that Nazism and Fascism were and remain firmly rooted in Catholic Christian mysticism, authoritarianism, and, of course, the cult of personality. (Jesus, Mussolini, that guy in Spain, Hitler,…Jesus.) After all, if the Hitlerists persecuted the RCC, how could German Nazism be rooted, even in part, in the mystical body of Christ?
Klaus P. Fischer, the aforementioned author provides a clue when he notes early in his book that the term national socialism originated before the end of the Great War of 1914-1918 and was in usage long before the Catholics of Bavaria heard Hitler ranting in their beer halls. The nonmarxists, you see, were eager to undermine support for Marxism. So, in their cleverness, they developed a theory of nation-centric socialism to compete with the reds, a development which should have complemented Bismarck’s anti-Marxism and welfare statism.
-Saul of Tarsus, writing to the “Church of God” in Corinth. -Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible. See I Corinth 12:27 for Saul’s remarks about the “mystical body of Christ”, a term which does not appear there but the doctrine of which is based in part on that passage. A related passage can be found in Colossians 1.
It should read, “Like the Strassers, Spann became disillusioned…”
>>Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day.
Ohhhh I see what he’s saying here. So for instance, tracing the Government’s claim of sovereign ownership over its territory (and by extension everything within it) back to a time when it illegally seized it by force has no relevance today and so it should be considered a legitimate claim to ownership.
So therefore it is entirely justified in using its property as it sees fit, particularly in the way it enters into a contract with its citizens, providing them with the land to facilitate their labour in return for a portion of the profits (taxation), the use of which it is free to decide for itself. Of course to enjoy the full benefits of that ownership it needs to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of consumers, which is why it gives them provisional ownership of private property and other ‘rights’ as determined by the constitution and its laws, and also allows them to generate private wealth on the proviso they do so within the limitations of the contract agreed upon.
Wow!! And I always thought Mises was anti-statist!
Mises, an anti-statist? Maybe in a universe parallel to our own, but not in this one.
I’m not quite persuaded that Mises in his day thought that “tracing the Government’s claim of sovereign ownership over its territory…has no relevance today”, but for sure the implication is that at some point in time there would be no justification for such tracing and, hence, no basis for challenging the government’s ownership claim. So then no basis for challenging property claims dependent upon said government’s seizure by force.
Welcome to the radical incoherency of the politics of Ludwig and Murray. The logo of http://mises.org.br/ provides a somewhat amusing graphical portrayal of how LvMI is trying to force the two to live together in harmony, like a foolish mother who is so desperate for her sons to get along that she has them share a bedroom even though the house has enough space for each to have his own room. (The brothers eventually go their separate ways, anyway, rarely to speak again.) Granted, “amusing” is like value in that it does not refer to a quality or attribute which inheres in an object of thought.
Skim Mises’ Liberalism for his pining for a “world superstate”, a Weltueberstaat, as he puts it in the German text from which Raico made his translation. You can also find Oberstaat der Staaten, superstate of states.
It so happened that Rothbard, at least as he was in the heyday of The Libertarian Forum, had his anarchism denigrated in Liberalismus. In TLF, Rothbard can sound a little like a radical leftist when he calls for seizure of wealth obtained via government shenanigans. Lysander Spooner was more in step with Rothbard than Mises on the relevant point, here, and it’s a shame that Rothbard came into contact with Mises before he got to know Spooner much better and had his head filled with the buzzterm “free-market”.
Mises, however, was a diehard apologist of a world order fit for a globetrotting clique of plundering crony capitalists, not to mention militarists and customers of Tasers who would be called upon to help to build and to maintain Mises’ utopia, which is dedicated to world peace. Mises was naivete, insofar as naivete can be incarnated and animate human flesh.
Maybe Doug French has a mind to fix things. Make them right.
Step 1: Change the name to the The Murray Rothbard Institute after developing and implementing a project plan to make the change stick.
Or
Step 1: Leave LvMI. Then write a business plan for TMRI. Radical anticorporatism. A place of honor for Lysander Spooner, his mistakes notwithstanding. Commerce and trade via trimetallism, albeit without fixing of prices (gold/silver, gold/copper, etc.) by government. Ontology, the study of being, of which economics ought to be regarded a branch no less than physics is a branch of ontology. Well, we depart just a little from the scope of Rothbard, but does not even the many orgs named for Max Planck tolerate ideas which compete with Planck’s?
Better still, how about The Lysander Spooner Institute? Or even one such institute named after Spooner’s father, who provided Lysander with an environment conducive to learning. The name just mentioned is already taken, so, The Spooner Institute, it is.
There was a certain measure of sarcasm intended in my post.
“Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again, proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. The history of private property can be traced back to a point at which it originated out of acts that were certainly not legal. Virtually every owner is the direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent spoliation of their predecessor.”
Private property is a human device, a “legal convention”. I would argue that the homestead rule for ownership is arbitrary and inapplicable to the original establishment of “good title”, in land as well as other forms of property, such as IP. Even though it is possible to argue that certain IP is actually a homesteading of ultra-scarce resources (i.e. non-existent) and the innovation is a production process that reduces this scarcity, as does all production, in the end it is unnecessary. A legal convention serves the needs of cooperating society. It is a manifestation of public policy. The concept of public policy implies a system of governance.
If there is no allowance in an ideology for a system of governance, there can be no public policy, and there can be no legal conventions to implement and enforce this policy. This is equated to a concept of freedom, and the lack of it.
Therefore, from the anarchist’s position, the concept of property rights conflicts with the concept of freedom, and the entire treatment of Mises’s analysis of markets, competition, external markets, monopolies, etc., gets ignored or dismissed when it conflicts with the fundamental conclusions of the anarchist ideology. On these issues, Mises was simply “wrong”. This position has value in my view, merely as a rhetorical convenience for the ideologues.
In my opinion, this is the essence of some of the irreconcilable problems with the anarchist position. In order to make that position on various social issues square with the ideology, which denies all legitimacy of government in society, property ownership must be reduced to a logical premise that holds no relative importance to the issue of the market effects of legal conventions, which creates and defends “good title” in property.
In reality, the application of the homesteading principle of ownership is irrelevant. It has no historical basis, and it has no modern utility. It is a logical device to conclude that certain property rights are illegitimate, on the one hand, but legitimate only when based on a logical construct concerning how it actually comes about, which is false.
This is why discussions concerning the obvious need to reduce the role of government, how that might be done, what the specific features of that process might be with regard to politics, banking, environmentalism, IP, etc. cannot advance. It is stillborn at the outset.
This is a great failing of the leadership of the Mises Institute, in my humble opinion.
Wildberry,
This omits the core issue: IP requires homesteading of resources that already have been homesteaded by someone else.
How so?
Because IP is an attribute of the physical world, which is already covered by physical property rights.
Peter,
“Because IP is an attribute of the physical world, which is already covered by physical property rights.”
We have established (I think) that pure ideas are not the subject of IP law.
If pure ideas are free goods, then how are they covered by physical property rights before they are fixed in a medium? They aren’t.
If ideas are free goods, then I am free to combine them and arrange them in any pattern I wish. Anyone else is equally free to do so. This is not yet IP or any other right of property, agree?
If I fix this pattern of ideas onto paper with ink which I own, how is it covered by physical property rights? If it is comprised of my paper, ink, and “my ideas”, does anyone else have better title to them than I? I don’t think so. I also think my intellectual property rights at this point are not clearly established either.
How can we tell which ideas are mine, compared to the infinite pattern of ideas that potentially exist in the universe of free-good ideas, presumably in the minds of all other humans? We would need an objective methodology to do this. If we could find an objective method of establishing the uniqueness in my particular pattern, would you say that someone else would have better title to them? I’m the one who invested my personal capital in the selection and arrangement of the ideas that I assembled and fixed on the paper. I am not claiming that I “created” ideas, only that I fixed these particular ideas on my paper with my ink. Is there any theory of property that would conclude that despite all this, the paper and marks are actually owned by someone else? No.
OK, but does that mean that I own them? Why not? If I own the means of production, and I only use my own property and free goods in this production process, what would be the theory for anyone else’s claim that they are not mine? None. If this is true, that no one has a better claim, then I am on my way to establishing potential rights of “property” in my pattern, as fixed in my book. Although I haven’t yet done so, one could argue that this is similar to an act of homesteading; i.e. claiming possession of property at a time when there is no “better” title to it.
Is this enough to create a property interest in IP law, say for copyright? No, it is not. It must be fixed, but it must also be “original”. Only then does it become the subject of copyright law. I do not yet have property rights unless I can prove that my original pattern is not the subject of someone else’s copyrighted property. If it fails any of these tests, it cannot subject the subject of property rights, and the “work” remains in the public domain, along with all other ideas that exist in this domain. Also, not just any fixed, original ideas are copyrightable. They must be “expressed”. There are any numbers of exclusions which, if you examined them, actually encompass many of your strongest objections.
However, even this is not sufficient to enable me to enforce property rights. There must be an “unlawful appropriation”. For example, probably contrary to what you have heard, it is not unlawful for members of the public to copy facts, ideas, or other uncopyrightable elements from a copyrighted work. It is the burden of the plaintiff to demonstrate that a defendant copied the plaintiff’s “copyrightable expression”, and that there was a “substantial similarity of copyrightable expression”. It would be pretty easy to show that your photocopy of my book fits the bill.
When you consider all of this, it is hard for me to identify what exactly you object to. That is the dishonesty of trying to make an anti-IP position wash with an anarchist position. It only works if you assume away all of the real facts about how and why the law operates as it does. You end up attacking the concept that the State enforces these laws, and that is really the fundamental objection, in my humble opinion.
And I have established that there is no such thing as a “pure idea”. At least the idea has to be present in someone’s brain. There is no situation where idea exists without being a part of something physical, covered by physical property rights. Indeed, once you realise that abstract concepts are merely a specific interpretation of the physical world, you will realise that there cannot be such a thing as “existence” outside of the context of the physical world.
You seem to have a history of wanting things that do not exist.
Peter, Don’t nit pick, we have bigger fish to fry.
Whether ideas are “pure” or not is not my point. Certain types of fundamental ideas, i.e. formulas and natural laws, are not protectable by IP laws.
My whole, long (very) post on Properganda was on this subject, but I know you had one foot out the door.
The issue, in short, is not that ideas in all their forms, exist somewhere OUTSIDE of human perceptions of the physical world, it is that they DO exist there. I argue that ideas which are fixed in some medium perceptable by others, are original and unique, are not equivalent to “free goods”.
The twenty six letters of the alphabet are not enough to explain War and Peace.
Here’s a good one:
“If Dante and Beetoven had not existed, one would not have been in a position to produce the Devina Commeia or the Ninth Symphony by assigning other men these tasks” (HA VII 5 p. 140)
You and other IP opponents seem to have a history of equivocating this difference.
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