OnProperty

Quora Answer : Can capitalism exist without the state to defend property rights?

May 29, 2020

Not in any recognisable sense, no.

Every major form of property wealth today : land titles, rights to exploit minerals, fishing rights, shares in corporations, patents, copyrights, trademarks etc. is a bureaucratic invention of government.

Some people want to claim capitalism is any trade in small handmade objects or bartering six eggs for a bag of cabbages.

You can call that "capitalism" if you like. But if you do, you have to accept that every human society in history did something like this. And so there's never been a human society that wasn't "capitalist".

Bartering eggs for cabbages is NOT what most people who think and write about capitalism believe "capitalism" to mean. It's certainly not what ANY critic of capitalism thinks that capitalism is. Which is why you aren't going to win any actual arguments against anti-capitalists by just loudly insisting that this is what capitalism is.

Most people assume that capitalism is something that has arisen in the last 500 years, includes the institution of private banks, the institution of private corporations, and stock markets to trade shares, and the fact that these corporations and financial markets are sufficiently powerful and influential that governments, whether kings and princes or democratically elected presidents and prime ministers, are obliged to defer to them.

"Capitalism" goes hand in hand with the rise of the rest of the liberal / Enlightenment philosophies : of personal rights, of the rule of law. And with the industrial revolution and the organization of production in the form of capital-expensive factories funded by rich investors, and a proletariat of poor people without property who work in those factories.

None of these things are fully essential in capitalism, but they all kind of cluster together. And if you start trying to eliminate any, capitalism as we know it doesn't really survive.

One essential plank in the infrastructure which supports capitalism is the state which defends property with violence. (It's already claimed the monopoly of the right to violence, and it claims the right to wield that violence "for good" when it defends both property and other rights)

Now the state sure uses violence to defend property. Which is why it puts bank robbers in prison. But MORE IMPORTANTLY than the actual defence (which can be, and sometimes is, subcontracted to private agents) the real work that the state does, is put its legitimacy into DEFINING property. Exactly what things count as property and will be protected by property law? What aren't? What are legitimate transactions for the transfer of property, vs. what things are fraudulent where a transaction "didn't count"?

What other kinds of movement of property are legitimate? Fines? Compensation? Taxes?

All of these have to be decided by someone. And whoever claims the legitimacy to make those decisions is, de facto, the state.

And those decisions are external to the market. They are prior to it. Parameters to your market. You can't discover the "right answer" to "what is property?" by trading property in the market. A system where you hire the judge to adjudicate in your favour over a disputed contract is not one where any kind of "rule of law" is going to last.

Capitalism is hugely complex socio-economic system we've constructed. And it needs an entire support framework to provide law-making / rule-enforcing services

Quora Answer : Freedom: Consider property is equal to life (you spend life to gain property) – Is it wrong then to value your property above the cloud of remaining humans?

Nov 27, 2012

The (standard Libertarian) equation of property with life is just wrong.

You can acquire property WITHOUT spending your life. Eg. if you inherit it. Or win it in a lottery. Even when you are spending your life to work to earn it, the amount of property your life corresponds to varies according to a whole diffuse, holistic context that includes how many rivals there are in the market, exchange rates etc. etc.

In fact, if Libertarians really believed that property equalled life they'd subscribe to some version of the Labor theory of value which, in practice, they utterly reject.

So they don't really believe it. The ONLY reason that Libertarians make the claim that property is equivalent to life is as a rhetorical trick to try to convince you that property rights should be elevated to the same moral status as humanist rights such as the right to life, health, freedom of speech etc.

My advice is just not to fall for the rhetoric. Life, health, freedom are a whole different kind of right than mere property. And, yes, it's wrong to prioritise the latter over the former.