Progress pill
Foundations of freedom

Property and freedom of work

Freedom as a Social Project

Property and freedom of work

  • Self-ownership: the first property
  • Why property of things
  • The universality of property
  • Freedom of work: from need to action
  • Self-interest and the harmony of the world
  • Free trade: the logical conclusion

Self-ownership: the first property

We now turn from civil liberties to the economic freedoms, property, freedom of work, free trade, that are less readily accepted in contemporary debate, yet which rest on exactly the same factual foundations. Indeed, political freedom without economic freedom is a means without an end: it is the freedom to choose a master, not the freedom to live as a self-governing individual.
There is no property of things without property of self. And what is self-ownership? It is the culmination of a chain of facts we have already examined. Consider two cycles of thought that materialize it. The first runs from sensation to judgment, then to opinion: our sensory perceptions are personal and individual; our judgments are free; their expression leads to freedom of the press, education, and religious tolerance. The second cycle links observation, reasoning, and adaptation: the individual observes, establishes links of cause and effect, then acts according to a personal plan of conduct.
Jules Simon (1814–1896), philosopher and statesman, demonstrated in a remarkable series of works, notably La Liberté civile and La Liberté (1859), that the most complex economic notions, such as capital or freedom of labor, rest ultimately on simple human facts: free reflection and the ownership of one's own thought. From sensation to judgment, from judgment to action, from action to production, the chain is unbroken, and self-ownership is its first link.

Why property of things

Self-ownership leads naturally to the ownership of things, because human existence can only be sustained through appropriation and production. We must eat, we must clothe ourselves, and to do so we must produce, which requires precisely those acts of observation, reasoning, and purposeful action that belong to self-ownership.
There is no consumption without appropriation. We saw this with the apple: to eat it is to make it one's own. And this appropriation, as its name implies, is an act of making something proper, personal, individual. It is because I appropriate individually that I feel the effects individually: it is I who am no longer hungry, I who experience the satisfaction.
But property extends beyond the consumption of perishable goods to the ownership of land, and here a crucial fact enters: possession is work. The image of the settler clearing virgin land, dripping with sweat, captures this reality perfectly. Land in its natural state is often utterly unfit for human needs. To make it productive, one must clear it, cultivate it, maintain it, repair the soil's natural fertility, manage drainage and irrigation. This is arduous, sustained labor.
The same principle extends to capital. To preserve and increase one's capital is a form of negative work, it demands resistance to the constant temptation of immediate consumption, and the ability to direct investments wisely. Many lose their capital, whether through dissipation in consumption or through misguided ventures that fail to reproduce in value what they cost in initial investment.
Frédéric Bastiat, in his Œuvres complètes, expressed this link between work and property with characteristic precision:
"Man can live and enjoy only through an assimilation, a perpetual appropriation, that is, through a perpetual application of his faculties to things, or through labor. From this arises Property."
In other words, property is not an invention of legislators. It is the natural and necessary consequence of human action applied to the world.

The universality of property

If property were merely a social convention, one would expect to find societies without it. But the opposite is true: property can be observed in all ages and all societies, at different levels of development.
We can even observe it among animals, who claim and defend territories, burrows, nesting sites, hunting grounds, and who recognize, at least in a rudimentary form, the property of other individuals. Bodies cannot live except under a regime of property.
Even at the Stone Age, caves and resources were treated as property, not by all humanity, but by specific tribes. This collective tribal property should not be confused with communism: the tribe excluded other groups. The property was "common" only within its boundaries, and private in relation to all outsiders. The form of ownership was adapted to the conditions of production: hunting, for example, could not be conducted within narrow enclosures, because animals roamed vast territories. But the principle of property was already present, only its application differed.

Freedom of work: from need to action

What are the facts at the origin of freedom of work? First, the reality of human need. Needs are not imaginary or fictitious; they are felt, real, and inescapable. One cannot live without satisfying them. And they are individual: it is I who feel hunger, I who suffer from an ill-sheltered dwelling, I who know the intensity of my own discomfort.
From this individual need flows the necessity of an individual plan of action, which is to say, work. I must respond to my needs using my own body, my own faculties, my own intelligence. The plan of conduct I devise is mine by definition: it arises from my own sensations and my own reasoning about the best way to satisfy them.
A second foundation is the variety of dispositions, tastes, and strengths among individuals. Even facing the same need, different individuals feel it differently and possess different capacities to address it. Some have strong bodies that resist long hours of physical labor; others tire quickly but recover after a night's sleep. Some are drawn to manual work, others to intellectual pursuits. Each must be free to employ his own body, which he owns, in the manner best suited to his own situation.
When a regulatory state intervenes, it breaks this natural chain. It presumes to know the worker's sensations better than he does, and to prescribe a plan of action without regard for individual dispositions. But the sensation is personal: only I know how intensely I feel my hunger, how urgently I need shelter. And the plan of action is personal: only I can judge which application of my faculties will best respond to my needs.

Self-interest and the harmony of the world

The motive that drives all this activity is self-interest, a fact identified in the French liberal tradition well before Adam Smith. Pierre de Boisguilbert (1646–1714), in his economic writings at the turn of the 18th century, expressed it with remarkable clarity:
"There is a reflection to be made: that all the commerce of the earth, wholesale and retail, and even agriculture, is governed solely by the interest of the entrepreneurs, who have never thought of rendering service nor of obliging those with whom they deal; and every innkeeper who sells wine to travelers has never had the intention of being useful to them, nor the travelers who stop at his house of making the journey for fear that his provisions might be lost. It is this reciprocal utility which makes the harmony of the world and the maintenance of states; each one thinks of procuring his personal interest to the highest degree and with the greatest ease possible."
Self-interest is not a moral failing to be overcome; it is a fact of human nature, rooted in the individuality of our sensations. It is because I suffer, because I seek the pleasure that will reach me individually, that I develop plans and actions to improve my condition. And it is precisely this pursuit, multiplied across millions of individuals, that produces the harmony of the world.

Free trade: the logical conclusion

Nicolas Baudeau (1730–1792), a Physiocrat economist, drew the ultimate consequence of these principles with devastating directness:
"By what right, if you please, by what motive and for what utility do you decide that such-and-such a kind of durable work shall be done in such-and-such a way and not in any other, by such-and-such a person and not by any other? For either I shall find my pleasure and my advantage in enjoying things thus, or I shall find it in enjoying them otherwise, I, the legitimate possessor of a good acquired by my labor, who can employ it for my well-being. If I find my pleasure and advantage in consuming such-and-such an object, in having such-and-such a worker labor for me and in having him labor thus, your regulations and your privileges are quite useless to him. If I do not find it there, if I find it on the contrary in the object you prohibit, in the person you exclude, you manifestly violate my liberty, my property; you prevent, you restrict my enjoyments. Now that is precisely the moral evil, the offense, the usurpation, that is precisely what authority ought to prevent."
Free trade is the logical extension of all these principles. If I am the legitimate owner of a good, acquired by my labor or by a previous exchange, then who has the authority to prevent me from exchanging it for another good that pleases me more? To forbid such an exchange is to violate my liberty and my property simultaneously. The liberal economists of the 18th and 19th centuries did not invent a theory; they observed facts about human nature and drew their consequences with rigorous consistency.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
What does the text suggest would happen if a regulatory state intervenes in individual work choices?