Progress pill
Sophisms of unfreedom

The international fallacy: national property before private property

Freedom as a Social Project

The international fallacy: national property before private property

  • The socialist attack on private property
  • How national property is born
  • The variable-geometry recognition of property
  • Taxation and regulation as territorial aggression

The socialist attack on private property

Socialist and communist thought takes a particularly paradoxical theoretical stance on property. These currents of thought regularly attack private property, holding that the individual appropriation of things and land is contrary to justice. According to this vision, we should live in a world where wealth is distributed in a common and equal manner, or according to a collective, political organisation aimed at balancing the distribution of resources.
Charles Comte, in his Traité de la propriété (1834), meets this attack head-on by grounding property rights in the natural facts of human existence:
Property is not an invention of legislators, nor a convention of citizens. It is a consequence of the nature of man and of his condition on earth. Man must eat to live; to eat he must produce; to produce he must have the use of land and of tools; to make continuous use of land and tools he must have the assurance that he will not be dispossessed of them. Property is nothing more than this assurance, raised to the level of a right. Destroy it, and you destroy not inequality but production itself.
Indeed, the criticism naturally extends to inheritance, seen as an unfair transmission of wealth that should be politically organised rather than left to the free decision of individuals. But this criticism rests on a fundamental confusion. For liberals, inheritance is a logical extension of the right of ownership. If I am truly a proprietor, I have the freedom to do with my wealth as I wish: to give it away, to sell it, or to pass it on to my heirs. Guyot makes this point with characteristic directness in La Tyrannie collectiviste (1893):
To deny the right of inheritance is to deny the right of property. For what is property, if not the power to dispose of a thing as one wishes, including after one's death? A property right that expires with its holder is not a property right; it is a life-lease granted by the state, revocable at the pleasure of the legislator. Call it what you will; do not call it ownership.
In other words, free exchange itself rests on this fundamental respect for the ownership of things and of oneself. Transmitting some or all of one's wealth to one's heirs in no way infringes on the equal rights of others.

How national property is born

To understand the paradox between the socialist rejection of private property and the defence of national property, we must analyse how property is born within its collective and national boundaries. But where does the right of a nation to its territory actually come from?
Comte, in his Traité de la propriété, traces the origin of territorial ownership through a careful historical analysis. Ancestral tribes and human groups took possession of territories, sometimes by violence, but often simply by the first discovery of new lands. This work of discovery was by no means simple: it was accompanied by a considerable effort of conservation in the face of the constant dangers posed by settling in an unfamiliar place.
The transfer of a human group to a new area was fraught with difficulties. People had to survive in unknown conditions when they had previously known where to draw their means of subsistence. They had to fight the climate, the animals of prey, the uncertainty of unknown soil. This work of taking possession was often paid for at the cost of lives. As Comte observes:
The first possessors of a territory did not simply occupy it; they created it, in the only sense that matters economically. They transformed a wilderness into a habitation, a desert into a field, a forest into a village. Their labour is inscribed in the landscape itself. When their descendants inherit this territory, they inherit not merely the land but the accumulated labour of generations. To redistribute this territory by political decree is not to restore justice; it is to confiscate a multigenerational inheritance.
Over the generations, these groups not only extracted their subsistence from the territory but improved it through farming, digging canals, and building roads. This process resembles exactly that by which an individual improves his own property after taking possession of it and clearing it.

The variable-geometry recognition of property

The contradiction becomes apparent when we observe that socialists and communists are perfectly willing to recognise the boundaries and borders of national groups while rejecting private property. What is this, if not a spectacular inconsistency?
In contemporary debates about wars of conquest or attacks by one country against another, they pose as defenders of frontiers. But what is a frontier, if not the recognition of the limits of a group's collective ownership of its territory? To defend frontiers is to recognise that a group of individuals deserves guaranteed respect for its property, even at the cost of armed intervention. Leroy-Beaulieu presses this contradiction with precision in Le Collectivisme (1884):
The socialist defends the frontier of France against the German; the socialist defends the territory of the commune against the neighbouring commune. He recognises, in both cases, a right of collective ownership that entitles the group to exclude all others. And yet, if I apply the same principle to the family, he hesitates. If I apply it to the individual, he protests. But by what logic does the right of ownership appear at the level of the nation and vanish at the level of the person? The socialist has no answer, because there is no rational answer. He is simply more comfortable with large collectives than with small ones.
This position becomes particularly uncomfortable as we descend the community ladder. In micro-states, socialists also respect collective property. But how far down does this respect extend? To a community of a thousand? A hundred? A single family? The first level is, of course, the individual. If we respect the boundaries of property at the level of the group, why not respect them at the individual level?
In other words, this logic reveals that we remain prisoners of ancient tribal conceptions, where collective ownership of a hunting ground was exclusive to all other tribes without being conceived as belonging to the whole human race.
We can also turn the inheritance argument against socialists by asking: why do they defend inheritance in its collective forms? National ownership of land, such as that of France, implies that it is always French people who inherit from French people. Why, then, should the world's dispossessed, those who live in deserts or unfavourable climates, not also inherit? Why not redistribute wealth worldwide? Socialists will not admit it, because they fully recognise the ownership of borders at the national level while refusing to recognise it at the individual level. The inconsistency is complete.

Taxation and regulation as territorial aggression

This analysis also enables us to understand how systems of unfreedom undermine individual autonomy. What is a tax that exceeds its proper function? What is a regulation that goes beyond the protection of rights?
Taxes, when they exceed the legitimate contribution of service for service, constitute a form of territorial aggression against individual property. Bastiat identifies the essential point in La Loi (1850):
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it. Property plundered by law is no less plundered for the formality. The man whose earnings are seized by the tax collector and transferred to a protected industry has been robbed as surely as if a thief had visited him in the night. The only difference is that the legal robber has the police on his side.
Regulation, too, represents a form of dispossession: the homeowner forbidden to paint his house the colour he wishes discovers that his supposed ownership is merely usufruct. These interventions dispossess us of our own property, whether the property of ourselves, of things, or of land. Indeed, the international sophism thus reveals a variable-geometry recognition of property, where states and nations benefit from protection of their collective property, while the individual who acquires goods through work and exchange must endure regulation, supervision, and tutelage.
In other words, the incoherence at the heart of the socialist position on property is not accidental: it reflects a consistent preference for collective power over individual autonomy, for the state over the person, for the group over the man. The liberal tradition, from Comte and Bastiat to Leroy-Beaulieu and Guyot, has identified this preference with precision and answered it with the only argument that can be answered: the equal right of every human being to his own person, his own labour, and the fruits thereof.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
According to the text, what reductio ad absurdum does the argument for national wealth imply when taken to its logical conclusion on a global scale?