[Now updated at my site]

Rothbard has so many amazing works. Some of my favorite of his articles include “The Mantle of Science,” “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” (pdf), “Beyond Is and Ought,” “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” “Left and Right: Prospects for Liberty,” and various chapters in The Ethics of Liberty such as “‘Human Rights’ As Property Rights,” “Knowledge, True and False,” and “Property Rights and the Theory of Contracts.” I think my favorite collection of his works is The Logic of Action One and Two–just chock full of classic, amazing pieces [now online as Economic Controversies]. And yet another favorite is The Free Market Reader–one of the best introductions to free market thinking; see Rothbard’s opening chapter, “Ten Great Economic Myths” (also ch. 2 in another great collection, Making Economic Sense).

Case in point is his stunning, amazing article in The Logic of Action One, “Justice and Property Rights” [and, again, this is also in Economic Controversies]. This piece was published in two forms in 1974: first, in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, and is available online here. The second version was also published in 1974, in Property in a Humane Economy, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, ed. (online here).

Now, The Logic of Action is not online and not easy to find, but this article in my copy of that book is heavily underlined. But luckily the Blumenfeld book is online at Mises.org. The two pieces seem identical but the latter version appends an important concluding paragraph that is not present in the first one:

It might be charged that our theory of justice in property titles is deficient because in the real world most landed (and even other) property has a past history so tangled that it becomes impossible to identify who or what has committed coercion and therefore who the current just owner may be. But the point of the “homestead principle” is that if we don’t know what crimes have been committed in acquiring the property in the past, or if we don’t know the victims or their heirs, then the current owner becomes the legitimate and just owner on homestead grounds. In short, if Jones owns a piece of land at the present time, and we don’t know what crimes were committed to arrive at the current title, then Jones, as the current owner, becomes as fully legitimate a property owner of this land as he does over his own person. Overthrow of existing property title only becomes legitimate if the victims or their heirs can present an authenticated, demonstrable, and specific claim to the property. Failing such conditions, existing landowners possess a fully moral right to their property.

This part was no doubt added by Rothbard to combat the arguments of some, such as some left-libertarians, who want to argue that existing property titles are illegitimate because of their non-immaculate origins and, presumably, ought to be wrested from current nominal owners, especially the wealthy, and I suppose redistributed to the proles.

[Update: See Rothbard’s “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” from Libertarian Forum, vol. 1.6, June 15, 1969, which may be what Kevin Carson has in mind here:

I’m quite friendly to George, and think the lines between individualism and Georgism are a lot less harsh than (say) Tucker would have believed. But I believe a great deal of rent could be eliminated simply by removing subsidies to economic centralization and positive externalties created by taxpayers–not to mention by removing state enforcement of title to vacant and unimproved land. If as much urban infrastructure as possible were funded by user fees, and cities broken up into lots of mixed-use neighborhoods in which residential areas had their own miniature “downtown” cores, differential rent would be far less significant. I think a majority of George’s aims could be achieved by Tucker’s means, or even by a throughgoing application of Rothbard’s means.]

This piece is just so full of great insights. Hoppe has noted previously that there are arguments in Ethics of Liberty that basically anticipated Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights (see my post Hoppe and Intellectual Property: On Standing on the Shoulders of Giants). …

Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…Read More »