Chapter Eleven

Structural Changes: The Abolition of Privilege
A. Reciprocity
The norm of reciprocity seems to be very deeply and universally ingrained in human
nature.1 Alvin Gouldner, in the specific context of taboos against incest as a form of
sexual exploitation, identifies the universal concept of exploitation with deviation from
reciprocity. Human relations normally involve the mutual conferring of benefits, with
both parties participating in a relationship because they see them as beneficial.
Exploitation results from the intrusion of power relations, so that the party with superior
power is able to derive a lopsided benefit from the relationship, receiving benefits from
the other party while providing a smaller quantity of benefits in return. Exploitation, as a
general phenomenon, is unequal exchange resulting from an inequality of power.
Gouldner even suggests "reciprocity imbalance" as a less emotionally charged alternative
to "exploitation."2
Reciprocity was at the heart of the medieval idea of the just price. And contrary to
condescending dismissals by modern economists who treat the just price as a quaint
notion akin to the number of angels on the head of a pin, in fact it was rooted in a
common sense understanding of human nature. It was, precisely, the considerations of
reciprocity mentioned above, that underpinned the popular understanding of equity in
exchange, reflected in the medieval concept of the "just price." Aquinas stated the basis
of just price theory in reciprocity:
....[B]uying and selling seems to have been entered into for the common advantage of
both parties, since, indeed, one lacks what the other has, and the reverse.... But what
is entered into for common advantage ought not to be more burdensome to one party
concerned than to the other. Therefore an agreement ought to be arranged between
them in accordance with an equality of advantage.3
The concept of "just price" as conceived by Church authorities was based on
reciprocity of cost and effort, with cost of production including a remuneration for labor
consistent with one's station.
....[Albertus Magnus] held that two commodities were equal in value, and their

1

See, for example, Alvin Gouldner, "The Norm of Reciprocity," American Sociological Review," 25 (May
1961): 161-179. See also Michael Shermer's extensive discussions of the evolutionary roots of reciprocity,
in The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from
Evolutionary Economics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008).
2
Gouldner, pp. 165-167.
3
Hannah Robie Sewall, The Theory of Value Before Adam Smith. Publications of the American Economic
Association, vol. II, no. 3 (August, 1901), p. 14.

exchange therefore just, if their production represented equal amounts of labour and
expense.... This doctrine was adopted almost word for word by Thomas d'Aquinas,
and having thus been expounded by the two leading authorities, remained supreme
throughout the Scholastic period.4
....No man must ask more than the price fixed, either by public authorities, or,
failing that, by common estimation. True, prices even so will vary with scarcity, for,
with all their rigor, theologians are not so impracticbale as to rule out the effect of
changing supplies. But they will not vary with individual necessity or individual
opportunity. The bugbear is the man who uses, or even creates, a temporary
shortage....
....The dominant conception of Aquinas [was] that prices, though they will vary
with the varying conditions of different markets, should correspond with the labor and
costs of the producer, as the proper basis of the communis estimatio....5
The basis of the just price was also transparent, tending as it did to coincide with a
community's "common estimation" of a reasonable price to recoup production cost and
make a living, and reflecting the common understanding of justice in exchange in a
society where, as Ronald Meek argues, commodity exchange between self-employed
producers predominated:
...[F]or the major part of the period of commodity production as a whole, supply prices
have... been directly or indirectly determined by "values" in Marx's sense. And these supply
prices are by no means hypothetical: for most of the period of commodity production they
have been firmly rooted in the consciousness of the producers themselves. Even in primitive
societies one can see the beginnings of the idea that the exchange of commodities "at their
values" in the Marxian sense is "the rational way, the natural law of their equilibrium". In
quite a few cases, apparently, the prices asked and received for commodities in primitive
markets are based on production costs. The introduction of money, which "materially
simplifies the determination of equivalence", and the gradual extension of commodity
production and exchange within the community, contribute substantially to the growth of
this idea in the consciousness of the producers. After a while, the producers of commodities
come quite naturally to think of the actual price they happen to receive for their commodity
in terms of the extent to which this price deviates from the supply price--i.e., roughly, from
the value of the commodity in Marx's sense. The value of the commodity, although the
market price may not often "tend" to conform to it at any particular stage of development
owing to the existence of certain specific forms of monopoly, state interference, etc.,
characteristic of that stage, is regarded by the producers themselves as a sort of basis from
which the deviations caused by these factors may legitimately be measured.
The idea that the exchange of commodities "at their values" represents the "natural" way

4

Rudolf Kaulla, Theory of the Just Price: A Historical and Critical Study of the Problem of Economic
Value. Translated by Robert D. Hogg (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1940), pp. 37-38.
5
R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Mentor Books, 1926, 1954), p. 42.

of exchanging them was of course often expressed in ethical terms. In other words, it often
took the form of an idea concerning the manner in which exchanges ought to be conducted if
justice was to be done. But ideas as to what constitutes a "fair" exchange come into men's
minds in the first instance from earth and not from heaven. When the small capitalist who is
faced with the competition of a powerful monopolist says that he has the right to receive a
"fair" profit on his capital, or when the peasant who exchanges his produce for that of a
guildsman on disadvantageous terms says that he has a right to receive a "fair" return for his
labour, the standard of "fairness" erected by each of the complainants actually has reference
to the way in which exchanges would in fact be conducted in the real world if the particular
form of monopoly to which he is objecting did not exist. In pre-capitalist times, there must
always have been some commodities which were exchanged more or less at their values, and
some times and localities in which deviations of price from value were relatively small, so
that the "natural" method of exchanging commodities could actually be seen in operation.
For obvious reasons, this "natural" method was regarded as the only really "fair" one. Thus
the persistence of the concept of a "just price" throughout the major part of the precapitalist
period...6

As Meek's discussion of supply prices suggests, there is a great deal of overlap
between the medieval conception of the just price and the "natural price" of the political
economists (the latter being the normal value toward which the prices of reproducible
goods gravitate "in a regime of free competition"). The common estimation of the "just
price" was based on "the prices actually paid over a period of time when there was no
disturbing cause."7
And as Meek also suggests, there is good reason for that overlap: both conceptions
are rooted in the same common-sense understanding of human nature. This
understanding underlay Adam Smith's idea of a "natural value" toward which price
normally fluctuated in a competitive market, exemplified by his famous illustration of the
exchange of deer and beaver, at the ratio of their embodied labor. As James Buchanan
argued, it was based on an implicit understanding of man as a rational utility-maximizer.
Even in so simple a model, why should relative costs determine normal exchange values?
They do so because hunters are assumed to be rational utility-maximizing individuals and
because the positively valued "goods" and the negatively valued "bads" in their utility
functions can be identified. If, for any reason, exchange values should settle in some ratio
different from that of cost values, behavior will be modified. If the individual hunter knows
that he is able, on an outlay of one day's labor, to kill two deer or one beaver, he will not
choose to kill deer if the price of a beaver is three deer, even should he be a demander or
final purchaser of deer alone. He can "produce" deer more cheaply through exchange under
these circumstances.... Since all hunters can be expected to behave in the same way, no deer

6

Ronald L. Meek, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value (New York and London: Monthly Review Press,
1956), pp. 294-296. (As we shall see in the next section, the medieval concept of usury was in fact closely
associated with the idea of unequal exchange resulting from extra-economic power, in exactly the way
Meek describes here.)
7
W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce. Vol. 1 (The Early Middle Ages) .
Fourth Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), p. 253.

will be produced until and unless the expected exchange value returns to equality with the
cost ratio. Any divergence between expected exchange value and expected cost value in this
model would reflect irrational behavior on the part of the hunters.
In this interpretation, the classical theory embodies the notion of opportunity cost. To
the hunter at the point of an allocative decision, the cost of a beaver is two deer and the cost
of a deer is one-half a beaver. At an expected exchange ratio of one for two, each
prospective hunter must be on the margin of indifference. Physical production and
production-through-exchange yield identical results. Labor time, the standard for
measurement, is the common denominator in which the opportunity costs are computed.8

Proudhon put it in similar terms, and likewise framed it in terms of the common sense
understanding of the producers actually engaged in the transaction:
How many nails is a pair of shoes worth? If we can solve this appalling problem,, we
shall have the key to social system which humanity has sought for six thousand years.
Facing this problem, the economist is confused and retreats; the peasant who can neither read
nor write replies without hesitation: "As many as can be made in the same time and with the
same expense."9

When the market is free from obstructions and privilege, the tendency is for embodied
labor-time (or in more sophisticated terms, embodied effort) to equalize itself through the
free movement of labor into those occupations that command the highest returns in terms
of others' labor--the same mechanism described by Buchanan, above. That is, by what
both Smith and his radical disciple Hodgskin called the "the higgling of the market":
Smith: It is often difficult to ascertain the proportion between two different quantities of
labour. The time spent in two different sorts of work will not always alone determine this
proportion. The different degrees of hardship endured, and of ingenuity exercised, must
likewise be taken into account. There may be more labour in an hour's hard work than in two
hour's easy business; or in an hour's application to a trade which it cost ten years' labour to
learn, than in a month's industry at an ordinary and obvious employment. But it is not easy to
find any accurate measure either of hardship or ingenuity. In exchanging, indeed, the
different productions of different sorts of labour for one another, some allowance is
commonly made for both. It is adjusted, however, not by any accurate measure, but by the
higgling and bargaining of the market, according to that sort of rough equality which, though
not exact, is sufficient to carry on the business of common life.10
Hodgskin: ....There is no principle or rule, as far as I know, for dividing the produce of
joint labour among the different individuals who concur in production, but the judgment of

8

James Buchanan, Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory, vol. 6 of Collected Works
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999) 4.
9
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? Edited and translated by Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G.
Smith (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 106.
10
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago, London,
Toronto: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), p. 13.

the individuals themselves....
....If all kinds of labour were perfectly free..., there would be no difficulty on this point,
and the wages of individual labour would be justly settled by what Dr Smith calls the
"higgling of the market."11

Franz Oppenheimer expounded, at greater length, on the actual process by which this
would be done: under the inducements of a truly free labor market, labor would
distribute itself among employments until incomes became "equal"--in our terms, equal in
relation to given quantities of subjectively perceived effort.12 Oppenheimer, in "A PostMortem on Cambridge Economics," quoted with approval Adam Smith's claim that "[t]he
whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and
stock must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to
equality." He also quoted, with like approval, Johann Henirich von Thuenen's posited
equilibrium at which "labor of equal quality is equally rewarded in all branches of
production...."13
Reciprocity (or mutuality, or commutative justice) was central to Proudhon's
economic thought. In a passage in Volume II of System of Economical Contradictions
(with a phrase at the end that ought to be good for a yelp from the Randroids), he wrote
The theory of mutuality, or mutuum, that is to say exchange in kind, of which the
simplest form is the loan for consumption, where the collective body is concerned, is the
synthesis of the notions of private property and collective ownership. This synthesis is as old
as its constituent parts since it merely means that society is returning through a maze of
inventions and systems, to its primitive practices as a result of a six-thousand-year-long
meditation on the fundamental proposition that A=A.14

And in Political Capacity of the Working Class:
....[The mutualist principle] is service for service, product for product, loan for loan,
insurance for insurance, credit for credit, security for security, guarantee for guarantee. It is
the ancient law of retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, as it were
turned upside down and transferred from criminal law and the vile practices of the vendetta

11

Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (New York: Augustus M. Kelley,
1963 (1823)), pp. 83-86.
12
Eduard Heimann, “Franz Oppenheimer’s Economic Ideas,” Social Research (February 1949), p. 34.
13
Franz Oppenheimer, “A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part I),” The American Journal of
Economics and Sociology 1942/43 pp. 373-374.
14
System of Economical Contradictions, vol. II, quoted in Stewart Edwards, ed., Selected Writings of P.J.
Proudhon (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 57-59. Edwards mistakenly attributes it to the
first volume; but it is, in fact, from the second. Although vol. II was never translated in its entirety, the
passage appeared, in English translation, in The Spirit of the Age I, 7 (August 18, 1849). The translation
here is a different one; like most of the material in Edwards' collection, it was translated by Elizabeth
Frazer. The version that appeared in Spirit of the Age, in its entirety, can be found at Shawn Wilbur's In the
Libertarian Labyrinth archive site (I'm indebted for his help in clearing up the source of the material)
<http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2007/03/proudhon-coming-era-of-mutualism.html>.

to economic law, to the tasks of labor and to the good offices of free fraternity. On it depend
all the mutualist institutions: mutual insurance, mutual credit, mutual aid, mutual education;
reciprocal guarantees of openings, exchanges and labor for good quality and fairly priced
goods, etc.15

The "synthesis... of private property and collective ownership" anticipates Tucker's
argument that market competition, in the absence of privilege and artificial scarcity,
causes the benefits of private property to be socialized. As Stephen Pearl Andrews
commented:
One side of the truth of the subject, the individualistic side, Warren, more fortunate than
Proudhon, did discover and formulate; the other side, the opposite and counterparting side, is
communism, best represented as yet, on any large scale, by the Oneida Perfectionists. These
two opposite ideas and types of life are to be reconciled and united, not merely despite of
their appositeness, but because of their oppositeness. Everything that approximates
perfection is made up, primarily, of two opposite factors.16

The perfect expression of mutuality was the contract between equals, both
"synallagmatic" (bilateral) and "commutative" (reciprocal, based on an exchange of equal
values).17
For Proudhon, unequal exchange was the defining characteristic of exploitation:
...If... the tailor, for rendering the value of a day's work, consumes ten times the product
of the day's work of the weaver, it is as if the weaver gave ten days of his life for one day of
the tailor's. This is exactly what happens when a peasant pays twelve francs to a lawyer for a
document which it takes him an hour to prepare....
Every error in commutative justice is an immolation of the laborer, a transfusion of the
blood of one man into the body of another....18

The principle of reciprocity is built into the normal functioning of a free market.
When exchange is free and uncoerced, it is impossible for one party to benefit at another's
expense. The ratio at goods and services are exchanged will move toward a value that
reflects the respective costs of the parties, including the disutility of their labor. If one
party is able to find another exchange that provides a higher degree of utility, he will
choose it in preference to the lesser utility. And if one party receives a producer surplus
or rent above his costs, and market entry is free from barriers, others will find it profitable
to offer a better deal. The normal pattern of free exchange is cost for cost, effort for

15

Political Capacity of the Working Class, in Edwards, ed., pp. 59-60.
Stephen Pearl Andrews, "Proudhon and His Translator," The Index, June 22, 1876. Formatted by Shawn
Wilbur at Libertarian Labyrinth <http://libertarian-labyrinth.org/theindex/1876-tucker-andrews.pdf>.
17
Proudhon, The Principle of Federation. Translated by Richard Vernon (Toronto, Buffalo, London:
University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 36.
18
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, or, The Philosophy of Misery, translated
by Benjamin R. Tucker (Boston: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1888), p. 123.
16

effort, disutility for disutility, so that things equal out through the "higgling of the
market." Or as Proudhon described it,
Whoever says commerce says exchange of equal values, for if the values are not equal
and the injured party perceives it, he will not consent to the exchange, and there will be no
commerce.19
....What characterizes the contract is the agreement for equal exchange; and it is by virtue
of this agreement that liberty and well-being increase; while by the establishment of
authority, both of these necessarily diminish....
Between contracting parties there is necessarily for each one a real personal interest; it
implies that a man bargains with the aim of securing his liberty and the loss of revenue at the
same time, without any possible loss. Between governing and governed, on the contrary, no
matter how the system of representation or of delegation of the governmental function is
arranged, there is necessarily alienation of a part of the liberty and of the means of the
citizen....
The contract therefore is essentially reciprocal: it imposes no obligation upon the
parties, except that which results from their personal promise of reciprocal delivery: it is not
subject to any external authority: it alone forms the law between the parties: it awaits their
initiative for execution....
The social contract should increase the well-being and liberty of every citizen. -- If any
one-sided conditions should slip in; if one part of the citizens should find themselves, by the
contract, subordinated or exploited by the others, it would no longer be a contract; it would
be a fraud, against which annulment might at any time be invoked justly.20
....For no one has a right to impose his own merchandise upon another: the sole judge of
utility, or in other words the want, is the buyer.... Take away reciprocal liberty, and
exchange is no longer the expression of industrial solidarity: it is robbery.21

Coercive intervention, on the other hand, forces one party to a contract to accept a
lower-ranking preference than he otherwise would, in order to provide the other party
with his preference at a lower cost. Murray Rothbard described the principle in Man,
Economy, and State. Although he wrote of slavery in particular, his description applied
to all forms of compulsory exchange or coercive state intervention:
....In this form of compulsory exchange... only the ruler benefits from the exchange, since
he is the only one who makes it of his own free choice. Since he must impose the threat of
violence in order to induce the subject to make the exchange, it is clear that the latter loses
by the exchange. The master uses the subject as a factor of production for his own profit at
the latter’s expense, and this hegemonic relationship may be called exploitation. Under

19

Proudhon, What is Property?, p. 103.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. Trans. by John
Beverley Robinson (New York: Haskell House Publishers, Inc., 1923, 1969), pp. 113-114.
21
Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, pp. 80-81.
20

hegemonic exchange, the ruler exploits the subject for the ruler’s benefit.22
....[I]nter-vention will have direct, immediate consequences on the utilities of those
participating. On the one hand, when the society is free and there is no intervention,
everyone will always act in the way that he believes will maximize his utility, i.e., will raise
him to the highest possible position on his value scale. In short, everyone’s utility ex ante
will be “maximized”.... Any exchange on the free market, indeed any action in the free
society, occurs because it is expected to benefit each party concerned. If we may use the term
“society” to depict the pattern, the array, of all individual exchanges, then we may say that
the free market maximizes social utility, since everyone gains in utility from his free actions.
Coercive intervention, on the other hand, signifies per se that the individual or
individuals coerced would not have voluntarily done what they are now being forced to do by
the intervener.... The man being coerced, therefore, always loses in utility as a result of the
intervention, for his action has been forcibly changed by its impact....
Who gains in utility ex ante? Clearly, the intervener; otherwise, he would not have made
the intervention....
In contrast to the free market, therefore, all cases of intervention supply one set of men
with gains at the expense of another set....
....Voluntary exchanges, in any given period, will increase the utility of everyone and
will therefore maximize social utility.23

B. Privilege and Inequality
In the real world, the law of reciprocity is often honored in the breach; coercive
intervention in the market, as we saw in the previous section, violates the principle of
reciprocity and in so doing benefits some at the expense of others. We also see a high
degree of inequality. As R. A. Wilson suggested, the two phenomena just might be
related:
Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage.... "In
the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal
goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal
goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such
mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder
than others. But in total freedom— in anarchy— such unequal exchanges will be sporadic
and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now
look about you, professor— raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual
world as it is— and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe,

22

Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn University,
Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1962, 1993), p. 71.
23
Ibid., pp. 768-770.

instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an
equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is
not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the
determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it
yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B
in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege;
hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is
on the other side of the Iron Curtain....24

Anna Morgenstern, of Tranarchy blog, described the phenomenon in terms quite
similar to Wilson's:
Once a pocket of unmet demand is discovered, under anarchy, capital will flow in that
direction and will arbitrage out the profit opportunity pretty rapidly.
So while there will always be profit making going on somewhere in the economy, it will
never consistently flow to the same people. If it does, that is prima facie evidence of violent
intervention or fraud, IMO.
This is just one reason why I don't think anarchy will have a large inequality of wealth.25

Thus the so-called "Matthew Effect": "To him that hath, more shall be given." In
somewhat more scientific terms, it is sometimes referred to as "Pareto's law."
It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. "People on the whole have normally
distributed attributes, talents and motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that
are much more unequal than that," says Robin Marris, emeritus professor of economics at
Birkbeck, University of London....
In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that the distribution of
wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law pattern, which essentially meant that the
extremely rich hogged most of a nation's wealth (New Scientist print edition, 19 August
2000). Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very rich, and not
necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the rest.
Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the vast majority of people
are governed by a completely different law. Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of
Maryland in College Park, US, and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal
Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001.
They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy - about 3% of
the population - does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97% fitted a different
curve - one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas...26

24

The Illuminatus! Trilogy Note on Austrian dogma
Comment under Kevin Carson, "Chapter Seven Draft," Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism,
November 12, 2007 <http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/11/chapter-seven-draft.html>.
26
Jenny Hogan, "Why it's hard to share the wealth," New Scientist, March 12, 2005.
25

The reason, as we saw at the close of the previous section, is that privilege--coercion-creates a zero-sum situation in which one party benefits at the expense of the other.
There is a symmetrical relationship between one party's gain and the other party's loss.
As Ricardo described the relationship of landlords to capitalists and laborers, "The
dealings between the landlord and the public are not like dealings in trade, whereby both
the seller and the buyer may equally be said to gain, but the loss is wholly on one side,
and the gain wholly on the other."27
A monopoly creates artificial scarcity, so that the holder of the monopoly privilege
benefits at the expense of the public, who, forced to pay for something that is not
naturally scarce, are absolute losers in the transaction. Stephen Pearl Andrews divided
society into opposing classes of net exploiters and net exploited:
The whole community may be divided... into those who receive more than equivalents
for their labor and those who receive less than equivalents....
It is clear, if this exchange is not equal, if one party gives more of his own labor... than
he gets of the labor of the other, ... that he is oppressed, and becomes so far as this inequality
goes, the slave or subject of the other. He has, just so far, to expend his labor, not for his
own benefit, but for the benefit of another.28

Benjamin Tucker, the inheritor of this tradition, treated state intervention as a zerosum game:
To-day (pardon the paradox!) society is fundamentally anti social. The whole so-called
social fabric rests on privilege and power, and is disordered and strained in every direction
by the inequalities that necessarily result therefrom. The welfare of each, instead of
contributing to that of all, as it naturally should and would, almost invariably detracts from
that of all. Wealth is made by legal privilege a hook with which to filch from labor’s pockets.
Every man who gets rich thereby makes his neighbor poor. The better off one is, the worse
off the rest are. As Ruskin says, every grain of calculated Increment to the rich is balanced by
its mathematical equivalent of Decrement to the poor. The Laborer’s Deficit is precisely
equal to the Capitalist’s Efficit.29

Or as Big Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't work for, there's
another man who worked for a dollar he didn't get.
Perhaps the best summary of the nature of privilege is that of William Batchelder
Greene: "It is right that all persons should be equal before the law; but when we have

<http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7107>.
David Ricardo (1817)
28
Stephen Pearl Andrews, Science of Society, Pt. II:54, 57.
29
Benjamin R. Tucker, "Socialism: What it Is," Instead of a Book, pp. 361-362.
27

established equality before the law, our work is but half done. We ought to have EQUAL
LAWS also. Of what avail is it that we are all equal before the law, if the law is itself
unequal."30
The social and organizational pathologies we examined in the second and third parts
of this book all result from coercive interference with the natural expression of the
principle of reciprocity in voluntary market exchange. Coercion benefits one party at the
other's expense by forcing the other to accept a lesser utility. It creates an externality by
forcing one party to bear the other's costs. When exchange is uncoerced, the outcome is
Pareto optimal. Every party enters the exchange because it offers the highest utility of all
available alternatives--and there is no artificial limitation on the availability of
alternatives. Government, on the other hand, is in the business of limiting alternatives.
This limitation of alternatives by government coercion in order to enable the owners
of the remaining alternatives to collect rent on them, is what Franz Oppenheimer meant
by defining privilege as the "political means" to wealth ("unrequited appropriation of the
labor of others"), as opposed to the "economic means" ("one's own labor and the
equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others").31 The political means is
to collect tribute through artificial scarcity: political action to limit the available
alternatives (especially through the political appropriation of land).
Oppenheimer approved, conditionally, the contention of "bourgeois economics" that
the division of society into an exploited and exploiting class could not take place until the
land had been completely appropriated and vacant land was no longer freely available for
homesteading:
All teachers of natural law, etc., have unanimously declared that the differentiation into
income-receiving classes and propertyless classes can only take place when all fertile lands
have been occupied. For so long as man has ample opportunity to take up unoccupied land,
"no one," says Turgot, "would think of entering the service of another...."32
...This equality remained unshaken as long as there was still free land available for
everyone who wanted it; for, evidently, in Turgot's phrase, "No well man will be willing to
work for another, as long as he can take for himself as much land as he wants to cultivate."33

Where he differed was in his understanding of how the land had come to be
completely appropriated:

30

William Batchelder Greene, Equality, No. 1 (1849). Online text edited by Shawn Wilbur at Libertarian
Labyrinth. <http://libertarian-labyrinth.org/mutual/wbg-equality.html>.
31
Franz Oppehneimer, The State, Free Life Edition, translated by John Gitterman (San Francisco: Fox &
Wilkes, 1914, 1997), p. 14.
32
Oppehneimer, The State, p. 6.
33
Oppenheimer, "A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part Two)," The American Journal of
Economics and Sociology, vol. 2, no. 4 ((a943), p. 534.

Now it is true that the class State can only arise where all fertile acreage has been
occupied completely; and since I have shown that even at the present time, all the ground is
not occupied economically,34 this must mean that it has been preempted politically. Since
land could not have acquired "natural scarcity," the scarcity must have been "legal." This
means that the land has been preempted by a ruling class against its subject class, and
settlement prevented.35
....Nowhere in the world has the land been appropriated by small and medium free
peasants, "until the holdings," as Rousseau remarked "couching one another, covered the
whole country." Even in the most densely populated countries, at the present time whan the
population has increased beyond all former experience, many more holdings of that size
could exist than the number that would be needed to provide for their whole agrarian
population, family operating owners, tenants and landless laborers combined.
Of course, the differentiation into classes proves that the whole land is covered by
holdings. But this has not ocurred only because peasants have taken up small and mediumsized farms in gradual, peaceful settlement.36

Rather, the land has been universally appropriated by political means: the entire
supply of vacant land has been engrossed by one landed aristocracy or another, and their
artificial titles to vacant and unimproved land used either to exclude laborers who might
otherwise cultivate them as an alternative to wage employment, or to collect tribute from
those who rightfully appropriate it through cultivation. The result is that, as Mill said,
"The population of each country may be considered as composed, in unequal proportions,
of two distinct nations or races: the first the proprietors of the land, the latter the tillers of
it."37 Henry George, Jr., made a similar observation in The Menace of Privilege,
contrasting the high wages and lack of either severe poverty or great riches in eighteenth
century America, when "easy access to land made it a comparatively simple matter for all
men to get subsistence,"38 to the appearance of great disparities in wealth when most land
had been politically appropriated in the nineteenth century.39
Not that all this vast territory is settled and in use. Far from it. There are thousands upon
thousands of square miles of productive, accessible land that would yield bountifully to

34

In the United States, Nock observed in the 1930s, if the settlement of land had occurred "in a natural
way..., our western frontier would not be anywhere near the Mississippi River." In Rhode Island, the most
densely populated state at that time, it was possible to drive across the state on a major highway and see
almost no sign of human occupancy. "All discussions of 'over-population' from Malthus down, are based
on the premise of legal occupancy instead of actual occupancy, and are therefore utterly incompetent and
worthless." Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delavan, Wisc.: Hallberg Publishing Corporation,
1983), p. 67n.
35
Oppenheimer, The State, p. 8.
36
Oppenheimer, "A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part Two)," p. 534.
37
Franz Oppenheimer, "A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part Two)," p. 535.
38
Henry George, Jr., The Menace of Privilege, Chapter One (part one),
<http://www.progress.org/archive/hgjr1a.htm>; Chapter One (conclusion),
<http://www.progress.org/archive/hgjr1b.htm>
39
Ibid., Chapter Two (part one), <http://www.progress.org/archive/hgjr2a.htm>

labor.... But it is not used. It is preempted and belongs to this or that individual, who chooses
to hold it, not for use, but for what it will bring its owners when the increasing population
has made a greater demand for it. The owners ask for its present use a price based upon their
expectation of its value for the future. Vast quantities of unused land can be had, but not
from the Government, and free, as of yore. It is to be had only from private owners and on
the payment of a price -- a price that the growing needs of the community and the monopoly
power of speculation is constantly augmenting.40

George fils explained the derivation of the term "privilege" as private law, or class
legislation benefiting one group of individuals at the expense of another:
Now the word "privilege" means not a natural, but an artificial condition. Even its
derivation shows that. It comes from the Latin privilegium, meaning an ordinance in favor of
a person; and privilegium comes from privus, private, and lex or legem, a law. Hence, in its
essence, the word "privilege" means a private law, a special ordinance or a usage equivalent
to a grant or an immunity in favor of a particular person.41

And the primary effect of privilege, as we have already seen, is to "empower their holders
to appropriate, without compensation or adequate compensation, a large or small share of
the produce of labor."42
Although Oppenheimer's primary focus (like that of all Georgists) was on the political
appropriation of land as a form of artificial scarcity, the same principle of artificial
scarcity applies to all form of privilege. The present global corporate economy, for
instance, depends primarily on the enforcement of artificial scarcity by so-called
"intellectual property" (although old-fashioned land theft and eviction of peasant
subsistence farmers still deserves honorable mention for its role in promoting sweatshop
labor and reducing the bargaining power of those engaged in it).
The general distinction between the political and economic means was developed
independently by a wide range of thinkers: by Saint-Simon and Comte in France, and by
Enlightenment radicals like Paine and Godwin and Ricardian socialists like Thomas
Hodgskin in England, among many others.43 Samuel Edward Konkin III made it the basis
of his agorist class theory, which he erected as an alternative to Marxian class theory:
1. The State is the main means by which people live by plunder; the Market, in
contradistinction, is the sum of human action of the productive.
2. The State, by its existence, divides society into a plundered class and a plundering

40

Ibid., Chapter Eight (part one), <http://www.progress.org/archive/hgjr8a.htm>
Ibid., Chapter Two (part one).
42
Ibid., Chapter Two (conclusion), <http://www.progress.org/archive/hgjr2b.htm>
43
This is the theme of an excellent historical survey by David M. Hart and Walter E. Grinder, "The Basic
Tenets of Real Liberalism. Part IV Continued: Interventionism, Social Conflict and War," Humane Studies
Review vol. 3 no. 1 (1986), pp. 1-7
41

class.44

According to R.H. Tawney, the broad concept of usury in the middle ages roughly
corresponded to unequal exchange, extortion, or "taking advantage." It included "the
raising of prices by a monopolist" and rack-renting of land, among other things.
Although the term was not carefully defined, it generally applied to "any bargain, in
which one party obviously gained more advantage than the other, and used his power to
the full."45
For Adam Smith, as John Commons observed, the disutility of labor was the cause
and regulator of value (this was also the basis, as we saw in the first section, of medieval
notions of justice in exchange). Labor's disutility created value by restricting output of
reproducible goods, when the worker considered the income to be too low relative to the
labor-pain entailed in production. It regulated value by shifting labor from employments
where income was low relative to pain to employments where it was high relative to pain,
and thus equalizing pain per unit of income. This was also the basis of Smith's critique of
mercantilism and other forms of privilege. Privilege resulted in an unequal distribution of
labor-pain per unit of income, and imposed pain on some for the benefit of others:
Man was condemned to labor--that was true on account of the original sin. He was
compelled to lay down a portion of his ease, liberty, and happiness, in order that goods might
be produced. But this should be done fairly. No individual should be compelled to suffer
more than any other individual in his capacity of producing, accumulating, and exchanging
use-values for the good of his fellow men.46
Having identified his automatic regulator of scarcity-value with the quantity of laborpain, Smith proceeds to inquire why it is that, upon the labor-market, the price (exchangevalue) of labor does not, under existing conditions, coincide with the quantity of labor-pain
delivered in exchange for the produce. All of these discrepancies we shall find to be various
aspects of artificial scarcity controlled by custom, sovereignty, or other collective action,
instead of regulated automatically by quantity of labor-pain.... Among these restrictions
were exclusive privileges of corporations (guilds), long apprenticeship, understandings
between competitors, free education at public expense, state regulation of wages, price

44

Samuel Edward Konkin III, "Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class Theory," New Libertarian
Notes no. 28 (December 1973), reproduced in Wally Conger, Agorist Class Theory: A Left Libertarian
Approach to Class Conflict Analysis (Movement of the Libertarian Left, 2006).
45
R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism pp. 130-131.
46
John R. Commons, Institutional Economics (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 203-204. The radical
Thomas Hodgskin in Great Britain, as well as some of the American individualists, were influenced by
Smith in their understanding of the labor theory of value. Hodgskin, like Smith, saw labor's repugnance as
the basis of its value-creating capacity. In the United States, Stephen Pearl Andrews wrote that "by cost is
meant the amount of labor bestowed on [a good's] production, that measure being again measured by the
painfulness or repugnance of the labor itself" (Science of Society Pt. II:20), and identified cost with "the
amount of repugnance overcome." (Ibid., Pt. II:79); Benjamin Tucker argued that absent monopoly there
would be "no price where there is no burden..." And elsewhere, "Is there any just basis of price except
cost? And is there anything that costs except labor or suffering (another name for labor)?" (Instead of a
Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One, pp. 214, 403).

fixing, tariffs, bounties levied in order to maintain a favorable balance of trade, and
obstructing the free circulation of labor and stock [capital] by poor laws.
But even if these mercantilist interferences with liberty were eliminated, there were still
two other proprietary claimants, the landlords and the capitalist employers, who, even under
conditions of perfect liberty, prevented the accurate proportionment between labor-pain and
wages. These other two claimants, who introduced the factor of proprietary scarcity, were
examples of the Common Law of Private Property. "As soon as the land of any country has
all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never
sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."47

Profits on capital, likewise, were regulated both by the value of the capital employed
and by combination among masters to keep down wages.48 As most of the radical
classical liberals argued, much if not most nominal "private property" in land is artificial,
and thus a form of artificial scarcity created by privilege. And as we shall see later, much
of the value of capital results from artificial scarcity created by the state's banking laws.
Thomas Hodgskin, writing in regard to the illegitimate "property" rights of England's
landed oligarchy, made the crucial distinction between natural and artificial rights of
property. Natural property rights are simply "a man's right to the free use of his own
mind and limbs, and to appropriate whatever he creates by his own labour...." 49Artificial
rights, he said, are "the power of throwing the necessity to labour off [one's] own
shoulders... by the appropriation of other men's produce," and "[t]he power... possessed
by idle men to appropriate the produce of labourers...."50
...[C]ertain classes, it may be said, do not labour.... The receivers of rent and profit
subsist on the producer of other men's labour; so do those who live on taxes.... Social laws
may compel some classes to labour for other classes, or may even give the whole annual
produce to those who never labour. If we admit that the members of the government, and the
ministers of the church, are labourers, ... we cannot say the same for the slave-owners of the
West Indies...: we cannot say the same for the landlords and fund holders of England, and
for other similar classes. They are all subsisted and supported, supplied with all their wealth,
by the labour of the slaves in the West Indies, or of the toil-worn and half-starved slavedescended labourers of Europe.51

Social regulations and commercial prohibitions, he said, "compel us to employ more
labour than is necessary to obtain the prohibited commodity," or "to give a greater
quantity of labour to obtain it than nature requires," and put the difference into the
pockets of privileged classes.52

47

Ibid., pp. 207-208.
Ibid., p. 208.
49
Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics'
Institution (London: Printed for Charles and William Tait, Edinburgh, 1827), pp. 236-237.
50
Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, pp. 30, 237.
51
Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, pp. 29-30.
52
Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, pp. 33-34.
48

While Hodgskin defended the natural right of property without hesitation, he ridiculed
those who wanted to "preserve... inviolate" the "existing right of property" or to hold it
"sacred against the claims of the labourer to own whatever and all which he produces."
Hodgskin's distinction between natural and artificial property rights overlaps
considerably with similar distinctions made by other thinkers. Proudhon, for example,
distinguished "property" from "possession"; when he said "property is theft," by
"property" he meant "artificial property" or "privilege." In the words of Commons,
"[Proudhon] did not mean the individual property that a person owns resulting from his
own labor or from free negotiations with others whose property also resulted from their
own labor."53
In the same vein, as we saw above, Oppenheimer distinguished political appropriation
of the land from actual appropriation, and Albert Jay Nock distinguished "labour-made"
from "law-made" property.54
As our treatment of Proudhon suggests, artificial property rights in land are
paradigmatic of artificial property rights in general. The same distinction in princple
between natural and artificial property rights in land is made, in analogous manner,
between natural and artificial property rights in all other areas. The same principle
applies to patents and copyrights, business and occupational licenses, and every other
form of privilege: natural property rights reflect scarcity, while artificial property rights
create it; natural property rights secure the individual's right to his own labor-product,
while artificial property rights entitle the holder to collect tribute on the labor-product of
others; natural property rights entitle the holder to a return for his contributions to
production, while artificial property rights entitle the holder to collect a toll for not
impeding production.
Thus, in response to the proprietor's claim not only to have labored but to have
provided employment to those otherwise without means of support, Proudhon challenged:
You have laboured! Have you never made others labour? Why, then, have they lost in
labouring for you what you have gained in not labouring for them?
You have laboured! Very well, but let us see your creations. We will count, weigh, and
measure them. It will be the judgment of Balthasar; for I swear by this balance, level, and
square, that if you have appropriated another's labour in any way whatsoever, you shall
restore it to the last iota.55

53

Commons, Institutional Economics, p. 368.
Nock, Our Enemy, the State, p. 80.
55
Proudhon, What is Property?, p. 69.

54

Like the children of Israel in Canaan, the proprietor reaps where he did not sow.56
Because of the near-universal appropriation of land, most of it vacant and unimproved
land held out of use, labor's ability to create wealth for the laborer is impeded, and instead
becomes a means of creating wealth for the proprietor. Artificial property rights in land
give the proprietor, as a result, property rights in the labor of others:
....A philosopher, arguing that all animals were originally born from the earth warmed by
the rays of the sun..., was asked why the earth no longer yielded crops of that nature; and he
answered: "Because it is old, and has lost its fertility." Has labour, once so fertile, also
become sterile? Why does the tenant no longer acquire through his labour the land formerly
acquired by the labour of the proprietor?
"The reason, they said, "is that it is already appropriated."57

Privilege enables the holder of property rights to appropriate the productivity of
nature or society for himself, and to stand in for "society" or "nature" in charging users
according to their benefit--despite having done nothing to provide that benefit. The
"value" of the service, i.e. the price he is able to charge for access, depends entirely on its
positive utility to the buyer; so he is able to follow the standard method of monopoly
pricing and target his price to the buyer's ability to pay.
According to Carey and Bastiat, and contrary to Ricardo and the communists and
anarchists, the landlord or capitalist rendered a service to the community as much as did the
laborer. The value of this service was the alternative price which the employer or laborer
would be compelled to pay if he did not pay rent to the landlord, or profit and interest to the
capitalist. He was better off by paying rent for superior land than he would be by going to
the margin of cultivation where no rent was paid, and better off by paying profits and
interest to capitalists than b working for marginal capitalists who made no profits.58

But Bastiat and Carey do not distinguish "productivity" and "service" from the rents
on artificial scarcity. For Bastiat, the landlord and capitalist contribute a "service"
equivalent to the alternative cost if his land or capital were not available. The "unearned
accrual of social value," in the form of improved land and technology, is provided by
"society" to the laborer at far below its value to him. If the rent on land and the profit on
capital are less than the utility the laborer receives from access to them compared to what
his utility would be in the days before improved land and modern production technology
were available, that is actually an unearned rent accruing to labor.
...all this social accrual of value was freely available to present laborers who did not own it,
and thereby "saved" them from the labor they would otherwise be compelled to perform, as
individuals repeating the past history of society, in order to obtain the present necessaries

56

Ibid., p. 119.
Proudhon, What is Property?, p. 86.
58
Commons, Institutional Economics, p. 114.

57

and luxuries.

But for some reason the landlord and the capitalist are allowed to stand in for
"society" in taking credit for the improved land and technology that make increased
productivity possible. Although the laborer did not earn the increased powers of
productivity, which he did not himself produce, the landlord and capitalist apparently
did.59 Actually Bastiat's landlord was in a position, thanks to privilege, to collect tribute
for the productivity gains created by society.
Railroad apologists argued in the nineteenth century that the cost of transporting
wheat by horse over dirt roads was 50 cents per ton-mile; the railroads, therefore, were
doing the farmer a favor by charging only 3 cents per ton-mile, in effect giving the farmer
a consumer surplus of 47 cents. But as Commons pointed out, the proper comparison is
not between the cost of railroad transportation and the cost of transportation by dirt road
fifty years earlier. It is between railroad transportation and the best available alternative
today. And if the best available alternative is rendered worse than it might otherwise
have been, or access to it is restricted, by the railroads' privileges and artificial property
rights, then the 3 cents per mile is an unjust form of tribute.60
Reason magazine's Ron Bailey, shameless apologist for the drug and biotech
industries and all-around corporate cheerleader, has updated the railroaders' argument for
the 20th century. Citing a study that compared the overall economic value to consumers
from increased life expectancy to the cost paid for drugs, he argued (in the words of his
title) that "drug companies don't get enough money... for the life-saving benefits they give
us...."61
Ahem. There's a word for a firm that's able to price a good according to the
consumer's benefit from it: a monopolist. One of the commenters under Bailey's post
summed it up quite eloquently:
Many products generate massive "consumer surplus"--benefit to their purchasers vastly in
excess of their cost--because competition among suppliers drives the cost down to near the
cost of production, rather than up to the level of benefit to the purchasers.

Proudhon illustrated the same principle with regard to the landlord's alleged "service"
or "contribution" to production, in merely not impeding access to land he was not
working himself.
[David] Buchanan, a comentator on [Adam] Smith, regarded farm-rent as the result of a
monopoly and claimed that labor alone is productive....

59

Commons, Institutional Economics, pp. 319-320.
Commons, Institutional Economics, pp. 317-318.
61
Ron Bailey, "Drug Companies Don't Get Enough Money ...," Reason Hit&Run blog, February 22, 2006
<http://www.reason.com/blog/show/112727.html#012727>.
60

Say responds to Buchanan that the proprietor is not a monopolist because a monopolist
"is one who in no way adds to the utility of a product."
How much utility do the products of the farmer receive from the proprietor? Has he
plowed, sowed, reaped, mowed, winnowed, weeded? These are the processes by which the
tenant and his helpers increase the utility of the material which they consume for purposes of
reproduction.
The landed proprietor [Say writes] increases the utility of products by means of his
instrument, the land. This instrument receives the materials of which wheat is composed in
one state and returns it in another. The action of the land is a chemical process which
modifies the material in such a way that it multiplies by destroying it. The soil is thus a
producer of utility, and when it... requires its pay in the form of profit, or farm-rent, for its
proprietor, this is not done without giving something to the consumer in exchange for
whatever the consumer pays it....
Let us clarify this.
The blacksmith who makes farming equipment for the farmer, the wheelright who makes
him a cart, the mason who builds his barn, the carpenter, the basket-maker, etc., all of whom
contribute to agricultural production by the tools they provide, are producers of utility; and to
this extent they have a right to a part of the products.
"Without any doubt," Say says, "but the land is also an instrument whose service must be
paid for, and so..."
I agree that the land is an instrument, but who made it? The proprietor? Did he, by the
efficacious virtue of the right of property, by this moral quality infused into the soil, endow it
with vigour and fertility? The monopoly of the proprietor lies just in the fact that, though he
did not make the implement, he requires payment for its use....
"I admit that the proprietor's service is easy," adds Say--a frank confession.
"But we cannot disregard it. Without property, one farmer would contend with another
to cultivate any field without a proprietor, and the field would lie fallow...."
The role of the proprietor is thus to reconcile farmers by robbing them.... According to
[the economists], the proprietor is like Perrin-Dandin who, when summoned by two
travellers to settle a dispute about an oyster, opened it, devoured it, and said to them: "The
Court awards you each a shell."....
Will Say tell us why the same farmers who, if there were no proprietors, would fight
with each other for possession of the soil, do not fight with the proprietors for this possession
today? Obviously, because they think them legitimate possessors and because their respect
for even an imaginary right exceeds their cupidity.... Would it be more difficult, then, to
reconcile possessors without masters than tenants controlled by proprietors? Would working
men who, to their own cost, respect the pretended rights of the idler, violate the natural rights

of the producer and the manufacturer?62

The land is productive; but its productive forces are freely given by nature. They can
contribute to exchange value only when the free gift of nature is monopolized. The
landlord's only "contribution" to value is that he sits atop the free gift of nature, without
using it himself, and charges others a fee for access to it. His rent, in its essence, is the
toll collected by one of Dobb's gatekeepers (mentioned below). Or as Marx had put it in
volume 3 of Capital,
land becomes personified in the landlord and... gets on its hind legs to demand, as an
independent force, its share of the product created with its help. Thus, not the land receives
its due portion of the product for the restoration and improvement of its productivity, but
instead the landlord takes a share of this product to chaffer away or squander.63

The "trinitarian forumula" of labor-wages, capital-profit, and land-rent is
an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la
Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere
things.64

Benjamin Tucker, ridiculing claims that "whatever contributes to production is
entitled to an equitable share in the distribution," countered: "Wrong! Whoever
contributes to production is alone so entitled. What has no claims that Who is bound to
respect. What is a thing. Who is a person. Things have no claims.... The possession of a
right cannot be predicated of dead material...."65
Tucker criticized, in similar terms, Henry George's "Hodge and Podge" justification
for interest based on the productivity of nature.66 The illustration George used was of one
party, Hodge, charging for the productivity of natural forces: Hodge sold Podge a pail of
boiling water, not merely for the labor cost of fetching it from the stream and building the
fire to heat it, but also for the contribution of a natural force--fire. Profit, Tucker
paraphrased George as saying, is "the capitalist's share of the results of the increased
power which Capital gives the laborer," with "Hodge's boiling water... made a type of all
those products of labor which afterwards increase in utility purely by natural force."
Nevertheless, George argued that this share was not a deduction from the laborer's
earnings.
As Tucker pointed out, this is economic nonsense: "Where there is free competition
in the manufacture and sale of spades, the price of a spade will be governed by the cost of

62

Proudhon, What is Property?, pp. 124-126.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital vol. 3, vol. 37 of Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York:
International Publishers, 1998), p. 811.
64
Ibid., p. 817.
65
Benjamin R. Tucker, "Capital's Claim to Increase," Instead of a Book, p. 184.
66
Tucker, "Economic Hodge-Podge," Instead of a Book, pp. 202-205.
63

its production, and not by the value of the extra potatoes which the spade will enable its
purchaser to dig." Only when someone has a monopoly on the supply of spades, can he
charge according to utility to the user rather than cost of production. In that case, he can
pocket most of the proceeds of increased productivity, and leave the purchaser just
enough of the net increase in potatoes to persuade him to buy the spade. And the
monopolist's price is clearly a deduction from the wages of labor:
What are the normal earnings of other men? Evidently what they can produce with all the
tools and advantages which they can procure in a free market without force or fraud. If, then,
the capitalist, by abolishing the free market, compels other men to procure their tools and
advantages of him on less favorable terms than they could get before, while it may be better
for them to come to his terms than to go without the capital, does he not deduct from their
earnings?

Hodge, therefore, will be able to charge Podge according to what the natural process
of combustion contributes to the boiling of water, only if he can monopolize the boiling
of water. Otherwise, competitors will drive the price down to the actual cost of
performing the service, which does not include services provided free of charge by nature.
It is ironic that George should have failed to grasp this principle in the case of capital,
because it was the basis for his criticism of land monopoly: the injustice of monopolizing
natural opportunities in order to collect tribute from the labor of others.
He does not see that capital in the hands of labor is but the utilization of a natural force or
opportunity, just as land is in the hands of labor, and that it is as proper in the one case as in
the other that the, benefits of such utilization of natural forces should be enjoyed by the
whole body of consumers....
The truth in both cases is just this, - that nature furnishes man immense forces with
which to work in the shape of land and capital, that in a state of freedom these forces benefit
each individual to the extent that he avails himself of them, and that any man or class getting
a monopoly of either or both will put all other men in subjection and live in luxury on the
products of their labor. But to justify a monopoly of either of these forces by the existence of
the force itself, or to argue that without a monopoly of it any individual could get an income
by lending it instead of by working with it, is equally absurd whether the argument be
resorted to in the case of land or in the case of capital, in the case of rent or in the case of
interest. If any one chooses to call the advantages of these forces to mankind rent in one case
and interest in the other, I do not know that there is any serious objection to his doing so,
provided he will remember that in practical economic discussion rent stands for the
absorption of the advantages of land by the landlord, and interest for the absorption of the
advantages of capital by the usurer.

It is privilege that enables a class of absentee owners to appropriate the productivity
gains of social labor. As Proudhon pointed out, the increase in productivity from
collective labor is appropriated entirely by the owning classes.
"The capitalist," they say, "has paid the labourers their 'daily wages'"; at a rate agreed

upon; more precisely, it should be said that the capitalist has paid as many times "one day's
wage" as he has employed labourers each day, which is not at all the same thing. For he has
paid nothing for that immense power which results from the union and harmony of laborers
and the convergence and simultaneity of their efforts. Two hundred grenadiers set the
obelisk of Luxor upon its base in a few hours; do you suppose that one man could have
accomplished the same task in two hundred days? Yet according to the calculation of the
capitalist, the amount of wages would have been the same.
Divide et impera, divide and conquer: divide and you will become rich... Separate
labourers from each other, and each one's daily wage may exceed the value of each
individual product, but this is not the question here. A force of a thousand men working for
twenty days has been paid the same as a force of one working fifty-five years; but this force
of one thousand has done in twenty days what a single man, working continuously for a
million centuries, could not accomplish: is this exchange equitable? Once more, no; for
when you have paid all the individual forces, you have still not paid the collective force.
Consequently, there always remains a right of collective property which you have not
acquired and which you enjoy unjustly.67

Privilege is enforced by a monopoly on the supply of credit, which prevents
associated labor from appropriating the productivity gains from association in the form of
increased wages. Since the rentier classes maintain a monopoly on the supply of credit,
they maintain a monopoly on the function of advancing the capital necessary to organize
collective production, and supplying the labor fund, and thus approach labor from a
position of unequal exchange. They are able, therefore, to appropriate the net product to
themselves as profit. The worker, whose wage is based on the productivity of one
solitary man's labor rather than of his share in the productivity of collective labor, is
unable to buy back the product.
...It is in consequence of monopoly that in society, net product being figured over and
above gross product, the collective laborer must repurchase his own product at a price higher
than that which this product costs him, — which is contradictory and impossible; that the
natural balance between production and consumption is destroyed; that the laborer is
deceived not only in his settlements, but also as to the amount of his wages; that in his case
progress in comfort is changed into an incessant progress in misery: it is by monopoly, in
short, that all notions of commutative justice are perverted, and that social economy, instead
of the positive science that it is, becomes a veritable utopia....68

The purpose of Proudhon's credit schemes was to enable the worker, rather than the
absentee owner and the merchant-capitalist, to profit from collective force: "the
collective force, which is a product of the community, ceases to be a source of profit to a
small number of managers and speculators: it becomes the property of all the workers."69
This issue was at the heart of our discussion of lean production in Chapter Ten. The

67

Proudhon, What is Property?, pp. 91, 93.
Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, p. 303.
69
Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution, pp. 221, 223.
68

central question, in evaluating lean production, is the context of class power in which it
takes place: who is in a position to appropriate the benefits of increased efficiency? If it
is the worker, then lean production and labor-saving production technology are simply
ways to make his own work easier, and to reduce the ratio of effort to consumption. If it
is the absentee owner or manager, then the purpose of lean production becomes to
eliminate jobs, not effort, and "increased efficiency" takes the form of downsizing and
speedup.
The normal effect of market competition is for the productivity benefits of new
technology to translate directly into lower consumer prices. It is only through artificial
property rights that privileged sellers can charge the consumer in proportion to his
increased utility, regardless of the cost of supplying the good. As Proudhon described it,
the natural process of competition is that
.... a mechanical invention, notwithstanding the privilege which it temporarily creates
and the disturbances which it occasions, always produces in the end a general amelioration;
... the value of an economical process to its discoverer can never equal the profit which it
realizes for society....70

Patents impede the normal process of market competition by which technological
innovation translates directly into lower consumer cost. Benjamin Tucker, in "State
Socialism and Anarchism," argued that opening up the supply of capital and land to free
competition would result in their benefits being socialized. [add quote] Likewise,
eliminating patents and other barriers to the free adoption of innovations will result in the
socialization of the fruits of increased productivity.
Johan Soderberg gives the example of birds in flight, taking advantage of the
turbulence created by other birds flying immediately ahead of them. This is
an important boon for migratory birds enabling them to cover very long distances. Indeed,
the utilisation of excess capacity in this way is paramount to the health of all ecosystems.
With knowledge of this fact, the restricted economy of capitalism shows up as a mirror world
of anti-production where the principle of life has been inverted. If the first bird was a
bourgeois, he would sue the second bird for piracy. At each and every instant, private
property acts as a stoppage.71

So artificial property rights enable the privileged to appropriate productivity gains for
themselves, rather than allowing their benefits to be socialized through market
competition. But they do more than that: they make possible the privilege to collect
tribute for the "service" of not obstructing production. As Commons observed, the
alleged "service" performed by the holder of artificial property rights, in "contributing"

70

Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, p. 126.
Johan Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement (New York and
London: Routledge, 2008), p. 148.
71

some factor to production, is defined entirely by his ability to obstruct access to it. As I
wrote in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, marginalist economics
treated the existing structure of property rights over "factors" as a given, and proceeded to
show how the product would be distributed among these "factors" according to their
marginal contribution. By this method, if slavery were still extant, a marginalist might with a
straight face write of the marginal contribution of the slave to the product (imputed, of
course, to the slave-owner), and of the "opportunity cost" involved in committing the slave to
one or another use.72

Such privileges, Maurice Dobb argued, were analogous to a grant of authority to
collect tolls:
Suppose that toll-gates were a general institution, rooted in custom or ancient legal right.
Could it reasonably be denied that there would be an important sense in which the income of
the toll-owning class represented "an appropriation of goods produced by others" and not
payment for an "activity directed to the production or transformation of economic goods?"
Yet toll-charges would be fixed in competition with alternative roadways, and hence would,
presumably, represent prices fixed "in an open market...." Would not the opening and
shutting of toll-gates become an essential factor of production, according to most current
definitions of a factor of production, with as much reason at any rate as many of the
functions of the capitalist entrepreneur are so classed to-day? This factor, like others, could
then be said to have a "marginal productivity" and its price be regarded as the measure and
equivalent of the service it rendered. At any rate, where is a logical line to be drawn between
toll-gates and property-rights over scarce resources in general?73

Veblen made a similar distinction between property as capitalized serviceability, and
capitalized disserviceability. The latter consisted of power advantages over rivals and the
public which enabled owners to withhold supply, and constituted the bulk of tangible
assets.74
The circular reasoning of marginalist economics, by which forbearing to impede
production is a "contribution" to production, for which "service" the holder of an artificial
property right is entitled to compensation from the productive labor which he helpfully
refrained from impeding, is beautifully illustrated by Peter Schiff in the context of the
global economy. It's hilarious, until you consider that it's dead-on accurate:
Suppose six castaways are stranded on a deserted island, five Asians and one American.
Further, suppose that the castaways decide to divide the work load among them in the
following manner: (for the purpose of simplicity, the only desire the castaways work to
satisfy is hunger) one Asian is put in charge of hunting, an other in charge of fishing, and a
third in charge of finding vegetation. A fourth is put in charge of preparing the meal, while a

72

Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition, 2nd rev. ed.
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1940, 1960), p. 66.
74
Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and other Essays, p. 352, in Commons, p. 664.
73

fifth is given the task of gathering firewood and tending to the fire. The American is given
the job of eating.
So, on our island five Asians work all day to feed one American, who spends his day
sunning himself of the beach. He is employed in the equivalent of the service sector,
operating a tanning salon which none of the Asians on the island utilize. At the end of the
day, the five Asians present a painstakingly prepared feast to the American, who sits at the
head of a special table, built by the Asians specifically for this purpose.
Realizing that subsequent banquets will only be forthcoming if the Asians are alive to
provide them, he allows them just enough scraps from his table to sustain their labor for the
following day.
Modern day economists would say that this American is the lone engine of growth
driving the island's economy and that without his ravenous appetite, the Asians on the island
would be unemployed.75

In a sense that's true--if you accept the premise that the land the Asians are working
belongs to the American, or that he has a legitimate "intellectual property" right in the
seeds or techniques they use to grow food. It's always technically true that a ruling class
"provides" jobs, if you take at face value its claimed right to rope off the means of
production and charge admission.
These considerations are fundamental to a correct resolution of the debate on profit
between Bastiat and Proudhon. What Bastiat fails to recognize, in his illustration of the
plane, is the role of monopoly in enabling the maker of the plane to rent it out at a price
that not only amortizes his actual cost and effort in producing it, but in addition to
appropriate the plane's contribution to productivity. Wakefield and Oppenheimer both
observed that the level of wages is set by the competing terms offered by selfemployment. The maker of the plane is able to rent it out for such high monopoly rents,
likewise, only when the alternative of acquiring one's own plane is artificially expensive.
One of Tucker's correspondents, "Apex" (in a discussion that anticpates our treatment of
mutual banking later in this chapter), explained the principle:
The question is this: “Is a man who loans a plough entitled in equity to compensation for its
use?” My answer is, “Yes.” Now, then, what of it? Does that make something for nothing
right? Let us see. We must take it for granted that the loaning of the plough was a good
business transaction. Such being the case, the man who borrows the plough must give good
security that he will return the plough and pay for what he wears out. He must have the
wealth or the credit to make the owner of the plough whole in case he should break or lose
the plough. Now, I claim that this man, having the wealth or credit to secure a borrowed
plough, could transmute that same credit or security into money, without cost, and with the
money buy a plough, were it not for a monopoly of money. For a monopoly of money implies

75

Peter Schiff, "Even Stephen Roach Has It Wrong," Safe Haven, March 29, 2005
<http://www.safehaven.com/article-2810.htm>.

a monopoly of everything that money will buy.76
Let us remember that no man can borrow money, as a good business transaction, under
any system, unless he has the required security to make the lender whole in case he should
lose the money. What a stupendous wrong is this—that a man having credit cannot use it, but
must exchange it and pay a monopoly price, which is really for the privilege of using his own
credit!77

Tucker, immediately following the series of exchanges between Apex and the
defenders of interest, added his comment:
But under the system of organized credit contemplated by Apex no capable and deserving
person would borrow even a title to capital. The so-called borrower would simply so change
the face of his own title as to make it recognizable by the world at large, and at no other
expense than the mere cost of the alteration. That is to say, the man having capital or good
credit, who, under the system advocated by Apex, should go to a credit-shop—in other
words, a bank—and procure a certain amount of its notes by the ordinary process of
mortgaging property or getting endorsed commercial credit discounted, would only exchange
his own personal credit—known only to his immediate friends and neighbors and the bank,
and therefore useless in transactions with any other parties—for the bank’s credit, known and
receivable for products delivered throughout the State, or the nation, or perhaps the world.
And for this convenience the bank would charge him only the labor-cost of its service in
effecting the exchange of credits, instead of the ruinous rates of discount by which, under the
present system of monopoly, privileged banks tax the producers of unprivileged property out
of house and home.78

Regarding Bastiat's example of the plane, Tucker pointed out that price in a free
market is governed by cost of production rather than utility to the purchaser, and "that
James consequently, though his plane should enable William to make a million planks,
could not sell or lend it for more than it cost him to make it, except he enjoyed a
monopoly of the plane-making industry."79
Capitalism, as opposed to the free market, could not exist without artificial property
rights--as its most honest defenders admit. This is the theme, for example, of a post by
Elizabeth Anderson of Left2Right blog, one of the better liberal bloggers.80 She rejects
natural property rights because they are "incompatible with capitalism"--particularly with
the form of "advanced capitalism" she so admires. Advanced capitalism, she argues,
depends on artificial forms of property like the limited liability corporation and
"intellectual property rights" (which are both "indispensable to capitalism and deeply
artificial). On first reading the post, in fact, I mistakenly read Anderson's defense of

76

"Another Answer to Mr. Babcock," Instead of a Book, p. 189.
"Usury," Ibid., p. 191.
78
Tucker, "Apex or Basis," Ibid., p. 194.
79
Tucker, "The Position of William," Ibid., p. 200.
80
Elizabeth Anderson, "How Not to Complain Against Taxes (II): Against Natural Property Rights,"
Left2Right, January 20, 2005. http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/why_i_reject_na.html
77

artificial property rights as written in the spirit of Swift's "modest proposal": a brilliant
satiric attack on capitalism.
Anderson's judgment in placing the divide between "natural" and "artificial" strikes
me as oddly counterintuitive in some cases. For example, she identifies "natural"
property in land as a hypersteroidal form of Lockeanism, in which the absolute power of
transfer is limited by no requirement of possession. I would tend, rather, to measure the
artificiality of property rights by the distance of their remove from simple possession and
transfer of possession. She quotes De Soto as an authority on the importance of
government in transforming customary property rights into artificial (and enforceable)
ones, but neglects the present role of government in suppressing more egalitarian forms
of possessory ownership in favor of the artificial property rights of latifundistas and other
landed oligarchs. Likewise, she regards bankruptcy as an artificial limitation on the
"natural" property rights of creditors, whereas Spooner's position on the unenforceability
of specific performance in the case of promises to pay strikes me as far more natural.
Thomas Hodgskin, almost a hundred years before J.A. Hobson or John Maynard
Keynes, remarked on the effect of privilege in the maldistribution of purchasing power.
....The peasant, who produces so much corn, that his master is ruined by its reduced
price, has not wherewithal to eat and cover himself. The weaver, who supplies the world
with clothing, whose master undertakes perilous adventures to tempt savages to use his
productions, is perishing with hunger and nakedness in the midst of an inclement season....
The established right of property,—that right which denies bread and raiment to the labourer,
in order to pamper those who do not labour with luscious viands and clothe them in purple
and fine linen, [is threatened with] total subversion by violence....81

Privilege results in distorting and destabilizing effects that, in turn, lead to corrective
government intervention. A central problem of the advanced economies, from the late
19th century on, has been the crisis of overproduction, overaccumulation and
underconsumption. They all result from the maldistribution of purchasing power that
occurs when privilege breaks the direct connection between effort and reward. To quote
Hodgskin again,
The wants of individuals which labour is intended to gratify, are the natural guide to
their exertions. The instant they are compelled to labour for others, this guide forsakes them,
and their exertions are dictated by the greed and avarice, and false hopes of their masters.
The wants springing from our organization, and accompanying the power to labour, being
created by the same hand which creates and fashions the whole universe, including the
course of the seasons, and what the earth brings forth, it is fair to suppose that they would at
all times guide the exertions of the labourer, so as fully to ensure a supply of necessaries and
conveniences, and nothing more. They have, as it were, a prototype in nature, agreeing with
other phenomena, but the avarice and greed of masters have no such prototype. They stand
isolated and apart from all the great phenomena of the universe. They were originally crimes

81

Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, p. 264.

condemned by our moral sentiments, and still have their source in our crime-begotten
political systems. Nature disowns them as a guide to action, and punishes us for following
them. By this system the hand is dissevered from the mouth, and labour is put in motion to
gratify vanity and ambition, not the natural wants of animal existence. When we look at the
commercial history of our country, and see the false hopes of our merchants and
manufacturers leading to periodical commercial convulsions, we are compelled to conclude,
that they have not the same source as the regular and harmonious external world. Capitalists
have no guide to their exertions, because nature rejects and opposes their dominion over
labour. Starts of national prosperity, followed by bankruptcy and ruin, have the same source
then as fraud and forgery. To our legal right of property we are indebted for those gleams of
false wealth and real panic, which, within the last fifty years, have so frequently shook, to its
centre, the whole trading world.82

The major function of the interventionist state from the early 20th century on, as we saw
in Chapter Three, has been to guarantee a market for overproduction, either through
foreign imperialism (as J.A. Hobson described), through government spending to use up
the surplus product, or through Keynesian policies of increasing aggregate demand.
Note to vulgar libertarians: I'm already fully aware of all the second-hand arguments
from J.B. Say as to why labor's inability to "buy back its product" is supposed to be a nonproblem, and why maldistribution of income couldn't happen in a free market. No less an
Austrian than Joseph Stromberg has explained just how it can be, and is, a problem in the
nonfree market we actually live in. In "State Monopoly Capitalism and Empire," he made
considerable use of J.A. Hobson's "imperialism as solution to overproduction" thesis,
explaining in terms of Austrian economic principles just why it is true. In an economy
where industry is cartelized by the state operating in league with big business, big
business is unable to dispose of its product at cartel prices.83 As Stromberg also put it in
a later email, what part of "this isn't a free market" don't the vulgar libertarians
understand?
C. Specific Forms of Privilege, and the Effect of Their Abolition
The central area of disagreement between individualist anarchists and state socialists
(along with all other "progressive" ideologies that see state intervention as the solution to
the evils of capitalism) is over the relationship between the interventionist state and
economic exploitation. The statists see exploitation as the natural outcome of an

82

Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, addressed
without permission to H. Brougham, Esq. M.P. F.R.S. (London: B. Steil, 1832). Online Library of Liberty
<http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=323&layout=html
>.
"Letter the Eighth: Evils of the Artificial Right of Property"
83
Joseph R. Stromberg, "The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire" Journal of
Libertarian Studies, vol. 15, no. 3 (Summer 2001) <http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_3/15_3_3.pdf>.

unregulated market, and see state intervention as necessary to counteract this outcome.
Individualist anarchists see exploitation as the result of privilege created by state
intervention in the market, and propose opening up all the forms of artificial scarcity
created by such privilege to the revolutionary force of market competition. As Benjamin
Tucker put it, we are consistent Manchester liberals.
Tucker described the functioning of privilege in the ostensibly "free market"
economy:
When Warren and Proudhon, in prosecuting their search for justice to labor, came face to
face with the obstacle of class monopolies, they saw that these monopolies rested upon
Authority, and concluded that the thing to be done was... to utterly uproot Authority and
give full sway to the opposite principle, Liberty, by making competition, the antithesis of
monopoly, universal. They saw in competition the great leveler of prices to the labor cost of
production. In this they agreed with the political economists. The query then naturally
presented itself why all prices do not fall to labor cost; where there is any room for incomes
acquired otherwise than by labor; in a word, why the usurer, the receiver of interest, rent, and
profit, exists. The answer was found in the present one-sidedness of competition. It was
discovered that capital had so manipulated legislation that unlimited competition is allowed
in supplying productive labor, thus keeping wages down to the starvation point, or as near it
as practicable...; but that almost no competition at all is allowed in supplying capital, upon
the aid of which both productive and distributive labor are dependent for their power of
achievement, thus keeping the rate of interest on money and of house-rent and ground-rent at
as high a point as the necessities of the people will bear.
On discovering this, Warren and Proudhon charged the political economists with being
afraid of their own doctrine. The Manchester men were accused of being inconsistent. The
believed in liberty to compete with the laborer in order to reduce his wages, but not in liberty
to compete with the capitalist in order to reduce his usury....
....So they raised the banner of Absolute Free Trade; free trade at home, as well as with
foreign countries; the logical carrying out of the Manchester doctrine; laissez faire the
universal rule. Under this banner they began their fight upon monopolies, whether the allinclusive monopoly of the State Socialists, or the various class monopolies that now prevail.
Of the latter they distinguished four of principal importance: the money monopoly, the
land monopoly, the tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly.84

The phenomenon Tucker described, the coexistence of almost unlimited competition
in the supply of labor with greatly circumscribed competition in the supply of capital, has
been remarked upon by many thinkers over the years. The general principle is described
by Noam Chomsky as "socialism for the rich, free market discipline for the poor." Or as
Geoff Olson describes it, at greater length:

84

Tucker, "State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ"

For several decades, middle-class North Americans have been coached on the virtues of
beating out the other guy or gal for a grade, contract, job or home. "Competition" and
"competitiveness" have become magical spells for warding off the last remaining gremlins of
socialism....
If we seem to be working more than our parents ever did, and receiving less for the
effort, that may offer a bit of a clue. It's intriguing that mainstream media always trots out
competitiveness whenever the indefensible needs defending. Whether it's an argument for the
minimum wage, a celebration of corporate merger, or applause for a superstar CEO's golden
parachute, we're told it's really about us being more competitive as a city, province, nation,
trading bloc, etc.
But hang on a moment. If this is the case, why do we find relatively little direct
competition at the highest levels of business? What of the interlocking boards of major
corporations, in which the same names crop up over and over?
Once you get past mom and pop businesses, the North American economic landscape is
mostly an "oligopoly." That may sound like a Dr. Seuss creature, but it's actually a market in
which control over the supply of a commodity is in the hands of a small number of
producers. Hence, the comfortable push/pull between remaining monopolies--the Coke/Pepsi
dynamic. This mirrors the monopolies in the political realm, summed up in the comic battles
between the Democrats and Republicans. (Lest we forget, the last two main contenders, John
Kerry and George W. Bush, hailed from the same Yale frat club/secret society, Skull and
Bones.)
Those at the top have little to gain from direct competition. They and their parents hail
from the same prep schools, head for the same golf courses, and subscribe to the same
journals. Their interactions are usually more country club than cutthroat. With a
multigenerational game this good, the plutocrats have plenty of reason to convince everyone
else to keep fighting among themselves, by pushing the glorious virtues of competition
through foundations and media outlets. In fact, their continuing comfort depends on it.85

The central function of privilege being the power to extract unearned wealth by
impeding production, and by obstructing access to unused productive resources on the
part of those who could put them to productive use, it follows that the general effect of
abolishing privilege will be the opposite: to increase production and wealth, both through
the allocation of productive resources without impediment to their most productive use,
and through the full reward of productive labor. As Henry George, Jr., pictured it:
The production of wealth would not be less in such a state of things, but more; while the
powers to interfere with its natural and equitable distribution would be destroyed. None
would have the means of appropriating what he did not produce. None would have the power
to heap together great riches at the expense of the mass. To the producer would go the fruits,
and he who would not work should starve, or at least be viewed with disgust and treated with

85

Geoff Olson, "Social Darwinist competition leads to Ik-y mess," The Vancouver Courier, July 20, 2007
<http://www.canada.com/vancouvercourier/news/opinion/story.html?id=f70e98e6-8fbb-4f5c-9a2576c038cca258&k=83345>.

contempt. No longer would the idler, the appropriator of other men's gains, call himself a
"gentle-man" in the marriage certificate; no longer would the owners of Government favor
range themselves apart as an aristocracy of privilege....
For if Nature... is no longer shut off by the speculator at every turn, but is cast open to
the labor of head and hand, whence can come enough men to fully engage her in production?
Her demand for men can never cease, and to them she does not exhaust herself, but passes
from a lower to a higher use, multiplying her rewards in an infinite progression.
Where all men would be able to get an independent living, who need bow, or cringe, or
be afraid? And where would be the necessity for laborers to band together to resist cutting in
wages, blacklisting, dismissal for premature old age?
Labor produces more and more as civilization advances; but Privilege, in the person of
the monopolist of natural opportunities, the owner of franchise, tariff or similar power,
appropriates, leaving to the laborer little more than enough to sustain him in further
production. Wages at bottom depend upon what the laborer can earn for himself from the
best land that is free to him -- land that is open to him without the payment of rent. With all
restrictions away and Nature calling for men to bring forth her infinite quantity and variety of
treasure, and with the powers of labor increasing as the human units more closely cooperate
in the body social, wages would not fall or even remain stationary, but would mount.
American laborers would then think no more of organizing against "capital," as Privilege is
mistakenly called, than they would think of organizing against a race of men whose only
records are a few scattered ruins and picture writings engraved on fragments of stone. Strikes
and lockouts, sweeping enjoining orders and the glisten of bayonets in industrial affairs
would belong to a past and to-be-forgotten age. Great stretches of unused Nature would be
calling to labor to come and receive her rich reward, and none by Government writ or social
sanction would bar the way.
Labor applied to free conditions would find so ample a reward as to lead sensibly to a
shortening of the hours of toil and the development of the mental and moral natures.86

1. The Credit Monopoly.
Benjamin Tucker listed the credit monopoly first among the forms of legal privilege
that robbed labor of its product. The credit monopoly consists of state-enforced entry
barriers, like licensing and capitalization requirements (even for secured loans) that
restrict competition in the supply of credit, and enable banks to charge a monopoly price.
The form such restrictions take in recent times was described by Karl Hess and David
Morris:
First, one gets a certificate which gives permission to raise capital for the bank and outlines

86

Henry George, Jr., The Menace of Privilege, "Chapter Twenty-Six,"
<http://www.progress.org/archive/hgjr26a.htm>

what conditions need to be met in order to receive a charter. Step two is getting the charter
after having met the conditions. The conditions are numerous, but the most important one is
that a given amount of deposit capital must be raised in a specific period of time. In order to
get permission to raise capital a group must prove that there is a reason to have another bank,
that it can serve a necessary function, and that it has a viable chance of succeeding.87

Capitalization requirements for institutions providing secured loans, over and above
the security provided for the loans themselves, amount to unnecessarily mandating a
double guarantee. Their only real function is to raise the entry cost for the credit industry
so that a monopoly price can be charged for issuing currency against property.
BANK-BILLS are doubly guaranteed. On one side, there is the capital of the bank, which
is liable for the redemption of the bills in circulation: on the other side are the notes of the
debtors of the bank, which notes are... a sufficient guaranty for all the bills; for no bills are
issued by any bank, except upon notes whereby some responsible person is bound to restore
to the bank. after a certain lapse of time, money to the amount borne on the face of the bills.
If the notes given by the receivers of the bills are good, then the bills themselves are also
good.88

As we saw in the opening section of Chapter Three, privilege (or its lack) has a
powerful effect on the bargaining power of labor. The very term "employment" (with
"self-employment" an anomaly comparable to a freed slave or an unowned horse), and the
idea of work as something that someone must be given rather than something one does,
assumes a lack of direct access to means of production and subsistence:
Our natural resources, while much depleted, are still great; our population is very thin,
running something like twenty or twenty-five to the square mile; and some millions of this
population are at this moment "unemployed," and likely to remain so because no one will or
can "give them work." The point is not that men generally submit to this state of things, or
that they accept it as inevitable, but that they see nothing irregular or anomalous about it
because of their fixed idea that work is something to be given.89

Defenders of the status quo often argue that employers are competing for labor as
much as workers are competing for employment. But this is not entirely true. The
competition between employers, although it exists, is artificially constrained by privilege,
so that there are fewer employers competing in the labor market than would be the case in
a genuinely free market.
Oliver Williamson refers, for example, to the "reputation effects" of bad employer

87

Karl Hess and David Morris, Neighborhood Power: The New Localism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p.
81.
88
William B. Greene, The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages of a
Mutual Currency (1857). Online text scanned by Shawn Wilbur <http://libertarianlabyrinth.org/mutual/wbg-mb1857.html >. This work, with minor alterations, was the basis of the 1870
edition of Mutual Banking.
89
Nock, Our Enemy, the State, p. 82n.

practices: workers in the job market will evaluate prospective employers on past
performance.90 That's true, as far as it goes. But the more the number of competing
employers is reduced, the worse a reputation the worst employer can afford to have and
still get workers. To put it in terms of Bohm-Bawerk's marginal pairs, if the number of
competing employers is artificially constrained, there is likely to be a disappointed worker
left over at the end rather than a disappointed employer.
Vulgar libertarians like to stress that, "in a free market," workers are free to take their
labor elsewhere if they don't like their working conditions. And many free market
libertarians respond with just that advice--frequently in quite indignant terms--in response
to workers' complaints about their employers. Every complaint about employers'
restrictions on their employees' freedom of speech and association outside of work is met
with the response: "Well, nobody's forcing you to work there."
Well, yes and no. We market anarchists do not propose the imposition of any external
constraint on what terms an employer can set as a condition of employment. The
question is not whether the state should permit employers to set such conditions, but what
kind of a market allows it?
Just how godawful do the other “ options” have to be before somebody’s desperate
enough to take a job, and hold onto it like grim death, under conditions of stagnant pay,
where (thanks to downsizing and speedups) they're doing their own work plus that of a
former coworker?
But never mind those things. How do things get to the point where people are lined
up to compete for jobs where they can be forbidden to associate with coworkers away
from work, where even squalid, low-paying retail jobs can involve being on-call 24/7,
where employees can’t attend political meetings without keeping an eye out for an
informer, or can’t blog under their own names without living in fear that they’re a websearch away from termination?
To grasp the extent of the state's role in such exploitation, just consider the likely
effect of abundant, low-interest credit (or, as we shall see in the next section, cheap
vacant land) on the bargaining power of labor. Tucker's remedy of free mutual credit
("free" as in "free speech," not "free beer") was based on the mutual banking proposals of
William B. Greene.
Here is how a mutual bank would function, as described by Greene in The Radical
Deficiency of the Circulating Medium:
Any person or company, by pledging real estate to the MUTUAL B ANK , may become
a member of the Banking Company; and said Banking Company shall have power to receive
new members to an unlimited extent.

90

Oliver Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1985), p. 259.

Said Mutual Bank shall have power to issue paper-money to circulate as currency among
parties willing to use it as such.
Any member may borrow the paper-money of said bank, on his own notes running to
maturity, to an amount not to exceed three-fourths (or such other fixed proportion as your
honorable body may determine)of the value of the property by himself pledged.
Each member shall be bound to receive the bills issued by said bank, at the full value
borne on their face, in payment of debt, and in all the transactions of trade; but no member,
who has in his possession bills of the bank to an .amoumt equal to the whole value.of the
property by himself pledged, shall be bound to receive any more, until some of those held by
him shall have gone out of his possession....
The rate of interest at which said money shall be loaned shall be determined by—and
shall, if possible, just meet and cover—the average losses and necessary expenses of the
institution.
No money shall be loaned by said bank to any person who does not become, by a pledge
of real estate, a member of the company.
Any member, by paying his debts to the bank, may withdraw from the company, have his
property released from pledge, and be himself released from all obligations to the bank, and
to the holders of the bank's money as well....
No paper-money shall be issued by said bank, until after real estate, to the value of two
millions of dollars, shall have been pledged to the bank by the members of the Banking
Company.
Your petitioners humbly conceive that a bank is an insurance company that insures and
guarantees the business-paper of individuals. Individuals give their promissory notes to the
bank, which notes bear interest; and receive from the bank, in exchange for their notes, other
promissory notes not bearing interest. The notes given by individuals are worth more than
those given by the bank, since they bear interest; but, on the other hand, the bank's notes are
worth more than the notes of individuals, since they are notes of individuals transformed-by
being- insured, and may therefore serve as currency. The interest paid by borrowers for banknotes not bearing interest is paid to the banks as insurance money
According to the estimate of your petitioners, one per cent on the amount borrowed,
would more than cover the average cost of insurance.... Your petitioners believe that a
Mutual Bank, through the simple process of legitimate competition... would furnish them
with an instrument by which they might enable the members of the community generally to
mutually insure each other's business-paper; thus providing a currency for the people at less
than one-sixth of the present cost.91

Greene expected such free competition in the issue of secured loans to exercise a

91

Greene, The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium.

powerful downward pressure on interest rates, and to increase the independence of labor:
Let it be assumed that the Mutual Bank has been established and offers credit at the cost
of operating the bank, which is about one per cent. This will be the full rate charged on all
loans. This rate comes into competition with the rate charged by all other banks and all other
money lenders. The effect on the other banks will be felt very soon, because no one is going
to pay six or eight per cent for money when he can get it for one per cent or less. One of two
things must happen. The old banks must either meet the cut and also lend money at that rate,
or else lose their customers who will go to the new bank, the new bank needs no capital, as it
does business entirely on the capital of its customers, who are also its members; for every
member virtually brings his own capital to the Mutual Bank when he joins it.
The business the Mutual Bank can do is unlimited, and each new member joining the
Bank in creases the number of people who can do business with each other on this new basis.
The circle of exchange becomes wider arid wider and it cannot be long before the whole
comunities is impelled by self interest to do business on this plan.
Once the Mutual Bank is operating, money will be available practically without interest
to any responsible producer, so that his independence will no longer depend upon the whim
of the usurer, but upon his determination and his ability in his line of work. There will be big
factories and small shops, and the demand for wage labor will be greater than the supply,
with the result that wages will soar until they approach the full value of the work done. Due
to the elimination of interest, rent, and privileged profits, under Mutualism the cost of
commodities will be much lower and money therefore will have more buying power, in
addition to wages being higher.92

This was, in all its essentials, the same mutual banking system that Tucker tirelessly
advocated in the pages of Liberty over his entire career as editor. For example:
Does the law of England allow citizens to form a bank for the issue of paper money against
any property that they may see fit to accept as security; the paper money not redeemable in
specie except at the option of the bank; the customers of the bank mutually pledging
themselves to accept the bank’s paper in lieu of gold or silver coin of the same face value;
the paper being redeemable only at the maturity of the mortgage notes, and then simply by a
return of said notes and a release of the mortgaged property,—is such an institution, I ask,
allowed by the law of England?93

The ability mobilize their own credit through such a free credit system would open up
an enormous source of capital for workers. As Alexander Cairncross observed, "the
American worker has at his disposal a larger stock of capital at home than in the factory
where he is employed...."94

92

Greene, Mutual Banking (1870). Online edition scanned by Saren Calvert <http://www.theportal.org/mutual_banking.htm>.
93
Tucker, "The Power of Government over Values," Instead of a Book, p. 226.
94
Alexander Cairncross, "Economic Schizophrenia," Scottish Journal of Political Economy (February
1950), quoted. in Michael Perelman, Classical Political Economy: Primitive Accumulation and the Social
Division of Labor (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld; London: F. Pinter, 1984, c 1983), p. 27.

Here's how Tucker envisioned the resulting worker-friendly market, with jobs
competing for workers instead of the reverse:
For, say Proudhon and Warren, if the business of banking were made free to all, more and
more persons would enter into it until the competition should become sharp enough to reduce
the price of lending money to the labor cost, which statistics show to be less than threefourths of once per cent. In that case the thousands of people who are now deterred from
going into business by the ruinously high rates which they must pay for capital with which to
start and carry on business will find their difficulties removed… Then will be seen an exemplification of the words of Richard Cobden that, when two laborers are after one employer,
wages fall, but when two employers are after one laborer, wages rise. Labor will then be in a
position to dictate its wages, and will thus secure its natural wage, its entire product...95

John Beverley Robinson, a member of Tucker's circle, in The Economics of Liberty
described the effects of such free credit on the bargaining power of labor:
Upon the monopoly rate of interest for money that is... forced upon us by law, is based
the whole system of interest upon capital, that permeates all modern business.
With free banking, interest upon bonds of all kinds and dividends upon stock would fall
to the minimum bank interest charge. The so-called rent of houses... would fall to the cost of
maintenance and replacement.
All that part of the product which is now taken by interest would belong to the producer.
Capital, however... defined, would practically cease to exist as an income producing fund, for
the simple reason that if money, wherewith to buy capital, could be obtained for one-half of
one per cent, capital itself could command no higher price.96

Near-zero interest rates would increase the independence of labor in all sorts of
interesting ways. Mortgages would be paid off far more quickly, with most people in their
30s likely owning their houses free and clear. Between this and the disappearance of highinterest credit card debt, two of the greatest sources of anxiety to keep one's job at any
cost would disappear. In addition, many workers would have large savings ("go to hell
money"). In Doug Henwood's words,
mortgaged workers are more pliable--less likely to strike or make political trouble. And
they need money to live; nearly everyone below the upper middle class is just a few
paychecks from insolvency.97

Significant numbers would retire in their forties or fifties, cut back to part-time, or
start businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would

95

“State Socialism and Anarchism,” Instead of a Book, p. 11.
John Beverley Robinson, The Economics of Liberty (Minneapolis: Herman Kuehn, 1916), pp. 80-81.
97
Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p.
232.
96

be revolutionary.
The authors of An Anarchist FAQ elaborated on the libertarian socialist implications
of Benjamin Tucker's free market in credit:
It’s important to note that because of Tucker’s proposal to increase the bargaining
power of workers through access to mutual credit, his individualist anarchism is not
only compatible with workers’ control but would in fact promote it (as well as
logically requiring it). For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining
power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able
to: (1) demand and get workplace democracy; and (2) pool their credit to buy and own
companies collectively. This would eliminate the top-down structure of the firm and
the ability of owners to pay themselves unfairly large salaries as well as reducing
capitalist profits to zero by ensuring that workers received the full value of their
labour. Tucker himself pointed this out when he argued that Proudhon (like himself)
"would individualise and associate” workplaces by mutualism, which would “place
the means of production within the reach of all.”98
The worker would become a de facto co-owner of his workplace, even if it remained
nominally capitalist-owned.
In addition, the availability (or unavailability) of capital to working class people has a
significant effect on the rate of self-employment and small business formation. The
capitalist credit system, in particular, is biased toward large-scale, conventional, absenteeowned firms. David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald99 found that childhood
personality traits and test scores had almost no value in predicting adult entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, access to startup capital was the single biggest factor in predicting
self-employment. There is a strong correlation between self-employment and having
received an inheritance or a gift.100 NSS data indicate that most small businesses were
begun not with bank loans but with own or family money...."101 The clear implication is
that there are "undesirable impediments to the market supply of entrepreneurship."102 In
short, the bias of the capitalist credit system toward large-scale capitalist enterprise means
that the rate of wage employment is higher, and self-employment is lower, than their
likely free market values.
As you might expect, barriers to market competition in the supply of credit lead to a

98

“Benjamin Tucker: Capitalist or Anarchist?” Anarchist FAQ, G.5 <http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secG5.
html>.
99
David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, "What Makes an Entrepreneur?"
<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/entrepre.pdf>. Later appeared in
Journal of Labor Economics, 16:1 (1998), pp. 26-60.
100
Ibid., p. 2.
101
Ibid., p. 28.
102
Ibid., p. 3.

net loss of social utility.
If it is true that capital and other constraints hold back the effective supply of
entrepreneurship, and so lead to there being frustrated employees who would rather be
entrepreneurs, those who run their own businesses might be expected to be 'happier', on
average, than those who do not.103
And the study found, indeed, that they are.104 In addition,
When capital constraints bind, the larger is Z, the number of people in the economy who
have capital, the smaller is the utility gap between entrepreneurs and workers.105

So it follows that we have no need for state intervention to secure to labor its full
product. As Tucker argued over a century ago,
These employers have a perfect right to hire men on whatever conditions the men will
accept. If the latter accept cruel conditions, it is only because they are obliged to do so. What
thus obliges them? Law-sustained monopolies. Their relief lies, then, not in depriving employers
of the right of contract, but in giving employees the same right of contract without crippling them
in advance.106

I attempted to make the same point in "Contract Feudalism," a pamphlet for the
Libertarian Alliance:
We shouldn’t need federal regulations to stop [the setting of onerous conditions of
employment by employers] from happening. In a free market where land and capital weren’t
artificially scarce and expensive compared to labor, jobs should be competing for workers.
What’s remarkable is not that contract feudalism is technically “ legal,” but that the job
market is so abysmal that it could become an issue in the first place.107

In addition to the primary form of exploitation described above, the monopoly has
some other ill effects.
The absentee ownership of capital also skews investment in a different direction from
what it would be in an economy of labor-owned capital, and reduces investment to lower
levels. Investments that would be justified by the bare fact of making labor less onerous
and increasing productivity, in an economy of worker-owned capital,108 must produce an
additional return on the capital to be considered worth making in an economy of rentiers.
It is directly analogous to the holding of vacant land out of use that might enable laborers
to subsist comfortably, because it will not in addition produce a rent over and above the

103

Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., pp. 25-27.
105
Ibid., p. 9.
106
Tucker, "On Picket Duty," Instead of a Book, p. 163.
107
"Contract Feudalism"
108
Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, pp. 255-256.
104

laborer's subsistence.
It is maintained... that labour is not productive, and, in fact, the labourer is not allowed to
work, unless, in addition to replacing whatever he uses or consumes, and comfortably
subsisting himself, his labour also gives a profit to the capitalist...; or unless his labour
produces a great deal more... than will suffice for his own comfortable subsistence.
Capitalists becoming the proprietors of all the wealth of the society... act on this principle,
and never... will they suffer labourers to have the means of subsistence, unless they have a
confident expectation that their labour will produce a profit over and above their own
subsistence. This... is so completely the principle of slavery, to starve the labourer, unless his
labour will feed his master as well as himself, that we must not be surprised if we should find
it one of the chief causes... of the poverty and wretchedness of the labouring classes.109

Perhaps not coincidentally, there is a wide array of literature finding an inverse
correlation between inequality of wealth and economic growth.110
When capital equipment is owned by the same people who make and use it, or made
and used by different groups of people who divide the entire product according to their
respective labor and costs, it is productive. But when capital equipment is owned by a
class of rentiers separate from those who make it or use it, the owners may be said more
accurately to impede production rather than "contribute" to it.111
...One labourer may produce or make the instruments which another uses to assist
production—not mutually to share in just proportions the produce of their co-operating
labour, but for the profit of a third party. The capitalist being the mere owner of the
instruments, is not, as such, a labourer. He in no manner assists production. He acquires
possession of the produce of one labourer, which he makes over to another, either for a
time,—as is the case with most kinds of fixed capital, or for ever, as is the case with
wages,—whenever he thinks it can be used or consumed for his advantage. He employs or
lends his property to share the produce, or natural revenue, of labourers; and every
accumulation of such poverty in his hands is a mere extension of his power over the produce
of labour, and retards the progress of national wealth. In this which is at present the case, the
labourers must share their produce with unproductive idlers, and to that extent less of the
annual produce is employed in reproduction.
If there were only the makers and users of capital to share between them the produce of
their co-operating labour, the only limit to productive labour would be, that it should obtain
for them and their families a comfortable subsistence. But when in addition to this..., they
must also produce as much more as satisfies the capitalist, this limit is much sooner reached.
When the capitalist... will allow labourers neither to make nor use instruments, unless he

109

Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, pp. 51-52.
Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, "Economic Growth and Income Inequality: Reexamining the Links,"
Finance & Development, March 1997, pp. 38-41
<http://www.worldbank.org/fandd/english/0397/articles/0140397.htm>. Philippe Aghion, Eve Caroli,
Cecilia Garcia-Penalosa, Inequality and Economic Growth: The perspective of the new growth theories N
9908 (June 1999 ) <http://www.cepremap.cnrs.fr/couv_orange/co9908.pdf>.
111
Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, pp. 243-244.
110

obtains a profit over and above the subsistence of the labourer, it is plain that bounds are set
to productive labour much within what Nature prescribes. In proportion as capital in the
hands of a third party is accumulated, so the whole amount of profit required by the capitalist
increases, and so there arises an artificial check to production and population. The
impossibility of the labourer producing all which the capitalist requires prevents numberless
operations, such as draining marshes, and clearing and cultivating waste lands; to do which
would amply repay the labourer, by providing him with the means of subsistence, though
they will not, in addition, give a large profit to the capitalist. In the present state of society,
the labourers being in no case the owners of capital, every accumulation of it adds to the
amount of profit demanded from them, and extinguishes all that labour which would only
procure the labourer his comfortable subsistence.

He developed this same theme, as it applied to land, in The Natural and Artificial
Right of Property Contrasted:
It is, however, evident, that the labour which would be amply rewarded in cultivating all
our waste lands, till every foot of the country became like the garden grounds about London,
were all the produce of labour on those lands to be the reward of the labourer, cannot obtain
from them a sufficiency to pay profit, tithes, rent, and taxes....
In the same manner as the cultivation of waste lands is checked, so are commercial
enterprise and manufacturing industry arrested. Infinite are the undertakings which would
amply reward the labour necessary for their success, but which will not pay the additional
sums required for rent, profits, tithes, and taxes. These, and no want of soil, no want of
adequate means for industry to employ itself, are the causes which impede the exertions of
the labourer and clog the progress of society.112

This resembles the argument made by some Radical Keynesians that, at zero real interest,
any investment project will be undertaken that increases the net efficiency of production.
On the other hand, the availability of credit (and land) without the monopolist's
surcharge will increase the producers' motivation to invest in their own production.
Apologists for capitalism see the present system, in which capital investment is carried
out primarily by the absentee owners of large concentrations of investment capital, as the
only possible one. So any suggestion that the rates of return on absentee investment
might be lowered result in cries of "but what will be the motive for investment?" In an
economy of predominantly worker-owned production, the primary motive for investment
will be to reduce future effort by making one's labor more productive. And the abolition
of monopoly rates of interest (and rent) will increase the present-day earnings of labor
from which such investments can be made. As Charles-François Chevé put it in response
to Bastiat:

112

Thomas Hodgskin, "Letter the Eighth: Evils of the Artificial Right of Property," The Natural and
Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, addressed without permission to H. Brougham,
Esq. M.P. F.R.S. (London: B. Steil, 1832).
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=323&layout=html

“The law,” you say, “will rob us of the prospect of laying by a little property, because it
will prevent us from gaining any advantage from it.” Quite to the contrary, the law will
assure to everyone the prospect of laying by as much wealth as they have produced through
their labour, by forbidding anybody to plunder his neighbour of the fruits of his labours, and
by decreeing that services exchanged shall be equivalent: use for use and property for
property. “It will deprive us,” you add, “of all stimulus to save at the present time, and of all
hope of repose for the future. It is useless to exhaust ourselves with fatigue; we must
abandon the idea of leaving our sons and daughters a little property, since modern science
renders it useless, for we should become traffickers in men if we were to lend it on interest.”
Quite to the contrary, the abolition of interest revives in you the stimulus to save at the
present time and assures you the hope of repose for the future, because it prevents you, the
labourers, from being plundered, by means of rent, of the greater part of the fruits of your
labour, and because by obliging you to spend no more than the exact sum you have earned, it
renders saving all the more indispensable to everybody, be they rich or poor. Not only will
you be able to leave your sons and daughters a little property without becoming traffickers in
men, but you will b able to obtain this property with a good deal less effort than today;
because if, while you earn 10 francs a day and spend 5, you are deprived, as nowadays, of the
other 5 by all the forms of rent and of interest on capital, after forty years you won’t have a
farthing to leave to your children; whereas once rent is abolished you will have more than
60,000 francs to bequeath to them.113

Most of the objections raised against Greene's and Tucker's radical theory of credit are
strawmen, and have been debunked quite effectively.
For example, Murray Rothbard dismissed the Greene-Tucker propsals as just another
form of "money crankery," an attempt at creating prosperity by inflating the money supply
with fiat currency.114
But this objection was answered by no less an authority than Rothbard himself, as I
have pointed out:
On money and banking issues, Rothbard made the mistake of interpreting the GreeneTucker system of mutual banking as an attempt at inflationary expansion of the money
supply. Although the Greene-Tucker doctrine is often casually lumped together (in a broader
category of “money cranks”) with social crediters, bimetallists, etc., it is actually quite
different. Greene and Tucker did not propose inflating the money supply, but rather
eliminating the monopoly price of credit made possible by the state’s entry barriers: licensing
of banks, and large capitalization requirements for institutions engaged in providing only
secured loans. Most libertarians are familiar with such criticisms of professional licensing as
a way of ensuring monopoly income for the providers of medical, legal and other services.
Licensing and capitalization requirements, likewise, enable providers of credit to charge a

113

F. C. Chevé [Charles-François Chevé (1813-1875)], one of the editors of the Voix du Peuple, to Frédéric
Bastiat. Translation by Roderick T. Long. The Bastiat-Proudhon Debate on Interest (1849-1850)
<http://praxeology.net/FB-PJP-DOI-IV-1.htm>.
114
Murray Rothbard, "The Tucker-Spooner Doctrine: An Economist's View," Egalitarianism as a Revolt
Against Nature and Other Essays (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000), reproduced in Journal
of Libertarian Studies, vol. 20, no. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 10-12.

monopoly price for their services.
In fact, Rothbard himself made a similar analysis of the life insurance industry, in which
state reserve requirements served as market entry barriers and thus inflated the cost of
insurance far above the levels necessary for purely actuarial requirements.115

The notions that present capital investment comes from past abstention, and that it is
necessary to advance a "labor fund" from past savings, have been repeatedly attacked.
Thomas Hodgskin, for example, made this point in both Labour Defended Against the
Claims of Capital and Popular Political Economy:
The only advantage of circulating capital is that by it the labourer is enabled, he being
assured of his present subsistence, to direct his power to the greatest advantage. He has time
to learn an art, and his labour is rendered more productive when directed by skill. Being
assured of immediate subsistence, he can ascertain which, with his peculiar knowledge and
acquirements, and with reference to the wants of society, is the best method of labouring, and
he can labour in this manner. Unless there were this assurance there could be no continuous
thought, an invention, and no knowledge but that which would be necessary for the supply of
our immediate animal wants....
The labourer, the real maker of any commodity, derives this assurance from a knowledge
he has that the person who set him to work will pay him, and that with the money he will be
able to buy what he requires. He is not in possession of any stock of commodities. Has the
person who employs and pays him such a stock? Clearly not....
A great cotton manufacturer... employs a thousand persons, whom he pays weekly: does
he possess the food and clothing ready prepared which these persons purchase and consume
daily? Does he even know whether the food and clothing they receive are prepared and
created? In fact, are the food and clothing which his labourers will consume prepared
beforehand, or are other labourers busily employed in preparing food and clothing while his
labourers are making cotton yarn? Do all the capitalists of Europe possess at this moment
one week’s food and clothing for all the labourers they employ?...
...As far as food, drink and clothing are concerned, it is quite plain, then, that no species
of labourer depends on any previously prepared stock, for in fact no such stock exists; but
every species of labourer does constantly, and at all times, depend for his supplies on the coexisting labour of some other labourers.116
...When a capitalist therefore, who owns a brew-house and all the instruments and
materials requisite for making porter, pays the actual brewers with the coin he has received
for his beer, and they buy bread, while the journeymen bakers buy porter with their money
wages, which is afterwards paid to the owner of the brew-house, is it not plain that the real
wages of both these parties consist of the produce of the other; or that the bread made by the

115

Kevin Carson, "Carson's Rejoinders," Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 20, no. 1 (Winter 2006), pp.
97-98. Rothbard's comments on the life insurance industry are found in Power and Market: Government
and the Economy (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1997), p. 59.
116
Hodgskin, "Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital."

journeyman baker pays for the porter made by the journeyman brewer? But the same is the
case with all other commodities, and labour, not capital, pays all wages....
In fact it is a miserable delusion to call capital something saved. Much of it is not
calculated for consumption, and never is made to be enjoyed. When a savage wants food, he
picks up what nature spontaneously offers. After a time he discovers that a bow or a sling
will enable him to kill wild animals at a distance, and he resolves to make it, subsisting
himself, as he must do, while the work is in progress. He saves nothing, for the instrument
never was made to be consumed, though in its own nature it is more durable than deer's flesh.
This example represents what occurs at every stage of society, except that the different
labours are performed by different persons—one making the bow, or the plough, and another
killing the animal or tilling the ground, to provide subsistence for the makers of instruments
and machines. To store up or save commodities, except for short periods, and in some
particular cases, can only be done by more labour, and in general their utility is lessened by
being kept. The savings, as they are called, of the capitalist, are consumed by the labourer,
and there is no such thing as an actual hoarding up of commodities.117

In short, what political economy conventionally referred to as the "labor fund," and
attributed to past abstention and accumulation, in fact resulted from the present division
of labor and the cooperative distribution of its product. "Capital" is a term for a right of
property in organizing and disposing of this present labor. The same basic cooperative
functions could be carried out just as easily by the workers themselves, through mutual
credit. Under the present system, the capitalist monopolizes these cooperative functions,
and thus appropriates the productivity gains from the social division of labor.
Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes
instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them,
and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he
transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share.
Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he
has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely
from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives
through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the
view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence.118

Franz Oppenheimer made a similar argument in "A Post Mortem on Cambridge
Economics":
THE JUSTIFICATION OF PROFIT, to repeat, rests on the claim that the entire stock of
instruments of production must be "saved" during one period by private individuals in order
to serve during a later period. This proof, it has been asserted, is achieved by a chain of
equivocations. In short, the material instruments, for the most part, are not saved in a former
period, but are manufactured in the same period in which they are employed. What is saved
is capital in the other sense, which may be called for present purposes "money capital." But

117
118

Hodskin, Popular Political Economy
Hodgskin, "Labour Defended."

this capital is not necessary for developed production.
Rodbertus, about a century ago, proved beyond doubt that almost all the "capital goods"
required in production are created in the same period. Even Robinson Crusoe needed but one
single set of simple tools to begin works which, like the fabrication of his canoe, would
occupy him for several months. A modern producer provides himself with capital goods
which other producers manufacture simultaneously, just as Crusoe was able to discard an
outworn tool, occasionally, by making a new one while he was building the boat.
On the other hand, money capital must be saved, but it is not absolutely necessary for
developed technique. It can be supplanted by co-operation and credit, as Marshall correctly
states. He even conceives of a development in which savers would be glad to tend their
savings to reliable persons without demanding interest, even paying something themselves
for the accommodation for security's sake. Usually, it is true, under capitalist conditions, that
a certain personally-owned money capital is needed for undertakings in industry, but
certainly it is never needed to the full amount the work will cost. The initial money capital of
a private entrepreneur plays, as has been aptly pointed out, merely the rôle of the air
chamber in the fire engine; it turns the irregular inflow of capital goods into a regular
outflow.119

The Greene-Tucker argument for the interest-lowering effect of mutual banking, say
its critics, ignores the nature of interest as a reward for "waiting" or "abstention." They
themselves ignore the basic fact that, in the case of secured loans, no abstention takes
place. Or rather, the saving or abstention was carried out by the very person whose
property is mortgaged. The mortgaged property is itself the accumulated savings of the
borrower, and the bank only issues currency against the borrower's note:
...[T]he banker, who invests little or no capital of his own, and, therefore, lends none to
his customers, since the security which they furnish him constitutes the capital upon which
he operates...120
...Mr. Fisher seems to think it inherently impossible to use one’s property and at the same
time pledge it. But what else happens when a man, after mortgaging his house, continues to
live in it? This is an actual every-day occurrence, and mutual banking only seeks to make it
possible on easier terms,—the terms that will prevail under competition instead of the terms
that do prevail under monopoly.121
...[T]he establishment of a mutual bank does not require the investment of capital,
inasmuch as the customers of the bank furnish all the capital upon which the bank’s notes are
based, and... therefore the rate of discount charged by the bank for the service of exchanging
its notes for those of its customers is governed, under competition, by the cost of that service,
and not by the rate of interest that capital commands.122

119

Franz Oppenheimer, "A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part Three)," The American Journal of
Economics and Sociology, vol. 3, no. 1 (1944), pp, 122-123, [115-124]
120
Tucker, "Economic Hodge-Podge," Instead of a Book, p. 206.
121
Tucker, "Free Trade in Banking,"Instead of a Book, p. 231.
122
Tucker, "Free Money and the Cost Principle," Ibid., pp. 286-287.

....The so-called borrower would simply so change the face of his own title as to make it
recognizable by the world at large, and at no other expense than the mere cost of the
alteration. That is to say, the man having capital or good credit, who, under the system
advocated by Apex, should go to a credit-shop—in other words, a bank—and procure a
certain amount of its notes by the ordinary process of mortgaging property or getting
endorsed commercial credit discounted, would only exchange his own personal credit—
known only to his immediate friends and neighbors and the bank, and therefore useless in
transactions with any other parties—for the bank’s credit, known and receivable for products
delivered throughout the State, or the nation, or perhaps the world. And for this convenience
the bank would charge him only the labor-cost of its service in effecting the exchange of
credits, instead of the ruinous rates of discount by which, under the present system of
monopoly, privileged banks tax the producers of unprivileged property out of house and
home. So that Apex really would have no borrowing at all...123

2. Artificial Property Rights in Land. We have already mentioned, in passing, the
general issue of artificial property rights in land. Of the specific points of contention
between the different systems of rules for property in land, I have already written in
Chapter Five of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (and hope someday to revise into
more satisfactory form). Here I wish only to examine the parallels between them, in the
analogous distinctions they make between natural and artificial, legitimate and
illegitimate, rights. As we have already seen, all major property theorists make some
such distinction, despite major differences on the specifics of determining legitimacy,
using quite similar language.
The possessory or usufructory theories of Proudhon and the American individualist
anarchists treated made occupancy and use the standard not only for just acquisition, but
for continued ownership; all land titles not grounded in ongoing occupancy and use were
to be treated as null and void. Among the American individualists, the general princple
was stated by Benjamin Tucker (whose main influence was J.K. Ingalls). He defined the
land monopoly as
the enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and
cultivation. It was obvious to Warren and Proudhon that, as soon as individualists should no
longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal occupancy and cultivation of
land, ground-rent would disappear, and so usury have one less leg to stand on. Their
followers of today are disposed to modify this claim to the extent of admitting that the very
small fraction of ground-rent which rests, not on monopoly, but on superiority of soil or site,
will continue to exist for a time and perhaps forever, though tending constantly to a
minimum under conditions of freedom....124

Our earlier distinction of privilege, as an artificial property right, from natural

123
124

Tucker, "Apex or Basis," Instead of a Book, p. 194.
Tucker, "State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ"

property rights, applies very much to land. It was central to classical liberalism from the
beginning. Thomas Hodgskin used this distinction as the title of a book: The Natural
and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. By natural right of property, he meant "the
right of individuals, to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and
enjoyment, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole
of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves..." This right, established by the
"continual possession and use by one person of any one thing," was founded in nature. It
resulted from the need of labor to satisfy human wants in the natural order of things, and
on the extension of individuality to the creations of the individual's labor.125
Although Hodgskin cited Locke as his primary authority, his radical interpretation of
Locke put an emphasis on ongoing use as the basis for continued appropriation of land in
a way that would probably cause Rothbard's followers and other modern Lockeans to look
askance:
You do not require to be informed, though I may state the fact for the benefit of less
enlightened persons, that all the wealth of the world, the whole means of subsistence,
whatever contributes to clothe and to feed man, is the produce of labour, and is annually
created and annually consumed. Even those useful instruments, such as ships, houses, &c.
which last for several years, require to be continually kept in repair by the hand of labour,
which is tantamount to continual production. The field that has been once cleared and
ploughed, is soon overrun with useless weeds, if it be not continually cultivated. There is no
other wealth in the world but what is created by labour, and by it continually renewed. This
principle, now universally acknowledged, makes the right of property appear more absolute
and definite than it was in Mr. Locke's comprehension, because the right to own land is in
fact only the right to own what agricultural or other labour produces. The natural law of
appropriation, therefore, exists in full force at all times and places; and at this moment
constitutes a rule for appropriating every part of the wealth which is continually created. The
wants which can only be gratified by labour always exist, or are always renewed, the
necessity to gratify them by labour is never suspended; and now, as at the beginning, nature
bestows on the labour intended to gratify these wants whatever it can produce.126

Hodgskin suggested, in rather pointed terms, that the practical effect of the property
rights established under the laws of the state was not at all to secure the individual's
ownership of his labor product:
Does legislation, Sir, that legislation which you, as a member of parliament, have sworn
to uphold, proceed upon a study of the principles which determine the natural right of
property? Is the latter—is the natural relation between labour and its produce recognised and
acted on throughout society, as we acknowledge and act on the relation between seed time
and sowing? Have all the laws of society said to be intended expressly to protect property,

125

Thomas Hodgskin, "Letter the Second. the Natural Right of Property Illustrated," The Natural and
Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, addressed without permission to H. Brougham,
Esq. M.P. F.R.S. (London: B. Steil, 1832).
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=323&layout=html
126
Ibid.

been framed with a view to preserve this relation entire and untouched? Has government,
instituted, according to Mr. Locke, for no other purpose but to guarantee the enjoyment of
our natural property, fulfilled its commission? Does labour now obtain and own whatever it
produces? Is every man's right to have and enjoy whatever he creates or obtains by honest
exertions protected by the law? Is it that splendid achievement described. Are the natural
consequences of every man's conduct allowed to come freely home to him under the
guarantee of the law?127

He went on to state, much more explicitly, that the artificial rights of property
established by the state had, as their primary purpose, the enablement of a parasitic
exploiting class to live off the labor of the productive classes. And this parasitic
exploiting class included the "owners" of most of the land in England:
Laws being made by others than the labourer, and being always intended to preserve the
power of those who make them, their great and chief aim for many ages, was, and still is, to
enable those who are not labourers to appropriate wealth to themselves. In other words, the
great object of law and of government has been and is, to establish and protect a violation of
that natural right of property they are described in theory as being intended to guarantee....
All the legislative classes, and all the classes whose possessions depend not on nature,
but on the law, perceiving that law alone guarantees and secures their possessions, and
perceiving that government as the instrument for enforcing obedience to the law, and thus for
preserving their power and possessions, is indispensable, unite one and all, heart and soul to
uphold it, and, as the means of upholding it, to place at its disposal a large part of the annual
produce of labour....
Among the legislative classes embodied into, and constituting the government, we must
place the landed aristocracy. In fact, the landed aristocracy and the government are one—the
latter being nothing more than the organized means of preserving the power and privileges of
the former. After securing a revenue for the government,—the landed aristocracy sacrificing
to this even a part of their private property, or rather taking a portion from rent, which they
appropriate as taxes, transferring their cash from one hand to the other,—after securing a
revenue to the state, the laws have been made with a view to guarantee the possessions and
the wealth of the landowners.... His right to possess the land, not to possess the produce of
his own labour, is as admirably protected as can be effected by the law. Another must not
even walk on it, and all the wild animals and fruit it bears are said by the law to be his.
Nature makes it a condition of man having land, that he must occupy and cultivate it, or it
will yield nothing. The instant he ceases his labour, she decks it with flowers, and stocks it
with the birds and animals which she delights to clothe and feed; exacting no payment but
their happiness. The mere landowner is not a labourer, and he never has been even fed but by
violating the natural right of property....
The law grants tithes, and enforces the payment of them. It gives the soil, and a power to
exact rent to the landlord, and a revenue to the government; but in all these, the great and
leading objects of law, I see no protection for the natural right of property. On the contrary,
not one of them can be thought of without trenching on this natural right....

127

Ibid.

At present, besides the government, the aristocracy, and the church, the law also protects,
to a certain extent, the property of the capitalist, of whom there is somewhat more difficulty
to speak correctly than of the priest, the landowner, and the administerer of the law, because
the capitalist is very often also a labourer. The capitalist as such, however, whether he be a
holder of East India stock, or of a part of the national debt, a discounter of bills, or a buyer of
annuities, has no natural right to the large share of the annual produce the law secures to him.
There is sometimes a conflict between him and the landowner, sometimes one obtains a
triumph, and sometimes the other; both however willingly support the government and the
church; and both side against the labourer to oppress him; one lending his aid to enforce
combination laws, while the other upholds game laws, and both enforce the exaction of tithes
and of the revenue. Capitalists have in general formed a most intimate union with the
landowners, and except when the interest of these classes clash, as in the case of the corn
laws, the law is extremely punctilious in defending the claims and exactions of the capitalist.
In all these circumstances which in relation to the right of property may be considered as
the leading objects of legislation, I see no guarantee or protection of the natural right of
property. The end for which men are said by Mr. Locke to unite into commonwealths, and
put themselves under government, is in practice unknown to the law. The natural right of
property far from being protected, is systematically violated, and both government and law
seem to exist chiefly or solely, in order to protect and organize the most efficacious means of
protecting the violation. On the men who produce a bushel of malt, nature bestows it every
grain; the law instead of guaranteeing to them its full use and enjoyment, takes three-fourths
of it from them. To those by whose combined labour the ground is cultivated, and the harvest
gathered in, nature gives every sheaf and every stalk which they choose to collect; the law,
however, takes almost the whole of it away....
The important and yet perhaps trite fact to which I wish by these remarks to direct your
attention is, that law and governments are intended, and always have been intended, to
establish and protect a right of property, different from that which, in common with Mr.
Locke, I say is ordained by nature. The right of property created and protected by the law, is
the artificial or legal right of property, as contra-distinguished from the natural right of
property. It may be the theory that government ought to protect the natural right; in practice,
government seems to exist only to violate it. Never has the law employed any means
whatever to protect the property nature bestows on individuals; on the contrary, it is a great
system of means devised to appropriate in a peculiar and unjust manner the gifts of nature. It
exacts a revenue for the government,—it compels the payment of rent,—it enforces the
giving of tithes, but it does not ensure to labour its produce and its reward.128

Hodgskin's position anticipates Oppenheimer's distinction, which we saw earlier,
between the economic and political means, and his conception of the class state. He
anticipates Oppenheimer in much else as well, setting forth a theory of political
appropriation much like Oppenheimer's.
Were the natural right of property the basis of all appropriation, Oppenheimer argued,

128

"Letter the Third: The Legal Right of Property," in Ibid.

it would have been impossible for the land to become fully appropriated to the extent that
it was necessary for laborers to pay rent for access to it.
[Mr. Locke] says accurately, “as much land as a man tills, plants, and improves,
cultivates, and can use, the product of so much is his property.”—“This is the measure of
property in land, which nature has well set by the extent of man's labour, and the
conveniences of life; no man's labour could subdue or appropriate all, nor could his
enjoyment consume more than a small part, so that it would be impossible in this way to
intrench on the right of another, or acquire to himself a property to the injury of his
neighbours. Unfortunately, however, this admirable principle has not the smallest influence
over legislators in dealing out that which, by the bye, is not theirs, the land of new
colonies.129

Rather, the land was politically appropriated by conquest, so that even vacant and
unimproved land could be held out of use by the artificial property titles of a ruling class,
and the latter could charge tribute from labor for access to it.
The persons who thus appropriated the soil of Europe, did so by a right of conquest.
They did not lay down the sword the instant they had overrun the land, they kept it drawn in
their hand, and engraved with it laws for the conquered. The countries they overran had been
previously cultivated by slaves in a rude manner. In appropriating the soil, they appropriated
its inhabitants, reduced some to slavery, and continued the slavery of others. Power so
acquired, and privileges so established, were the basis of the present political and legal, not
social, edifice of Europe. These conquerors were the first legislators. By an almost
uninterrupted succession, the power of legislation has continued in the hands of their
descendants to the present day....
....Seeing that conquerors have always been the legislators, and knowing that they have
always endeavoured to preserve their own power, I cannot avoid concluding, that the law has
always been made with a view to preserve, as much as possible, that appropriation of the
soil, that artificial right of property, and that system of government, which the northern
barbarians, under the blind impulse of previous habits, utterly ignorant of the form society
was destined to assume, and utterly ignorant of that rule for the appropriation of land.... I am
less anxious to investigate final causes, than to state general facts; and it is such a fact, that
all the laws of Europe have been made with a view to maintain and preserve by force an
artificial right of property, a scheme of appropriating the land, and a system of political
power, all of which were originally established by the sword.130

Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, both Georgists of sorts, rejected the
appropriation of land through state grants of title without personal occupancy or
admixture of labor as, respectively, "political appropriation of the land" or "law-made
property"; both of them, however, favored the socialization of rent as an alternative to a
possessory criterion for subsequent transfers of property once appropriated, and saw land
value taxation as an alternative to messy inquiries into the history of land appropriation.

129
130

"Letter the Fourth: On the Right of Property in Land," in Ibid.
Ibid.

Murray Rothbard, whose Lockeanism was less radical than the usufructory or Georgist
theories, considered all subsequent transfers of justly acquired land to be valid in
themselves, with no further requirement of personal occupancy as the criterion of
ownership; nevertheless he repudiated as strenuously as anybody, as artificial and
illegitimate, all titles to vacant and unimproved land never appropriated by admixture of
labor.
Despite the differences between these property theorists as to the specifics of where
they draw the line, their distinctions between natural and artificial property rights in land
are motivated by essentially the same value. All the major principled theories of property
rights (as opposed to the utilitarian system which governs real property law in the U.S.
and most western countries, and which--although nominally based on Locke--pays little
regard to questions of justice in acquisition) are imperfect attempts to maximize the value
of self-ownership, and the individual's ownership of his labor-product. Specifically, all of
the different major systems of property in land are intended to promote the individual's
ownership of the labor he mixes in with the land, given the special difficulties presented
by the immobility of land.
All of them are imperfect: each is more effective than the others in securing the
individual's ownership of buildings and improvements in some cases, and less effective in
doing so in other cases.
For example George Reisman, a prominent critic of my work, denounces the
mutualist position on land (the occupancy-and-use tenure advocated by J.K. Ingalls and
Benjamin Tucker) as a "philosophy for thieves."131 The reason is that the mutualist
system of property rights presents greater inconvenience, comparatively speaking, for the
occupier and improver of land to recoup the value of his improvements by alienating the
property:
...[L]et us imagine that our legitimate land owner—legitimate even by Carson’s
standards—has spent several years clearing or draining his land, pulling out stumps,
removing rocks and boulders, digging a well, building a barn and a house, and putting up
fences to keep in his livestock. It is this land that he agrees to rent to a tenant, or, what is not
too different, sell on a thirty-year mortgage, which he himself will carry, on the
understanding that every year for thirty years he will receive a payment of interest and
principal.
The tenant or mortgagee signs a contractual agreement promising to pay rent, or interest
and principal, and takes possession of the property. Being a secret mutualist, however, he
thereupon proclaims that the property is now his, on the basis of the mutualist doctrine that,
in Carson’s words, “occupancy and use is the only legitimate standard for establishing
ownership of land.”

131

George Reisman, "Mutualism: A Philsophy for Thieves," Mises Economics Blog, June 18, 2006
<http://blog.mises.org/archives/005194.asp>.

This is a clear theft not only of the land, but also of the product of labor. A worker has
toiled for years and is now arbitrarily deprived of the benefit of his labor, and this in the
name of the protection of the rights of workers!132

Of course the factual assumptions of the scenario are ludicrous. Reisman assumed a
broader community governed by Lockean principles, in which the "mutualist" acts as a
sort of cuckoo in the nest and surprises the former owner by announcing himself only
after the property has changed hands. In fact, mutualism, or any other system of land
tenure, could only exist where a local consensus existed on property rights rules.
Nevertheless, he has a point. It would be more difficult, under occupancy-and-use
tenure, for an owner who no longer wants to occupy his property to recoup the value of
his buildings and improvements by renting the property or selling it on installments. But
this hardship is balanced by an equal hardship under Lockeanism:
Here's an opposing case for you: Imagine I'm renting a house under a Lockean property
system, and get permission to plant a garden on it. I invest a lot of effort in composting and
green manuring, and even spend money on granite dust, greensand, rock phosphate and the
like to improve the soil. When I get done with it, what was hardpan clay has been
transformed into rich, black, friable soil. And when I cease renting, I lose the value of all the
improvements I made. That's the sort of thing that happens all the time under Lockeanism.
But I suspect that Reisman would say that I made the improvements with my eyes open, and
am entitled to no sympathy because I knew what the rules were. I certainly doubt that he's
shedding any tears over the invested labor that the South Central Farmers are in danger of
losing.
The difference is, when it happens under the system he's defending, it's just life; when it
happens under the system he's demonizing, it's an outrage.133

Although the different principled systems of property rights theory draw the line at
different point, in all of them the choice of where to draw the line reflects a similar
distinction in principle. Despite all their differences, all the principled property rights
systems regard admixture of labor or alteration as the only legitimate basis for
appropriating unowned land; and all of them regard property titles to vacant and
unimproved land as illegitimate.
This is true even of the most conservative of them, the Lockeans, whose most
conservative Austrian representative--Mises--observed in Socialism:
Nowhere and at no time has the large scale ownership of land come into being through
the workings of economic forces in the market. It is the result of military and political

132

George Reisman, "Mutualism's Support for the Exploitation of Labor and State Coercion," Mises
Economics Blog, June 23, 2006 <http://blog.mises.org/archives/005219.asp>.
133
Kevin Carson, "George Reisman's Double Standard," Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism,
June 23, 2006 <http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/06/george-reismans-double-standard.html>.

effort.... The great landed fortunes did not arise through the economic superiority of largescale ownership, but by violent annexation outside the area of trade.... The non-economic
origin of landed fortunes is clearly revealed by the fact that, as a rule, the expropriation by
which they have been created in no way alters the manner of production. The old owner
remains on the soil under a different legal title and continues to carry on production.134

This was but a restatement of a widespread observation made in many times and
places, and self-evident to anyone of common sense who takes time to look beneath the
veil of "property rights" to the underlying reality: whenever the majority who cultivate
the land, and whose ancestors have cultivated it from time out of mind, pay rent to the
absentee owners of large land holdings, that state of affairs does not have its origins in the
ordinary or natural process of appropriation. The use of coercive force by the state, in
upholding artificial rights of property on behalf of a usurping class, is at the root of it. As
Jefferson put it, "Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed
poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural
right."135
Even the most conservative of principled land theories, Lockeanism (and even
without the Proviso),136 is quite throughgoing in the radicalism of its effects, if it were
consistently applied. This is demonstrated by the thought of Murray Rothbard, whose
consistent Lockean principles would undermine the majority of land titles in the United
States and most of the world if they were put into effect. He denounced, in no uncertain
terms, surviving feudal forms of land ownership (like the latifundia of Latin America, and
its counterparts among the various landed oligarchies throughout the Third World). He
denounced, likewise, the state's preemption of vacant land in settler states like the United
States and Australia, and all present title to land stemming directly from the state's grants
of vacant and unimproved land to speculators.
...[S]uppose that centuries ago, Smith was tilling the soil and therefore legitimately
owning the land; and then that Jones came along and settled down near Smith, claiming by
use of coercion the title to Smith’s land, and extracting payment or “rent” from Smith for the
privilege of continuing to till the soil. Suppose that now, centuries later, Smith’s descendants
(or, for that matter, other unrelated families) are now tilling the soil, while Jones’s
descendants, or those who purchased their claims, still continue to exact tribute from the
modern tillers. Where is the true property right in such a case? It should be clear that here,
just as in the case of slavery, we have a case of continuing aggression against the true
owners—the true possessors—of the land, the tillers, or peasants, by the illegitimate owner,
the man whose original and continuing claim to the land and its fruits has come from
coercion and violence. Just as the original Jones was a continuing aggressor against the
original Smith, so the modern peasants are being aggressed against by the modern holder of
the Jones-derived land title. In this case of what we might call “feudalism” or “land

134

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London, 1951), p. 375
Thomas Jefferson, Writings, Ford Edition, Vol. VII, p. 36, in George, Jr., The Menace of Privilege,
Chapter Two (part one).
136
I.e., that there should be "enough and as good" land left for others after the appropriation.
135

monopoly,” the feudal or monopolist landlords have no legitimate claim to the property. The
current “tenants,” or peasants, should be the absolute owners of their property, and, as in the
case of slavery, the land titles should be transferred to the peasants, without compensation to
the monopoly landlords.137
THUS, THERE ARE TWO types of ethically invalid land titles: “feudalism,” in which
there is continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in
transforming the soil; and land-engrossing, where arbitrary claims to virgin land are used to
keep first-transformers out of that land. We may call both of these aggressions “land
monopoly”—not in the sense that some one person or group owns all the land in society, but
in the sense that arbitrary privileges to land ownership are asserted in both cases, clashing
with the libertarian rule of non-ownership of land except by actual transformers, their heirs,
and their assigns.138

It's safe to say, based on these passages, that Rothbard didn't share the attitude of the
usual suspects at Cato who get their panties in a wad every time a leftist government
initiates a land reform in Latin America. Unlike the vulgar libertarians, Rothbard didn't
regard United Fruit Company as the "good guys" in Guatemala. In fact, he might have
had the Catoids in mind when he wrote about the ineffectiveness of the free market
economists' preachments to the Third World when they ignored questions of justice in
land titles:
....But these preachments naturally fall on deaf ears, because “free market” for American
conservatives obviously does not encompass an end to feudalism and land monopoly and the
transfer of title to these lands, without compensation, to the peasantry. And yet, since
agriculture is always the overwhelmingly most important industry in the undeveloped
countries, a truly free market, a truly libertarian society devoted to justice and property
rights, can only be established there by ending unjust feudal claims to property. But
utilitarian economists, grounded on no ethical theory of property rights, can only fall back on
defending whatever status quo may happen to exist—in this case, unfortunately, the status
quo of feudal suppression of justice and of any genuinely free market in land or agriculture....
American conservatives, in particular, exhort the backward countries on the virtues and
the importance of private foreign investment from the advanced countries, and of allowing a
favorable climate for this investment, free from governmental harassment. This is all very
true, but is again often unreal to the undeveloped peoples, because the conservatives
persistently fail to distinguish between legitimate, free-market foreign investment, as against
investment based upon monopoly concessions and vast land grants by the undeveloped
states. To the extent that foreign investments are based on land monopoly and aggression
against the peasantry, to that extent do foreign capitalists take on the aspects of feudal
landlords, and must be dealt with in the same way....139

All the major principled theories of property rights in land, including the Lockean, are

137

"10. The Problem of Land Theft," The Ethics of Liberty
"11. Land Monopoly, Past and Present," The Ethics of Liberty
139
Ibid.
138

in agreement that the artificial scarcity resulting from enforcement of title to vacant and
unimproved land artificially depresses the return on labor and inflates that on land.
Among the Lockeans, this was stated quite forcefully by Rothbard:
Keeping land out of use raises the marginal value product and the rents of remaining land
and lowers the marginal value product of labor, thereby lowering wage rates.140

All the principled theories are likewise in agreement, not only that land is artificially
scarce for labor, but that it is artificially plentiful for the privileged classes who have
appropriated it politically. As a result, the political appropriators have access to far more
land than they can put to productive use, and therefore either use large tracts of land
inefficiently, hold it out of use altogether, or both. Adam Smith remarked on the
inefficient use of large estates in Europe:
It seldom happens that a great proprietor is a great improver... To improve land with
profit, like all other commercial projects, requires an exact attention to small savings and
small gains of which a man born to a great fortune... is seldom capable. The situation of such
a person naturally disposes him to attend to ornament which pleases his fancy than to profit
for which he has so little occasion.... He embellishes perhaps four or five hundred acres in
the neighbourhood of his house, at ten times the expense which the land is worth after all his
improvements; and finds that if he was to improve his whole estate in the same manner, and
he has little taste for any other, he would be a bankrupt before he finished the tenth part of
it....141

The great latifundistas of Latin America, likewise, often hold the majority of their land
out of cultivation.
Alfred Marshall referred to the fact "that much good land is poorly cultivated, because
those who would cultivate it well have not access to it."142
In addition, the boundaries between the different principled rights theories are quite
blurry. As Charles Johnson points out, any generally delineated principles of individual
rights require arbitrary rules for their application: "the principle... does not fully specify
how to apply individual rights in the case at hand." Principles, for their application,
require more or less arbitrary rules that are not entailed as such in the princples.143
Nozick argued that any theory of property rights must include provisions for extinction
(i.e., transfer and abandonment), as well as initial appropriation.144 This is equally true of

140

Murray Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews
and Mcmeel, Inc., 1970, 1977), pp. 132-133.
141
Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 166-167.
142
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, Book VI Ch. XI
143
Charles Johnson, "Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism," in Roderick T. Long
and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?
(Hampshire, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), p. 166.
144
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Lockeanism, which includes standards for constructive abandonment after some
arbitrarily chosen lapse of time. Usufructory theories, likewise, must set some reasonable
minimum threshold for abandonment so that it is possible to go on a long vacation or
periodically leave land fallow. Rather than saying they rest on qualitatively different
principles of transfer and abandonment, it's more accurate to say that both the usufructory
and Lockean systems provide for abandonment, and differ qualitatively "over how long
land must be left unused before it can be reclaimed as abandoned property."
George Reisman ignored the requirement of conventional (and in large part arbitrary)
rules, as an element common to all property rights systems. In fact, he used a double
standard in using god terms and devil terms, respectively, to describe the functioning of
objectively identical enforcement mechanisms under Lockean and mutualist property
rules.
It's a mistake to judge any proposed property system on the assumption that it would
be implemented as badly as possible, but that is often exactly what is done. For example,
critics of occupancy and use tenure commonly ask about an owner letting a portion of
land lie fallow as part of a crop rotation scheme, or taking an extended vacation, or even
going into town to buy groceries, and finding his land or home stolen out from under him
by a squatter. Now occupancy and use tenure will be enforced by juries of small property
owners in a community where property universally distributed among such small owners,
and all the members of the community are small owners. It would seem to be a matter of
common sense that the law of occupancy and use will be enforced in view of its primary
intent, which is to secure such small owners in their ownership with a minimum of
inconvenience; and since most such small owners presumably would not care to live in
fear of their land and homes being expropriated from under them the minute they leave
home.
Any rule is rigid less by the rigidity of its terms than by the rigidity of its enforcement. Now
it is precisely in the tempering of the rigidity of enforcement that one of the chief excellences
of Anarchism consists. Mr. Herbert must remember that under Anarchism all rules and laws
will be little more than suggestions for the guidance of juries, and that all disputes, whether
about land or anything else, will be submitted to juries which will judge not only the facts,
but the law, the justice of the law, its applicability to the given circumstances, and the
penalty or damage to be inflicted because of its infraction. What better safeguard against
rigidity could there be than this? Machinery for altering the law, indeed! Why, under
Anarchism the law will be so flexible that it will shape itself to every emergency and need no
alteration. And it will then be regarded as just in proportion to its flexibility, instead of as
now in proportion to its rigidity.145

The bare principle of private property in land does not carry with it, of any necessity,
any particular set of rules of land tenure. Nozick pointed out that any theory of "justice in
holdings" must include three major topics: 1) a theory of "the original acquisition of

145

Tucker, "Property Under Anarchism," Instead of a Book, p. 12.

holdings, the appropriation of unheld things"; 2) "the transfer of holdings from one
person to another"; and 3) "principles governing how a person may divest himself of a
holding, passing it into an unheld state."146 Or as Tucker put it, "The question is not
whether we should be able to sell or acquire in 'the open market' anything which we
rightfully possess, but how we come into rightful possession."147 Free market liberals are
divided among themselves on how to answer this question.
Bill Orton has argued, quite convincingly in my opinion, that no particular system of
property rules is self-evident. No ownership claim can be deduced logically from the
principle of self-ownership alone, without the "'overlay' of a property system," or a system
of "allocation rules."148 No such system, whether Lockean, Georgist, or Mutualist, can be
proved correct. Any proof requires a common set of allocation rules, and a particular set
of allocation rules for property can only be established by social consensus, not by
deduction from the axiom of self-ownership.149 (However, since all three traditions
deduce their theory of appropriation by homesteading from the principle of selfownership, in so similar a manner, it might be more accurate to say that the labor theory
of appropriation common to the different overlays is more plausibly deducible from selfownership, and less dependent on convention than the rules concerning transfer and
abandonment.)
In any case, there is a great deal of practical overlap in their positions. For one thing,
the "stickiness" of property is a matter of degree:
In both systems [i.e., "sticky" (Lockean) and "non-sticky" (socialist/usufruct)], in practice
there are well-known exceptions. Sticky property systems recognize abandonment and
salvage; usufruct allows for people to be absent for some grace period without surrendering
property, and of course allows trade. You might even see the two systems as a continuum
from high to low threshold for determining what constitutes "abandonment."150

Or as Orton put it elsewhere, stickiness is a matter of degree, rather than a qualitative
difference between capitalist and socialist property. They are "the same thing... with
different parameters" for the length of time necessary to establish abandonment.13
Libertarianism, in the sense of adherence to the non-aggression principle, is consistent
with any set of property rules. It is the set of property rules that determines whether a
given act of violence is coercion or self-defense. Arguments for the superiority of one set

146

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (U.S.A.: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 150-151.
Benjamin Tucker, "An Alleged Flaw in Anarchy," Instead of a Book, p. 212.
148
Bill Orton, "Cohen's Argument," Free-Market.Net forums, January 1, 2001 <http://www.freemarket.net/forums/main0012/messages/807541545.html> Captured April 30, 2004.
149
Orton, "Re: On the Question of Private Property," Anti-State.Com Forum, August 30, 2003
<http://www.antistate.com/forum/index.php?board=6;action=display;threadid=6726;start=20> Captured
April 30, 2004.
150
Bill Orton, "Yet Another Variation," Anti-State.Com Forum, December 7, 2003 <http://antistate.com/forum/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=7965;start=0> Captured April 30, 2004.
147

of property rules over another can be established only on consequentialist grounds (i.e.,
on the basis of prudential assessments of how they lead to results consistent with
commonly accepted ideas of "fairness"), and not deduced from principle.
3. Patents and Copyrights. We already discussed, in Chapters Nine and Ten, the
function of "intellectual property" in unequal exchange and the exploitation of labor. As
we saw, Tom Peters likes to enthuse that most of the price of commodities consists of
"intangibles" or "intellect." That is just another way of saying that most of the purchase
price of what we buy amounts to rent on artificial property rights like copyright and
patents, trademarks, and so forth, and that therefore the same portion of the labor we have
done to earn that purchase price goes to pay rent to the holders of such artificial property,
rather than to pay for the materials and labor actually involved in producing the goods.
Whatever portion of the price of consumer goods, on average, is comprised of returns on
"intellectual property," that same portion of our workweek consists of tribute to the
owners of artificial property.
It's funny that in the name of protecting "intellectual property," big media companies are
willing to do such violence to the idea of real property -- arguing that since everything we
own, from our t-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone's copyright, patent and
trademark, that we're basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters
who've seen fit to give us a lease on our homes.151

In industries where physical capital outlays are negligible compared to human capital,
patents and copyrights act as tollgates between labor and the consumer market, enabling
the holders of "intellectual property" both to appropriate part of the laborer's product and
to charge monopoly prices to the consumer.
The RIAA represents artists about as effectively as the big pharmaceutical companies
represent sick people. I'll explain. The vast majority of innovation in medicine comes from
university campuses. The usual pattern is Big Pharma then comes in and uses the research
that's already been done to then patent it and turn it into an obscenely profitable drug
(especially if it's good for treating a disease common among people in rich countries). Then
they say anybody else who makes cheap or free versions of the drug is stealing, and by doing
so we're stifling innovation and acting immorally.
Similarly, the vast majority of musical innovation happens on the streets by people who
are not being paid by anyone. The machine that is the music industry then snatches a bit of
that popular culture, sanitizes it, and then sells it back to us at a premium. They create a
superstar or two out of cultural traditions of their choosing and to hell with the rest of them.
Sometimes the musicians they promote are really good, but that's not the point. The point is
that if the RIAA were truly interested in promoting good artists, they'd be doing lots of
smaller record contracts with a wide variety of artists representing a broad cross-section of

151

Cory Doctorow, "In the age of ebooks, you don't own your library," Boing Boing, March 23, 2008
<http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/23/in-the-age-of-ebooks.html>.

musical traditions. But as it is, if it were up to the RIAA we'd be listening to the music of a
small handful of multimillionaire pop stars and the other 99.9% of musicians would starve.152

Intellectual property, in short, is theft. And it's instructive to consider the hypocrisy of
those who rely on it as a business model. The publishing, music and software industry
figures who whine the most about "piracy," and complain that "you can't compete with
free," are the very same people who themselves ruthlessly downsized their workforces
when new production technology made them redundant. David Noble, in Progress
Without People, relates an incident in the early 1970s when the Washington Post was
adopting computerized cold type technology which rendered pressmen obsolete. The
pressroom was invaded after hours by pressmen who systematically took apart the
machines with the clinical expertise of a Jack the Ripper.153 So why is it bad for
"Luddites" to smash machines that put them out of a job, while technology that puts
capitalists out of a job violates their "property" rights? If the same newspaper publishers
whose adoption of new technology rendered skilled workers obsolete, now find
themselves threatened by cutting and pasting and hyperlinks--well, it couldn't happen to a
nicer bunch of guys. And if the record companies' management and shareholders now
find themselves redundant in the face of home sound editing, filesharing, and other forms
of new technology, then let them eat cake. If workers don't have a property right in their
jobs in the face of new technology, then neither do capitalists have a property in a
business model rendered obsolete by new technology.
4. Occupational Licensing and Safety Codes. We already examined the role of
these forms of artificial property, as they affect unequal exchange and exploit the worker
and consumer, in Chapter Four. Like patents and copyrights, they serve as toll gates. In
this case, they impede the individual's ability to transform his labor and skills directly
either into subsistence production for his own use, or into marketable value.
A good example is the medallion system of licensing taxicabs, where a license to
operate a cab costs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The effect of the medallion
system is to criminalize the countless operators of gypsy cab services. For the
unemployed person or unskilled laborer, driving carless retirees around on their errands
for an hourly fee seems like an ideal way to transform one’s labor directly into a source of
income without doing obesiance to the functionaries of some corporate Human Resources
department.
The primary purpose of the medallion system is not to ensure safety. That could be
accomplished just as easily by mandating an annual vehicle safety inspection, a criminal

152

David Rovics, "The RIAA vs. the World," Counterpunch, October 9, 2007
<http://www.counterpunch.org/rovics10092007.html>.
153
David F. Noble, Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of
Resistance (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995), p. 42.

background check, and a driving record check (probably all the licensed taxi firms do
anyway, and with questionable results based on my casual observation of both vehicles
and drivers). And it would probably cost under a hundred bucks rather than three
hundred thousand. No, the primary purpose of the medallion system is to allow the
owners of licenses to screw both the consumer and the driver.
Another good example is the entry barriers to employment as a surveyor today, as
compared to George Washington's day. As Vin Suprynowicz points out, Washington had
no formal schooling until he was eleven, only two years of it thereafter, and still was able
to learn enough geometry, trigonometry and surveying to get a job paying $100,000
annually in today's terms.
How much government-run schooling would a youth of today be told he needs before he
could contemplate making $100,000 a year as a surveyor — a job which has not changed
except to get substantially easier, what with hand-held computers, GPS scanners and laser
range-finders? Sixteen years, at least — 18, more likely.154

Appendix 11A.
Reciprocity and Thick Libertarianism
Charles Johnson, in his argument for "thick" libertarianism, uses Chris Sciabarra's
"dialectical libertarianism"155 as a starting point--including anti-state libertarianism in
what Johnson calls "a larger effort to understand and to challenge interlocking, mutually
reinforcing systems of oppression, of which statism is an integral part--but only one part
among others."156 By "thick" libertarianism, he means promoting a relationship between
narrowly anti-state ("thin") libertarianism, and "'thicker' bundles of socio-cultural
commitments..."
Johnson lists several different kinds of "thickness": i.e., several possible ways in
which anti-state libertarianism's non-aggression principle can be bundled together with
related cultural values, so that "thick" libertarians may oppose forms of oppression or
exploitation which are not formally coercive.157 The most important, for our purposes, is
what he calls Grounds Thickness: "some commitments might be consistent with the nonaggression principle, but might undermine or contradict the deeper reasons that justify
libertarian principles. Although you could consistently accept libertarianism without the

154

Vin Suprynowicz, "Schools guarantee there can be no new Washingtons," Review Journal, February 10,
2008 <http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/15490456.html>.
155
Chris Sciabarra, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (University Park, Penn.: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
156
Charles Johnson, "Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism," p. 155.
157
Ibid., pp. 175-176.

bundle, you could not do so reasonably: rejecting the bundle means rejecting the grounds
for libertarianism.158
He goes on to argue that anti-state libertarianism's opposition to coercion assumes an
even more fundamental value of human moral equality and "equality of authority," which
social and economic oppression can violate without formal coercion.159 Given that the
"underlying reason" for commitment to anti-state libertarianism is a belief in the equal
political authority of human beings, while it may not be formally inconsistent for a
libertarian to endorse voluntary forms of social authoritarianism, it is "weird." The same
is true of those who display hostility toward voluntary expressions of solidarity or mutual
aid:
Once could in principle believe that everyone ought to be free to pursue her own ends
while also holding that nobody's ends actually matter except her own. But again,
while the position is possible, it is weird; one of the best reasons for being concerned
about the freedom of others to pursue their own ends is a certain generalized respect
for the importance of other people's lives and the integrity of their choices, which is
intimately connected with the libertarian conception of Equality.160
In short, the value libertarians place on liberty is grounded in the value of human
equality. We are entitled to equal liberty, and no one is entitled to coerce another,
because of the equal dignity and value each of us possesses as an end in himself. And it
is possible to violate this principle of equal dignity, by violating (as we shall see below)
the principle of reciprocity, without formally violating liberty as such.
Matt MacKenzie builds on this foundation, in analyzing economic exploitation from
the standpoint of Grounds Thickness.161 MacKenzie begins with the fundamental value
of anti-state libertarianism as such: that "it is morally impermissible to initiate coercion
or fraud against others."162 But that statement immediately suggests the question of why
it is impermissible; and the reason is that others are our equals in that they are entitled to
be treated as ends rather than means.
MacKenzie provides his own supplemental definition of Grounds Thickness: "certain
commitments ought to be accepted because they are based on the same grounds that
justify one's commitment to libertarianism in the first place."163 Economic exploitation
deserves condemnation even when non-coercive, because it violates the fundamental
norm of fairness underlying libertarianism's non-aggression principle.

158

Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., pp. 170-171.
160
Ibid., p. 179.
161
Matt MacKenzie, "Exploitation: A Dialectical Anarchist Perspective,"
162
Ibid.
163
Ibid.
159

In developing his argument against exploitation, MacKenzie relies heavily on Alan
Wertheimer's book Exploitation.164 Wertheimer defines exploitation, much like the
average medieval tradesman of Meek and Tawney, as "taking unfair advantage."165 He
distinguishes between harmful and mutually advantageous exploitation. Harmful
exploitation occurs when A exploits B in ways that create net harm to B. Mutually
advantageous exploitation equates to the kind of situation described earlier in this
chapter, in which the exploited party (B) is a net beneficiary from a transaction compared
to his state had he not participated in it, but the exploiter (A) is able to assess payment to
B based on the latter's benefit, rather than on A's cost of providing the service. The key
question, in distinguishing non-harmful exploitation from the coercive kind, is whether B
benefits compared to "a no-transaction baseline." If the individual gives consent because
he believes he benefits compared to his state without the transaction, it is both nonharmful and consensual exploitation. Harmful and non-consensual exploitation occurs
when the individual does not give voluntary or valid consent, as is the case with coercion
or fraud.
The most interesting case, in this taxonomy, is when the individual consents to the
transaction, and benefits from the exchange compared to the "no-transaction baseline,"
but the transaction still violates a norm of fairness.
....[C]onsider the case in which B is in a lifethreatening situation and A is the only one
who is in a position to rescue him. A offers to rescue B, but only if B agrees to sign
over all of his current wealth as well as 50% of all future earnings. B, valuing his life,
agrees. He benefits relative to the no-transaction baseline, which is death, but I think
most would agree that he is not treated fairly. The broader point here is that parties to
a mutually beneficial transaction are not indifferent to the distribution of costs and
benefits between the two parties. And I see no reason to rule out from the start the
idea that some distributions within the zone of mutual advantage could be
exploitative.166
MacKenzie treats justice as a subset of the broader category of fairness: claims to
justice entail a right to enforcement; claims to fairness which do not invoke the standard
of justice may well be equally valid, but are not necessarily enforceable in all cases.167
Unfairness is subject to what MacKenzie calls "transaction specific considerations,"
and to "background considerations":
First, there are transaction specific considerations of fairness. Here the focus is on
features of the transaction itself in relative abstraction from the larger social or

164

Alan Wertheimer, Exploitation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). All references
below to Wertheimer's arguments rely on their treatment in MacKenzie's article.
165
MacKenzie, "Exploitation,"
166
Ibid.
167
Ibid.

historical context. For instance, if A employs fraud in order to take advantage of B,
the unfairness here is a direct defect of the transaction itself. Also, cases of transient
monopoly, such as standard rescue examples, may simply involve forms of
transaction specific unfairness. Second, there are background considerations of
fairness. These considerations deal with the larger social context within which the
transaction occurs. For instance, if A has a legal monopoly on the production of
widgets, this fact may be relevant to whether A’s sale of widgets to B will count as an
exploitative transaction. Obviously, these two types of considerations are
interdependent. Background unfairness emerges from patterns of individual actions
and these systemic forms of unfairness can make possible or facilitate cases of
transaction specific unfairness. Moreover, background injustice—those forms of
unfairness that constitute rights violations—can make possible or facilitate forms of
unfairness that are not themselves unjust.168
MacKenzie sets aside, for the sake of argument, transaction specific considerations
that involve force and fraud. This leaves for consideration the very important general
class of transactions which are exploitative (in the sense of being unfair) without
involving direct coercion between the parties themselves, but nevertheless involve the
exploiting party taking advantage of structural conditions that operate in his favor so that
the "distribution of costs and benefits" between the two parties is unequal.
MacKenzie's "distribution of costs and benefits between the parties" is, in essence,
what I have discussed in the main body of this chapter as the norm of reciprocity.
Economic rents that result from short-term bottlenecks in the supply of reproducible
commodities, or from similar transient phenonmena that involve no coercion or fraud, fall
into the general category of "unfairness" (in the sense of an inequality of benefits
resulting from one party taking advantage of background conditions, so as to "charge
what the market will bear").
So long as market entry is unconstrained, such unfair but non-coercive exchange may
be not only of net benefit to the individual by MacKenzie's no-transaction baseline, but
(as Marx observed in The Poverty of Philosophy) serves a greater social purpose as the
driving mechanism by which resources are directed into those uses where demand
outstrips supply, and thereby causes price to gravitate toward cost. In such a case, when
exploitation amounts to a temporary producer surplus, the social attitude tends to fall into
the category of grudging admiration ("you lucky bastard"), rather than moral outrage.
Moral outrage occurs, on the other hand, when artificial (or even natural--e.g.,
differential land rent) constraints on market entry render the producer surplus permanent-especially when the beneficiary had recourse to political power in creating such an entry
barrier for his own benefit. MacKenzie is especially concerned with this category, which

168

Ibid.

equates by and large to Oppenheimer's "political means."169
So what we have arrived at is a residual category of transactions in which both parties
participate willingly and no direct force is used by the exploiting party, and in which the
exploited party benefits compared to his no-transaction baseline, and yet exploitation
takes place from the standpoint of fairness (i.e., the comparative distribution of costs and
benefits between the parties). And further, in this category of transactions, the exploiting
party is taking unfair advantage, not of a transient state of affairs resulting from normal
fluctuations of supply in a competitive market, or of producer rents from being the first to
introduce an innovation when competitors are free to adopt it afterward, but of a state of
affairs in which the state sets up market entry barriers to competition with the exploiting
party, and thereby artificially constrains the range of alternatives available to the
exploited party.
MacKenzie's objective is to convince libertarians that they ought to recognize as
exploitative the rents that accrue to corporations taking advantage of this state of affairs,
and condemn as unfair such exploitation even when it occurs in nominally "voluntary"
transactions between "private" entities.
The picture, then, is this: the state directly exploits its citizens and intervenes in
the market on behalf of privileged economic elites (often under the guise of
progressive, public interest regulation) creating a distorted, cartelized economy. The
rents gained by the beneficiaries of state intervention constitute the extraction of
social surplus from the exploited—workers, consumers, entrepreneurs, etc. Further,
this pervasive exploitation is compatible with the continued improvement in the
condition of the exploited through economic exchange. Relative to a no-transaction
baseline, market exchange is mutually beneficial, even in a cartelized market
economy. However, the beneficiaries of cartelization are able to capture more of the
surplus of social cooperation than they would be able to in a more just and
competitive economy.170
At one point MacKenzie catches himself in what seems to me to be a basic
contradiction:
....when it comes to voluntary market exchange, the appropriate libertarian principle
of fairness is not—heaven forbid—a notion of an objective price or a notion of equal
exchange, but rather a notion of the (hypothetical) competitive market price. The fair
market price is the (hypothetical) free market price.171
This seems to me to contradict his earlier line of argument. In even a competitive
market, short term imbalances of supply make it possible for a firm to receive a producer

169

Ibid.
Ibid.
171
Ibid.

170

surplus or economic rent by taking advantage of such conditions. This, I think, clearly
falls into the category of a transaction that is "unfair," in the sense of being an unequal
"distribution of costs and benefits" between the parties, without being either unjust in a
transaction-specific sense or in terms of background considerations. Like the unfairness
of, say, producer rents from superior innate skill, they are an unfairness that is nobody's
fault and which most sensible people will cheerfully accept, and yet which are still
"unfair" for all that.
In my opinion, denying the "unfairness" of such temporary economic rents, even in a
free and competitive market, undermines the central lesson of MacKenzie's article: the
distinction between unfairness and injustice. The most important thing, in MacKenzie's
model of state capitalism, is that unfairness is the product of background injustice, and
thereby goes beyond mere unfairness to the point of being itself tinged with actual
injustice, in a much larger share of cases than most libertarians are willing to recognize.
The difference between the free market and the regime of privilege is that while the
former permits unfairness, it is an unfairness in which the "unjust rewards" are temporary
and promote the greater social good; the latter, on the other hand, enforces "unjust
rewards" as its central end, while forcibly suppressing the process by which they serve the
greater good.
But from the same distinction, it also follows that unfairness--even when it does not
entail injustice, either directly or indirectly--it is still unfair. Libertarians should oppose
unfairness because--according to the principle of grounds thickness--it contradicts the
ethical basis of their libertarianism even when it does not involve actual coercion. The
value of liberty itself has, underlying it, the value of moral equality. And the norm of
reciprocity stems from that same value of moral equality. If you are just as important as I
am, it follows that your right to pursue your own goals is as sacred as mine, that your
right to be compensated for your labor is just as important to you as mine is to me, and
that the costs (effort or pain) you experience are just as significant to you as mine are to
me.

