Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Before advancing to the more exciting field of analyzing diverse policy schemes from the standpoint of economic theory and political philosophy, it is essential to introduce and explain the basic concepts used throughout the following study. Indeed, the concepts explained in this chapter—the concepts of property, contract, aggression, capitalism and socialism—are so basic, so fundamental, that one cannot even avoid making use of them, if at times only implicitly. Unfortunately, though, the very fact that in analyzing any kind of human action and/or any kind of interpersonal relationship one must make use of these concepts does not imply that everyone has a precise understanding of them. It seems instead to be the other way around.
Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition. But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster. For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them. To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified.
Next to the concept of action, property is the most basic category in the social sciences. As a matter of fact, all other concepts to be introduced in this chapter—aggression, contract, capitalism and socialism—are definable in terms of property: aggression being aggression against property, contract being a nonaggressive relationship between property owners, socialism being an institutionalized policy of aggression against property, and capitalism being an institutionalized policy of the recognition of property and contractualism.
Let us start with an elucidation of the precondition necessary for the concept of property to emerge.4 For a concept of property to arise, there must be a scarcity of goods. Should there be no scarcity, and should all goods be so-called “free goods” whose use by any one person for any one purpose would not in any way exclude (or interfere with or restrict) its use by any other person or for any other purpose, then there would be no need for property. If, let us say, due to some paradisiac superabundance of bananas, my present consumption of bananas does not in any way reduce my own future supply (possible consumption) of bananas, nor the present or the future supply of bananas for any other person, then the assignment of property rights, here with respect to bananas, would be superfluous. To develop the concept of property, it is necessary for goods to be scarce, so that conflicts over the use of these goods can possibly arise. It is the function of property rights to avoid such possible Clashes over the use of scarce resources by assigning rights of exclusive ownership. Property is thus a normative concept: a concept designed to make a conflict-free interaction possible by stipulating mutually binding rules of conduct (norms) regarding scarce resources.5 It does not need much comment to see that there is indeed scarcity of goods, of all sorts of goods, everywhere, and the need for property rights is thus evident. As a matter of fact, even if we were to assume that we lived in the Garden of Eden, where there was a superabundance of everything needed not only to sustain one’s life but to indulge in every possible comfort by simply stretching out one’s hand, the concept of property would necessarily have to evolve. For even under these “ideal” circumstances, every person’s physical body would still be a scarce resource and thus the need for the establishment of property rules, i.e., rules regarding people’s bodies, would exist. One is not used to thinking of one’s own body in terms of a scarce good, but in imagining the most ideal situation one could ever hope for, the Garden of Eden, it becomes possible to realize that one’s body is indeed the prototype of a scarce good for the use of which property rights, i.e., rights of exclusive ownership, somehow have to be established, in order to avoid clashes.
As a matter of fact, as long as a person acts,6 i.e., as long as a person intentionally tries to change a state of affairs that is subjectively perceived and evaluated as less satisfactory into a state that appears more rewarding, this action necessarily involves a choice regarding the use of this person’s body. And choosing, preferring one thing or state over another, evidently implies that not everything, not all possible pleasures or satisfactions, can be had at one and the same time, but rather that something considered less valuable must be given up in order to attain something else considered to be more valuable.7 Thus choosing always implies the incurrence of costs: foregoing possible enjoyments because the means needed to attain them are scarce and are bound up in some alternative use which promises returns valued more highly than the opportunities forfeited.8 Even in the Garden of Eden I could not simultaneously eat an apple, smoke a cigarette, have a drink, climb up a tree, read a book, build a house, play with my cat, drive a car, etc. I would have to make choices and could do things only sequentially. And this would be so because there is only one body that I can use to do these things and enjoy the satisfaction derived from doing them. I do not have a superabundance of bodies which would allow me to enjoy all possible satisfactions simultaneously, in one single bliss. And I would be restrained by scarcity in another respect as well: as long as this scarce resource “body” is not indestructible and is not equipped with eternal health and energy, but rather is an organism with only a limited life span, time is scarce, too. The time used up in pursuing goal A reduces the time left to pursue other goals. And the longer it takes to reach a desired result, the higher the costs involved in waiting will be, and the higher the expected satisfaction must be in order to justify these costs.
Thus, because of the scarcity of body and time, even in the Garden of Eden property regulations would have to be established. Without them, and assuming now that more than one person exists, that their range of action overlaps, and that there is no pre-established harmony and synchronization of interests among these persons, conflicts over the use of one’s own body would be unavoidable. I might, for instance, want to use my body to enjoy drinking a cup of tea, while someone else might want to start a love affair with it, thus preventing me from having my tea and also reducing the time left to pursue my own goals by means of this body. In order to avoid such possible clashes, rules of exclusive ownership must be formulated. In fact, so long as there is action, there is a necessity for the establishment of property norms.
To keep things simple and free of distracting details let us continue to assume, for another stretch of analysis, that we indeed inhabit a Garden of Eden, where exclusively one’s body, its standing room, and time are scarce resources. What can the prototype of a scarce good, a person’s body, tell us about property and its conceptual derivatives?
While even in a world with only one type of scarce resource all sorts of norms regulating exclusive ownership with respect to scarce means are conceivable in principle (for example, a rule such as “On Mondays I determine to which uses our bodies can be put, on Tuesdays you determine their use,” etc.), it is certain that not all of them would in fact have the same chance of being proposed and accepted. It then seems to be best to start one’s analysis with the property norm, which would most likely be accepted by the inhabitants of Eden as the “natural position” regarding the assignment of rights of exclusive ownership in bodies. To be sure, at this stage of the argument we are not yet concerned with ethics, with the problem of the moral justification of norms. Thus, while it can well be admitted from the very outset that I am indeed going to argue later on that the natural position is the only morally defendable one, and while I am also convinced that it is the natural one because it is morally defendable, at this stage, natural does not imply any moral connotation. It is simply meant to be a socio-psychological category used to indicate that this position would probably find the most support in public opinion.9 Indeed; its naturalness is reflected by the very fact that in talking about bodies, it is almost impossible to avoid using possessive (possession-indicating) expressions as well. A body is normally referred to as a specific person’s body: my body, yours, his, etc. (and, incidentally, the same is done whenever one speaks of actions!); and one does not have the slightest problem distinguishing what is mine, yours, etc.; clearly, in doing so, one is assigning property-titles and distinguishing between proper owners of scarce resources.
What, then, is the natural position regarding property implicit in one’s natural way of speaking about bodies? Every person has the exclusive right of ownership of his body within the boundaries of its surface. Every person can put his body to those uses that he thinks best for his immediate or long-run interest, well-being, or satisfaction, as long as he does not interfere with another person’s rights to control the use of his/her respective body. This “ownership” of one’s own body implies one’s right to invite (agree to) another person’s doing something with (to) one’s own body: my right to do with my body whatever I want, that is, includes the right to ask and let someone else use my body, love it, examine it, inject medicines or drugs into it, change its physical appearance and even beat, damage, or kill it, if that should be what I like and agree to. Interpersonal relationships of this sort are and will be called contractual exchanges. They are characterized by the fact that an agreement on the use of scarce resources is reached, which is based on mutual respect and recognition of each and all of the exchanging partners’ domain of exclusive control over their respective bodies. By definition, such contractual exchanges, while not necessarily advantageous for each and all of the exchanging partners in retrospect (I might not like my looks afterwards, even though the surgeon did exactly what I told him to do to my face), are always, and necessarily so, mutually advantageous for every participant ex ante, otherwise the exchange simply would not take place.
If, on the other hand, an action is performed that uninvitedly invades or changes the physical integrity of another person’s body and puts this body to a use that is not to this very person’s own liking, this action, according to the natural position regarding property, is called aggression.10 It would be aggression if a person tried to satisfy his sexual or sadistic desires by raping or beating another person’s body without having this person’s explicit consent. And it would be aggression as well, if a person were physically stopped from performing certain actions with his body which might not be to someone else’s liking, such as wearing pink socks or curly hair, or getting drunk every day, or first sleeping and then philosophizing instead of doing it the other way around, but which, if indeed performed, would not in itself cause a change in the physical integrity of any other person’s body.11 By definition, then, an aggressive act always and necessarily implies that a person, by performing it, increases his/her satisfaction at the expense of a decrease in the satisfaction of another person.
What is the underlying rationale of this natural position regarding property? At the bottom of the natural property theory lies the idea of basing the assignment of an exclusive ownership right on the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner and the property owned and, mutatis mutandis, of calling all property claims that can only invoke purely subjective evidence in their favor aggressive. While I can cite in favor of my property claim regarding my body the objective fact that I was the body’s first occupant—its first user—anyone else who claims to have the right to control this body can cite nothing of the sort. No one could call my body a product of his will, as I could claim it to be the product of mine; such a claim to the right to determine the use of the scarce resource “my body” would be a claim of nonusers, of nonproducers, and would be based exclusively on subjective opinion, i.e., on a merely verbal declaration that things should be this or that way. Of course, such verbal claims could (and very likely always will) point to certain facts, too (“I am bigger, I am smarter, I am poorer or I am very special, etc.!”), and could thereby try to legitimize themselves. But facts such as these do not (and cannot) establish any objective link between a given scarce resource and any particular person(s). Everyone’s ownership of every particular resource can equally well be established or excluded on such grounds. It is such property claims, derived from thin air, with purely verbal links between owners and things owned, which, according to the natural theory of property, are called aggressive. As compared with this, my property claim regarding my body can point to a determinate natural link; and it can do so because my body has been produced, and everything produced (as contrasted with things “given”), logically, has a determinate connection with some definite individual producer(s); it has been produced by me. To avoid any misunderstanding, ‘to produce” is not to say “to create out of nothing” (after all, my body is also a naturally given thing); it means to change a naturally given thing according to a plan, to transform nature. It is also not to say “to transform each and every part of it” (after all, my body has lots of parts with respect to which I never did anything!); it means instead to transform a thing within (including/excluding) borders, or, even more precisely, to produce borderlines for things. And finally, “to produce” also is not to say that the process of production must go on indefinitely (after all, I am sleeping sometimes, and my body is certainly not a product of my actions right then]), it simply means that it was produced in the past and can be recognized as such. It is such property claims, then, which can be derived from past, embordering productive efforts and which can be tied to specific individuals as producers, which recalled “natural” or “nonaggressive.”12
The ideas of capitalism and socialism should be almost clear at this point. But before leaving the Garden of Eden once and for all, a look at the consequences of the introduction of elements of aggressively founded ownership into paradise should be taken, as this will help elucidate, purely and simply, the central economic and social problem of every type of real socialism, i.e., of socialism in a world of all-around scarcity, the detailed analysis of which then is the concern of the following chapters.
Even in the land of milk and honey, people evidently could choose different lifestyles, set different goals for themselves, have different standards as to what kind of personality they want to develop and what achievements to strive for. True, one would not need to work in order to make a living as there would be a superabundance of everything. But, put drastically, one could still choose to become a drunk or a philosopher, which is to say, more technically, one could choose to put one’s body to uses that would be more or less immediately rewarding from the point of view of the acting person, or one could put one’s body to such uses which would only bear fruit in a more or less distant future. Decisions of the afore-mentioned type might be called “consumption decisions.” Decisions, on the other hand, to put one’s body to a use that only pays later, i.e., choices induced by some reward or satisfaction anticipated in a more or less distant future requiring the actor to overcome disutility of waiting (time is scarce!), might be called “investment” decisions—decisions, that is, to invest in “human capital,” in the capital embodied in one’s own physical body.13 Now assume that aggressively founded ownership is introduced. Whereas before every person was the exclusive owner of his body and could decide on his own whether to become a drunk or a philosopher, now a system is established in which a person’s right to determine how to use his body is curtailed or completely eliminated, and instead, this right is partly or fully delegated to another person who is not naturally linked to the respective body as its producer. What would be the consequence of this? The abolition of private ownership of one’s body can be far-reaching: the nonproducers can have the right to determine all of the uses of “my” body all of the time, or their right to do so can be restricted with respect to time and/or domains, and these restrictions again can be flexible (with the nonproducers having the right to change the restrictive definitions according to their own taste) or fixed once and for all, and so the effects can, of course, be more or less drastic! But whatever the degree, socialization of ownership always, and necessarily so, produces two types of effects. The first effect, “economic” in the narrower sense of the term, is a reduction in the amount of investment in human capital as defined above. The natural owner of a body cannot help but make decisions regarding that body as long as he does not commit suicide and decides to stay alive, however restricted his ownership rights might be. But since he can no longer decide on his own, undisturbed by others, to what uses to put his body, the value attached to it by him is now lower; the wanted satisfaction, the psychic income, that is to say, which he can derive from his body by putting it to certain uses is reduced because the range of options available to him has been limited. But then, with every action necessarily implying costs (as explained above), and with a given inclination to overcome costs in exchange for expected rewards or profits, the natural owner is faced with a situation in which the costs of action must be reduced in order to bring them back in line with the reduced expected income. In the Garden of Eden, there is only one way left to do this: by shortening the waiting time, reducing the disutility of waiting, and choosing a course of action that promises earlier returns. Thus, the introduction of aggressively founded ownership leads to a tendency to reduce investment decisions and favors consumption decisions. Put drastically, it leads to a tendency to turn philosophers into drunks. This tendency is permanent and more pronounced when the threat of intervention with the natural owner’s rights is permanent, and it is less so to the degree that the threat is restricted to certain times or domains. In any case, though, the rate of investment in human capital is lower than it would be with the right of exclusive control of natural owners over their bodies being untouched and absolute.
The second effect might be called social. The introduction of elements of aggressively founded ownership implies a change in the social structure, a change in the composition of society with respect to personality or character types. Abandoning the natural theory of property evidently implies a redistribution of income. The psychic income of persons in their capacity as users of their “own” natural body, as persons expressing themselves in this body and deriving satisfaction from doing so, is reduced at the expense of an increase in the psychic income of persons in their capacity as invaders of other peoples’ bodies. It has become relatively more difficult and costly to derive satisfaction from using one’s body without invading that of others, and relatively less difficult and costly to gain satisfaction by using other peoples’ bodies for one’s own purposes. This fact alone does not imply any social change, but once a single empirical assumption is made, it does: Assuming that the desire to gain satisfaction at the expense of a loss in satisfaction available to others by instrumentalizing another person’s body exists as a human desire, that it may not be instilled in everybody and to the same extent, but that it exists in some people sometimes to some degree and so conceivably can be suppressed or encouraged and favored by some given institutional arrangement, consequences are imminent. And surely, this assumption is true. Then, the redistribution of chances for income acquisition must result in more people using aggression to gain personal satisfaction and/or more people becoming more aggressive, i.e., shifting increasingly from nonaggressive to aggressive roles, and slowly changing their personality as a consequence of this; and this change in the character structure, in the moral composition of society, in turn leads to another reduction in the level of investment in human capital.
In short, with these two effects we have already pinpointed the most fundamental reasons for socialism’s being an economically inferior system of property arrangements. Indeed, both effects will reappear again and again in the course of the following analyses of socialist policy schemes. All that is left now is to explain the natural theory of property as regards the real world of all around scarcity, for this is the point of departure for all forms of real socialism.
Notwithstanding some evident differences between bodies and all other scarce resources, all conceptual distinctions can be made and applied again without difficulties: Unlike bodies, which are never “unowned” but always have a natural owner, all other scarce resources can indeed be unowned. This is the case as long as they remain in their natural state, unused by anyone. They only become someone’s property once they are treated as scarce means, that is, as soon as they are occupied in some objective borders and put to some specific use by someone. This act of acquiring previously unowned resources is called “original appropriation.”14 Once unowned resources are appropriated it becomes an aggression to uninvitedly change their physical characteristics or to restrict the owner’s range of uses to which he can put these resources, as long as a particular use does not affect the physical characteristics of anyone else’s property—just as in the case of bodies. Only in the course of a contractual relationship, i.e., when the natural owner of a scarce means explicitly agrees, is it possible for someone else to utilize and change previously acquired things. And only if the original or previous owner deliberately transfers his property title to someone else, either in exchange for something or as a free gift, can this other person himself become the owner of such things. Unlike bodies, though, which for the same “natural” reason can never be unowned and also can never be parted with by the natural owner completely but only be “lent out” as long as the owners’ agreement lasts, naturally all other scarce resources can be “alienated” and a property title for them can be relinquished once and for all.15
A social system based on this natural position regarding the assignment of property rights is, and will from now on be called pure capitalist. And since its ideas can also be discerned as the dominating ideas of private law, i.e., of the norms regulating relations between private persons, it might also be termed a pure private law system.16 This system is based on the idea that to be nonaggressive, claims to property must be backed by the “objective” fact of an act of original appropriation, of previous ownership, or by a mutually beneficial contractual relationship. This relationship can either be a deliberate cooperation between property owners or the deliberate transfer of property titles from one owner to another. If this system is altered and instead a policy is instituted that assigns rights of exclusive control over scarce means, however partial, to persons or groups of persons that can point neither to an act of previous usership of the things concerned, nor to a contractual relation with some previous user-owner, then this will be called (partial) socialism.
It will be the task of the next four chapters to explain how different ways of deviating from a pure capitalist system, different ways of redistributing property titles away from natural owners of things (i.e., from people who have put some particular resources to a specific use and so are naturally linked to them, and onto people who have not yet done anything with the resources but who have simply made a verbal, declarative claim regarding them) lowers investment and increases consumption, and in addition causes a change in the composition of the population by favoring nonproductive over productive people.
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