Title of Justice

I must've dreamed a thousand dreams
Been haunted by a million screams
But I can hear the marching feet
They're moving into the street
--Genesis

Lots of good points here by Murray Rothbard on the subject of justice and property rights. He begins with a point that is often overlooked. Whenever an economic exchange takes place, what is really being exchanged is title of ownership.

It is therefore inconsistent to condone free economic exchange between two parties while proposing that individuals do not have full rights to this property.

Viewed in this manner, denying such an exchange or such rights would be unjust.

Yet folks who frequently engage in free economic exchange also want to confiscate the property of others in the name of 'justice.' The rationale often offered is that the property was not the confiscatee's to begin with. Rather, the property is jointly owned by the community, and therefore can be rightly redistributed to others in the community.

As Rothbard points out, in denying the property rights of an individual, only two alternatives are possible. a) A certain class of people has the right to appropriate another class's property without the appropriatee's consent, or b) Everyone in the community has an equal share in the property of everyone else.

While the injustice of a) should be apparent, we witness such action routinely via taxation, eminent domain, et al. The 'communal' solution expressed in b) is grounded in the absurdity that individuals are entitled to own a part of everyone else but not entitled to own themselves.

As Rothbard notes, b) leads to a world where no one would be free to take any productive action without prior approval or command by all others in society. Because it would be physically impossible for everyone to keep tabs of everyone else to ensure that communal goals were being upheld, supervision (and ultimately control and ownership) would devolve into a specialized group of people who would become the ruling class.

Confiscation in the name of others would therefore practically devolve into an oligarchy of confiscators.

The oligarchs confiscate in the name of communal 'justice.'

Sadly, this twisted state of affairs is not a hypothetical. It is becoming reality.