State Legalisation of Theft

Every state makes theft illegal: if I cosh you in the street and steal your money, I am breaking the law, and should expect to go to prison for it. Yet, curiously, there are numerous examples of the state legalising theft.

1) William the Conqueror

In 1066, William of Normandy was not the correct heir to the throne of England, which should have been inherited by Edgar Ætheling. But William did have a better army and defeated the strongest of his rivals, Harold Godwinson, at Hastings.

Once established as King in England, William asserted that all land belonged to him personally, which he could then retain or parcel out to his loyal followers (often Norman, but sometimes English). Those top rank followers then parcelled out parts of their new domains to their own followers. This hierarchy of delegated ownership instigated what became known as the feudal system in England.

All previous land ownership in England was abrogated, except for church properties. By his successful execution of violence, William stole an entire country. Afterwards, there were no legal challenges to his ownership of England, and only a few military challenges, which he successfully fended off.

To this day, huge swathes of land ownership in England are ultimately dependent on its prior theft by William the Conqueror.

2) European Empires

Across several centuries, Britain acquired by force huge chunks of what are now the United States, Canada, India, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. At home, British law made theft illegal, but overseas British law authorised the theft of whole continents, regardless of the prior laws operating on those continents. While Africa and India reverted to local ownership at the end of the Empire, the current land ownership in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand remains dependent on the violent theft of imperial colonisation.

Britain is by no means alone in having used force to steal other countries, and then legalising their theft within their own legal system. I merely use it as the example english-speaking readers may be most familiar with. Pretty much all land everywhere has been previously stolen from someone else, at some point in history.

It is curious that nations who decry the “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine in the present day, have little to say about how territorial ownership was originally acquired in their own nations. Texas is presently part of the United States, because it seceded from Mexico and was then annexed by its more powerful neighbour (the USA).

3) Enclosures

The history of England is peppered with examples of richer people getting the law changed, to justify their cost-free acquisition of lands previously held in common by poorer people.

4) Fractional Reserve Banking

Originally when money was only in the form of gold, silver, or coins, banks could only lend out money they already had on deposit. However, once money began to exist in the form of promissory notes, there was little to prevent banks issuing more promissory notes for gold, than the amount of gold they actually had. This was fraud by the bankers. If all the promissory notes were presented at the same time, the bank would fail to meet its contractual obligation to redeem the note in gold.

However, governments found it expedient to allow and legalise this fraud (UK, in 1797) in order that the banks would continue financing their wars.

5) Closure of the gold window

In 1931 in the UK, and 1971 in the US, the governments of the day permanently cancelled the contractual rights of bank customers to receive their gold from the banks to whom they had entrusted it, and by this time it was the central bank of each nation who held the gold and now refused to return it to it’s rightful owners. The fraud of fractional reserve banking was made permanently legal, and purely fiat currency replaced commodity based money. In changing the law in this way, the governments defrauded their citizens, and stole their gold.