On page 169 of Man, Economy and State, Murray Rothbard asserts that “the origin of all property is ultimately traceable to the appropriation of an unused nature-given factor by a man and his “mixing” his labor with this natural factor to produce a capital good or a consumers’ good.”
He makes two errors.
Firstly in assuming that there are any unused unowned natural resources. Writing in the late 1950’s it should have been clear to Rothbard that virtually the whole world had already been claimed as property. Even in the USA, the pioneer days were long gone. Every piece of land, every animal and plant, every mineral resource is already claimed by someone; if not a person or a corporation, then by the state or federal governments.
To be sure, Rothbard accepts that property can be traded or gifted between willing parties, and that therefore current property title may be acquired as the result of an historic melding of human labour with unused unowned natural resources, and that property is then gifted or traded to the current owner. But we must also recall that Rothbard says that legitimate property title cannot be acquired via theft; the property still belongs to the original owner.
In the case of the USA, it is clear that all of the current USA was stolen from the Native Americans by various europeans. Using violence or the threat of violence, the pre-colonial populations were pushed off their lands, and confined to reservations. Some coerced treaties were signed, but the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act abrogated all those treaties and appropriated (stole) any remaining independent Native American lands, and made them the property of the USA.
The situation in Europe is even more clear cut. In every nation in Europe, the original settlers of the land, those who might be considered to have first mixed their labour with previously unused, unowned natural resources, those people were violently displaced by later invaders. The expansion of the Roman Empire negated all previous land ownership. The Norman invasion of Britain did the same. The warrior aristocracies of the early middle ages acquired their vast land holdings, their principalities, duchies and counties through conquest and the division of the spoils. Even where later revolutions overthrew the monarchies, the subsequent re-allocation of property was done via the coercion of force, rather than than by freely entered contracts and trade.
It is clear that there is no one in Europe or the Americas who can demonstrate the chain of freely-entered exchanges by which their current claim to land property could be validated, according to the Rothbard thesis of land ownership. The laws which pretend to uphold such claims are merely the laws of the invaders, the laws imposed by those who stole the land.
[Sade 1797: “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft“]
And if the claims to land property cannot be justified, then claims to the animals, plants and mineral rights on those lands, also fail.
The second error of Rothbard is to reserve the creation of property to only human labour and none other.
On page 2 of Man, Economy and State, Rothbard states: The fact that men act by virtue of their being human is indisputable and incontrovertible. To assume the contrary would be an absurdity. The contrary—the absence of motivated behavior— would apply only to plants and inorganic matter.
There is no need to enter here into the difficult problem of animal behavior, from the lower organisms to the higher primates, which might be considered as on a borderline between purely reflexive and motivated behavior. At any rate, men can understand (as distinguished from merely observe) such behavior only in so far as they can impute to the animals motives that they can understand.
Rothbard recognises the problem of animal motivation and action here, but declines to address it. Later, on page 92 he states “each man has ownership over his own self, over his will and actions, and the manner in which he will exert his own labor“. From his note on page 93 regarding the status of children, it appears that it is “the powers of reasoning” which are key for Rothbard in the transformation of children from being the property of their parents into “full self-owners“.
But curiously, Rothbard declines to offer self-ownership to animals, even where they display powers of reasoning, and act according to motivated behaviour.
When the beavers mix their labour with natural resources in order to build their dams, it seems clear that they are reasoning, and that they are motivated, and that they are acting in an economic way. To use Rothbard’s terminology, the dam is a capital good. The beavers forgo the satisfactions of food gathering today, in order to construct the dam, which will provide the future satisfaction of protection from predators.
Although they would have been unknown to Rothbard in the 1950’s, there are many other examples known today of animals exhibiting powers of reasoning, deduction, tool use, and motivated action.
If animals display powers of reasoning, then by Rothbard’s formula, they should be accorded rights of self-ownership. And the right of self-ownership of reasoning animals makes those animals ineligible to be the property of anyone else. Which means we don’t get to eat them, or keep them in zoos.
Our present treatment of the reasoning animals looks a lot like another exercise of violence, rather than a defensible assertion of property rights.