Privateering

“ For it links the omnipotence of the State to the limitations of private ownership; it thrusts the interests of private business into every legislature that grants charters or passes regulating acts; it diminishes, on the other hand, that stimulus to honesty and correct dealing which a private individual discerns to be his greatest asset in trade, for it replaces individual responsibility with group responsibility and scatters ownership among so large a number of persons that sinister manipulation is possible. ”

“ Private property, in every defence made of it, is supposed to mean, the guarantee to individuals of the fruits of their own labour and abstinence. The guarantee to them of the fruits of the labour and abstinence of others, transmitted to them without any merit or exertion of their own, is not of the essence of the institution, but a mere incidental consequence, which, when it reaches a certain height, does not promote, but conflicts with, the ends which render private property legitimate. ”

“ No doubt the institution of private property, necessitating, as it does, the transmission to one person of the possessions and earnings of another, always involves the inheritance of unearned power and opportunity. ”

“ Sovereignty and private property, then, constitute the two branches of this all-pervasive social relation, coercion, or dominion.
But private property, contrary to the legal view, is not the creature of the state, nor is it subject to the state. It is pristine and anterior. It springs from the very nature of man. The state is rather the creature and offspring of private property. It arises quite late in the history of property, with the rise of reflective thinking and the capacity for rational cooperation. ”

“ How is it possible for a group of parasites to retain private ownership over the means of labour, so indispensable to all? How has it come about that private ownership by the idle classes is maintained to the present day? ”

“ Private bodies regular, but unlawful, are those that unite themselves into one person representative, without any public authority at all; such as are the corporations of beggars, thieves and gipsies, the better to order their trade of begging and stealing; and the corporations of men, that by authority from any foreign person, unite themselves in another’s dominion, for the easier propagation of doctrines, and for making a party, against the power of the commonwealth. ”

“ The Revolution, that is to say, instead of denying or abolishing the institution of private property, affirmed it in an incomparably more positive, beneficial, permanent, and general form than had ever been known before. ”

“ Property in services means of course property in future services. The wealth which past services may have produced can be exchanged or owned; but the services themselves cannot. Now all systems of law which we know have allowed private persons to contract with each other for the future performance of certain services, and have punished, or allowed to be punished, the breach of such contracts. Here as in the case of debts, our growing respect for personal liberty has made the law look jealously on all onerous agreements made either by the citizen himself or for him by others. ”

“ The employers talk about "private enterprise," as if there were anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. ”

“ The property instinct is too deeply seated in human nature to tolerate such conditions. Neither would any Englishman endure for a day such a State regulation of his private life as must follow. Apart from that, our experience of the management of business affairs by public bodies, which are constantly changing in opinion and constitution, is not such as to warrant us in looking forward with complacency to the management of our industrial affairs by the State. ”

“ Whether, as in many cases, what he holds as private he so holds by permission only, or whether private ownership is recognized, it remains true that in the last resort he is obliged to surrender whatever is demanded for public use. ”

“ It should not be forgotten that the agent of a private company is also a representative of that larger and more powerful corporation which we call the state. The private company can do no more than outline his duty and discharge him for dereliction; the public corporation not only prescribes his duty but imprisons or hangs him for neglect; the private company is itself but a creation of the state which exercises over it autocratic power while shirking responsibility. ”

“ Quite on the contrary, the change in system placed the private and personal property rights of every citizen upon a basis incomparably more solid and secure and extensive than they ever before had or could have had while private capitalism lasted. ”

“ Little by little the government will become manufacturer, commission-merchant, and retail dealer. It will be the sole proprietor. Why, at all epochs, have the ministers of State been so reluctant to meddle with the question of wages? Why have they always refused to interfere between the master and the workman? Because they knew the touchy and jealous nature of property, and, regarding it as the principle of all civilization, felt that to meddle with it would be to unsettle the very foundations of society. ”

“ They were the first to assert and prove that men and women are not the private estate of princes, to be disposed of in their industry, their property, their consciences, by the discretion of those who were fortunate enough to be able to live by the labours of others. ”

“ But when the law declares that the lapse of time changes possessor into proprietor, it supposes that a right can be created without a producing cause; it unwarrantably alters the character of the subject; it legislates on a matter not open to legislation; it exceeds its own powers. Public order and private security ask only that possession shall be protected. Why has the law created property? Prescription was simply security for the future; why has the law made it a matter of privilege? ”

“ I am fully persuaded that by this system he would, at the expiration of twenty years, be a much richer and more extensive proprietor than any of those who possessed equal capital and industry, but who at first grasped at every acre they could claim, and for the period of probation found their best exertions must be devoted not for the comfortable support of their families, or for the acquisition of wealth, but to make those trifling yet general improvements, without which their land will be forfeited. ”

“ Our own choice is shewn by our continual aspiration to possess property, our common hailing of it as sacred, our setting apart of the word Respectable for those who have attained it, our ascription of pre-eminent religiousness to commandments forbidding its violation, and our identification of law and order among men with its protection. Therefore is it vital to a living knowledge of our society that Private Property should be known in every step of its progress from its source in cupidity to its end in confusion. ”

“ They were permitted to have houses or portions of houses to themselves, and to live there on the share of the public produce allotted to the several members of each household. It had been assumed as matter of course by the majority that when every one was forced to work there would be more than enough for all; that public spirit, and if necessary coercion, would prove as effectual stimulants to exertion and industry as interest and necessity had done under the system of private ownership. ”

“ By182 converting private property into a public function, we would subject it to no tyrannical interference; for this, by the destruction of free impulse and responsibility, would prove most deeply degrading to man’s character. ”

“ The accursed system of private property, rooted in the abysmal malice of the human heart, lies like a dead weight upon every creative impulse. Everything is weighed and judged, everything is valued and measured, in relation to this. ”

“ But there seems to be some confusion of ideas in connection with this phrase, "publicity of private affairs," for really, so far as taxation is concerned, there ought to be nothing "private" about the amount of any man's income, or the aggregate of all forms of his property, inasmuch as every man has a right to know, that all his neighbors are contributing pro rata with himself to support that Government, which is common to him and them. ”

“ Suppose you and a number of other men of your time, all having separate claims in a mining region, formed a corporation to carry on as one mine your consolidated properties, would you have any less private property than you had when you owned your claims separately? ”

“ In the first place, it is established by a series of cases that an ulterior public advantage may justify a comparatively insignificant taking of private property for what, in its immediate purpose, is a private use. ”

“ The peasant who hires land, the manufacturer who borrows capital, the tax-payer who pays tolls, duties, patent and license fees, personal and property taxes, &c., and the deputy who votes for them,—all act neither intelligently nor freely. Their enemies are the proprietors, the capitalists, the government.
Give men liberty, enlighten their minds that they may know the meaning of their contracts, and you will see the most perfect equality in exchanges without regard to superiority of talent and knowledge ”

“ Whereas the organization of feudal economic life rested upon an elaborate system of binding customs, the organization under the system of private enterprise has rested upon the self-interest of the property owner-a self-interest held in check only by competition and the conditions of supply and demand. ”

“ A clipped and regulated private ownership—a private company, for example, with completely published accounts, taxed dividends, with a public representative upon its board of directors and parliamentary powers—may be an infinitely more honest, efficient, and controllable public service than a badly elected or badly appointed board of governors of officials. ”

“ In the third state, toward which society is trending, the concept of service will rule, and private property as a dominant concept will be compelled to take a thoroughly subordinate place in human activities. ”

“ The true sanction of private property, consists in its effect to stimulate men to industry, and the improvement of the understanding ; from the consideration that they will enjoy whatever their knowledge and industry may gain. Exactly the reverse of this sanction, and this effect, is the doctrine, that knowledge or industry will be excited and increased, by transferring a portion of their gains from themselves, to orders, hereditary, titled, hierarchical or stock. ”

“ But I speak here of those laws which have a direct and known tendency to secure to us what we have, and to preserve us what we are: A free people are kept so, by no other means than an equal distribution of property; every man, who has a share of property, having a proportionable share of power ”

“ Turning back, wherever there is light to guide us, we may everywhere see that in their first perceptions, all peoples have recognized the common ownership in land, and that private property is an usurpation, a creation of force and fraud. ”

“ Functionless property appears natural to those who believe that society should be organized for the acquisition of private wealth, and attacks upon it perverse or malicious, because the question which they ask of any institution is, "What does it yield?" ”

“ As time passes, and the power of the propertied oligarchy becomes greater and greater, more and more of a studied attempt is made to represent the origin of that property as the product of honest toil and great public service. Every searcher for truth is entitled to know whether this is true or not. But what is much more important is for the people to know what have been [Pg vi] the cumulative effects of a system which subsists upon the institutions of private property and wage-labor. ”

“ Publick faith is the moral principle, called upon to defend monopoly and law charter, under the name of private property. Let us consider what this sanction is in a free government. If the government should solemnly, by law, enter into a contract with a number of individuals, the object of which was to diminish the liberty and wealth of the people, by increasing the power and wealth of the government and these individuals, does publick faith require From the nation a fulfilment of this contract? ”

“ But if an order of paper and patronage is erected, (remember that nothing makes an order but one interest,) in what manner is its power to be checked by a balance of property? The wealth of paper and patronage is daily growing, wherefore it cannot be measured or limited; it is therefore impossible to balance it ; and yet without this balance of property, the power which clings to wealth. will destroy liberty, even in the opinion of the English theorists. ”

“ Such men alone could be partners in the true ownership of property, or sue and be sued in their own right, [16] and such an exclusive right to a full personality in private law they claimed in virtue of their public services or privileges—the duty of taking the field on horseback or in heavy armour, the right of uplifting their voices in the assembly when they acclaimed a king or ratified a law. ”

“ Universal Private Ownership, an extreme development of the sentiment of individual autonomy and the limitation of the State to the merest police functions, were a necessary outcome of the breakdown of the unprogressive authoritative Feudal System in alliance with a dogmatic Church. It reached its maximum in the eighteenth century, when even some of the prisons and workhouses were run by private contract, when people issued a private money, the old token coinage, and even regiments of soldiers were raised by private enterprise. ”

“ When certain strong men found themselves able to garner a larger share of property than their fellows, they rebelled against the communistic ownership of property, and the state, with the system of private ownership, was evolved, came into being to protect the private owners in their private ownership against the community, or the mass, which possessed no private property. ”