That distinction traces back to Proudhon’s 1840 essay “What is Property?”. Reading it a few years ago was a huge deal for me and clarified my thinking about what this thing called “property” actually is no end. It helped bring into focus for me the implicit violence our societies are based upon (well, implicit for a middle class white guy at least – less so for other demographics…)

By the way, I’m sure you already know this, but libertarian is actually an anarchist/socialist word. That’s why I put it in inverted commas above. It was first used in the context of political philosophy by the anarchist-communist Joseph Dejacque in a letter to Proudhon in 1857. He used it for the title of a New York based anarchist journal Le Libertaire (The Libertarian) a year later.

European social anarchists then adopted the term to refer to themselves. Peter Kropotkin called himself a libertarian communist, for example – I wonder what American “libertarians” would make of that?! I find it off-the-scale ironic that around 100 years later you find Murray Rothbard types pinching the term to denote a form of hyper-capitalism! Freedom is slavery now I guess…

That’s a great passage from Chomsky. It reminds me of the anarchist/socialist distinction between ‘possession’ and ‘property.’ Libertarians frequently refer to possession in their defences of property but don’t really discuss ownership of production and wage labour, or ownership of land, or rental. This is use of property beyond what one ends and denies others basic needs through the use of force. For libertarians, such things are, as you say, irrelevant footnotes; just more ‘voluntary,’ ‘subjective’ decision making.

I recently read David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 500 Years and he makes an interesting point there about the relation between markets and states. Many folks – and particularly “libertarians” – will treat them like opposite ends of a spectrum, but Graeber points out that throughout history there are examples of market systems being forced upon previously autonomous communities by states. So the market is actually oftentimes a creature of the state, amusingly. For example he wrote the following in a shorter essay summarising the book:

“Kings, throughout history, tend to be profoundly ambivalent towards allowing the logic of debt to get completely out of hand. This is not because they are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it’s much easier to encourage markets and then buy them. Early markets often followed armies or royal entourages, or formed near palaces or on the fringes of military posts. This actually helps explain more, rather puzzling behavior on the part of royal courts: after all, since kings usually controlled the gold and silver mines, what exactly was the point of stamping bits of the stuff with your face on it, dumping it on the civilian population, and then demanding they give it back to you again as taxes? It only makes sense if levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around.”

I found that passage really interesting, as I hadn’t thought about states and markets as emerging together in that way before.

I agree with what you wrote on property rights too and how they implicitly involve value judgements (I don’t believe there is such a thing as “value free” economics – so long as economies are comprised of humans they require some accepted ethical basis to function). Noam Chomsky has a take on property rights I find clear and helpful, one that I think makes quite a good summary of what you said:

“Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn’t interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don’t have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it’s very different from other rights.”

Basically it’s the standard story of mainstream economists ignoring externalities / the third party costs/benefits of different kinds of property rights – or at least treating them as an irrelevant footnote rather than a central and critically important economic issue.

The distinction between possession and property must be made. Possession is natural and its impossible to envisage human life without some form of it. Property is arbitrary possession that is not based on use but on, well, property.

I think you are projecting a bit with your response, as this post wasn’t really aimed at economists. I am aware that particularly development economists talk a lot about institutions, and that economists sit in the gap between theory and reality. My issue is generally with the theories in and of themselves and you’ll not often find rhetoric from me that matches your descriptions.

A bit biased

Everything is biased one way or another!

Sometimes if you read hard minded anarchocapitalist it’s hard to distinguish their portrait of the State from the Marxist one (a bunch of guys using coercion to grant to themselves power and money is not so far from the so called “Burgeois State”).

Marxism and libertarianism agree in this area, certainly. What confuses me about anarcho-capitalism is the land ownership question I outlined above.