.

Libertarians and Austrian economists are passionate in their advocacy of private property. Any encroachment on private property, except by free agreement or consent/ is literally a breach of human rights. Insofar as private property rights are, and are enforced as, sovereign, there is no scope at all for taxation, i.e. non-voluntary payments specifically to fund government expenditure. This being the case, it is not surprising that most politicians in Washington, D.C. are so reticent about, if not actually terrified of, admitting the sovereign rights of property owners.

All of this I heartily and passionately agree with. However, the problem with most libertarians and free market economists is that they do not properly consider what "property" is. It is one thing to say that private property must be respected; it is quite another to say that "this" is private property. (There may be many reasons why economists' treatment of this subject is so weak, but a primary reason must be the conventional division of labor which asserts that this is not the business of the economist -even the political economist - but of the lawyer or jurist, who throughout history has had a licence to promote obscurity. However, there is also a prejudice among some economists that if economics is to be a science then it must be "value-judgement-ftee", meaning that economists must accept as "property" what is deemed to be property in a particular society. This was a view with which Henry George -- and surely also Mises -- seriously disagreed.)

The first, and most important, question is: does the law prescribe property rights, or is its task to enforce pre-existing natural rights of property? All Georgists - and I would hope all Misesians -- would assert the latter. Our next task is to determine what natural rights of property there are.

It may be noted, in passing, that in George's formative years, political economists had asserted or conceded that slaves were "chattels", "property" and "wealth". George always disagreed with this classification; if slaves "were" anything, they "were" labor. This misclassification, according to George meant that such a theory of political economy, far from being value-free, was actually value-dependent; for a simple statute abolishing chattel slavery would upset the basis of the whole theory.

According to George all property rights derive from the sovereignty of the individual - the right of the individual to himself and to what he himself produces. In this way, George actually asserts that property arises from freedom, and consequently that where there is no property there cannot be freedom - despite what communists may preach to the contrary. All this is pure George, and also pure Mises.

George then asserts that our basic ideas of property stem from property in chattels. (You try explaining to a child what a convertible redeemable preference share is and how and why it is property!)

All our fundamental ideas and concepts flow from very basic experiences. About the first year after birth, the human infant acquires what child psychologists term "ego boundaries". He learns that this is "my" arm, "my" hands, "ray" legs, etc. These are not things he owns; they are part of him; he learns where "I" stop and the world begins. Shortly thereafter he learns that this is "my" mother, "my" father, "my" teddy-bear. The interesting aspect of this is that the word "my" in the first two of these instances has a different conceptual meaning from that in the third. The child does not own his mother or father, notwithstanding that they are certainly "his". The word "my" in this context connotes a relationship between two things (in this case two people). This is what lies at the heart of the concept of "property" -- a relationship. When we assert that this is "my (home)land", we mean that this is where we belong; but when we say this particular piece of land is "my land" rather curiously we mean that the land belongs to us. This is something that the Australian Aborigines and Native Americans find baffling about us Europeans. When they say this is "my land" they use the word in exactly the same way that we do when we talk of "my mother", and with the same degree of reverence. To them, home is where we belong, not something that belongs to us.

This is the great cultural divide facing Americans - not that between "communism" and so-called "capitalism" -- but between the ideas of the Native Americans and the ideas of European America, and it is fitting that we should consider this on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' "discovery" of the New World. Communists and capitalists disagree, rather like disputing slave traders, about "who" owns the land - the state or the individual people -- without realising that this is the wrong question, and consequently has no answer. Indeed the Native Americans who dealt with the European settlers found it literally meaningless. (It is worth noting in passing that the assertion that "nobody owns the land" is likewise a false statement; to assert that land is res nullius is to assume that land can be a "res" in the first place! The same objection has been made to Proudhon's quip that "property is theft", because you cannot have a concept of theft without a concept of property. As another Austrian, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, might have said, property in land is something whereof we strictly cannot speak.)

Jurists have long recognised that legal ownership of land is actually a fiction. It is exactly the same sort of fiction -- a convention -- as that according to which the law speaks of a corporation as a legal person. Corporations do not exist; the terminology of corporate law is simply legal shorthand for a highly complex series of relationships among people -- real people -- individuals. In exactly the same way, the terminology of "property" in land is legal shorthand for a highly complex series of relationships among people who use, or seek to use, land.

Next time you sit at home, just think about the telephone company that lays wires under your garden, the underground train that hurtles beneath your house, the aircraft that flys overhead, the television station that transmits electromagnetic waves across your back yard. Have all these people obtained permission to use "your" land? In a libertarian world would you be entitled to refuse them access? (Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if airlines had to obtain permission from every single landowner to fly over "their" land?)

A word of clarification here. Georgists use the term "land" in a very special sense - the same as that of the Native Americans. It encompasses the whole of nature, including the seas, the air, the sun, and not merely terra firraa. Equally, it excludes everything produced by man, including buildings and other improvements, which Georgists assert are and should be private property. So Georgists and libertarians are actually in agreement in most major respects about property in "Land" (in the Georgist sense). They both agree that there is and should be property in man's products; they both agree (I hope) that there should not be private property in the air, the sun, the oceans. The respects in which they disagree are in relation to terra firma, the earth beneath your feet.

Henry George said that we all have a right to exist -- that is a fundamental tenet of libertarianism. If we do have a right to exist, it must be a right to exist on this earth -- unless we are to try to homestead another planet for our children. Think about it. Every child born occupies somebody's land upon birth. Do current landowners have the right collectively to say "not here, thank you". If so, that is nothing more nor less than a denial of the right to life itself.

This whole issue is one of supreme importance. If libertarians wish to diminish the power of the State they must hit it where it hurts most; the State exists to defend private property in land. The State is also, by the way, the largest landowner in America. Refusing to grapple with this issue is to give up on life itself and to sell out to the anti-life culture which libertarians are so quick to decry. America is busy asset stripping on a huge scale, selling land to overseas buyers - either directly or through company stock. It is rapidly once more becoming a colony. Americans laugh at how the Russians have regressed full circle to where they were less than a century ago. They do not realise that America is regressing (on a wider orbit) to its own reappointment with history - a new colonial war of independence. Perhaps xenophobia will bring America to its senses, if political economy will not. America is truly on the new road to serfdom.