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Quotes on private property as a central concern of liberalism 1

  1. „The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production... All the other demands of liberalism result from his fundamental demand.” Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, 3rd edition, San Francisco: Cobden Press and New York: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1985 (German edition, 1927), p. 19.
  2. „The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.” Ayn Rand, Man’s Rights, in the appendix to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, New York: Signet/New American Library, 1967, p. 322
  3. „It is because no one owns the airspace, pleasant vistas or the ocean bed that market disciplines do not apply, and exploiters and destroyers can escape without paying a price. Where the community does in some sense own resources such as the national road space, it inflicts harm by not behaving like an owner and instead allowing „free”, and therefore wasteful, use of scarce assets. It is not property rights but their absence that is anti-social.”
    Samuel Brittan, A Restatement of Economic Liberalism, London: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1988, p. 230.
  4. „Communism don’t work ‘cause folks wanna own stuff“ Attributed to Frank Zappa, 1940 – 1993, US musician, singer, and songwriter
  5. „Private property is… a necessary condition for political pluralism. A political entity… that controls all a country’s resources, through the state, is unlikely to allow any opposition access to the means of campaigning against it. Worse, if all economic decisions are political, loss of power threatens a loss of livelihood. Power becomes the only route to wealth. This is not just lethal for the economy. It is also lethal for democratic politics, which becomes a form of civil war. It is only when politics are not a matter of personal survival that a stable democracy is conceivable. …” Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works – The Case for a Global Market Economy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, p. 30.
  6. „The recognition of private or several property is… an essential condition for the prevention of coercion, though by no means the only one. We are rarely in a position to carry out a coherent plan of action unless we are certain of our exclusive control of some material objects; and where we do not control them, it is necessary that we know who does if we are to collaborate with others. The recognition of property is clearly the first step in the delimitation of the private sphere which protects us against coercion… .” Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960, all p. 140.
  7. „Property is the only solution men have yet discovered to the problem of reconciling individual freedom with the absence of conflict. Law, liberty, and property are an inseparable trinity. There can be no law in the sense of universal rules of conduct which does not determine boundaries of the domains of freedom by laying down rules that enable each to ascertain where he is free to act.”
    Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (3 Volumes), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, Vol. 1, p. 107.
  8. „My property rights in my knife allow me to leave it where I will, but not in your chest. I may choose which of the acceptable options involving the knife is to be realised. This notion of property helps us to understand why earlier theorists spoke of people as having property in themselves and their labour. They viewed each person as having a right to decide what would become of himself and what he would do, and as having a right to reap the benefits of what he did.”
    Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974, p. 171.
  9. „A system of private property established in the interests of specific persons, and varied to suit their demands, would infringe individual freedom, since those not so benefited would be coerced in the interests of the favoured owners and hence would not be free. Governmental coercion should always be in order to uphold rules.”
    Harry Burrows Acton, The Morals of Markets and Related Essays, edited by David Gordon and Jeremy Shearmur, Indianopolis: Liberty Press, 1993, p. 195.
  10. „Freedom of trade presupposes property rights. If no such rights exist, then there is no need for or opportunity to trade. People could just take from others what they want and would not need to wait for agreement on terms. Or, alternatively, if everyone owned everything, no one could ever trade. Everyone's permission would be required for every transaction.” By Tibor R. Machan, In Defense of Property Rights and Capitalism, in: The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty, vol. 43, no. 6, June 1993, http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=1848.
  11. „The libertarian creed can… be summed up as (1) the absolute right of every man to the ownership of his own body; (2) the equally absolute right to own and therefore to control the material resources he has found and transformed; and (3) therefore, the absolute right to exchange or give away the ownership to such titles to whoever is willing to exchange or receive them. … each of these steps involves property rights, but even if we call step (1) „personal“ rights, we shall see that problems about „personal liberty“ inextricably involve the rights of material property or free exchange. Or, briefly, the rights of personal liberty and „freedom of enterprise“ almost invariably intertwine and cannot really be separated. (… ) the exercise of personal „freedom of speech,“ for example, almost invariably involves the exercise of „economic freedom“ – ie, freedom to own and exchange material property. The holding of a meeting to exercise freedom of speech involves the hiring of a hall, travelling to the hall over roads, and using some form of transportation, etc. The closely related „freedom of the press“ even more evidently involves the cost of printing and of using a press, the sale of leaflets to willing buyers – in short, all the ingredients of „economic freedom.“
    By Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty – The Libertarian Manifesto, San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1973, revised edition 1978, pp. 68-69
1Compiled by Stefan Melnik