The Property Paradigm

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that there are really only two camps of people in the political and philosophical worlds: Those who recognize the reality of private property and those who support force and theft. Ultimately, statists don’t truly believe in private property (no matter how much they may extol the virtues of “capitalism”) because they believe that some individuals (or groups of individuals) have the right to expropriate private property from its rightful owners. Even among some of those who do not support statism (such as anarcho-syndicalists and even some of the “anarchists without adjectives”) there is an implicit support for the use of force to prevent entrepreneurial individuals from amassing and making use of natural resources.

Unless we recognize the immutable truth of private property — that we own not only our own minds and bodies, but that we can also definitively own natural resources and the products created by combining them with our labor — we will necessarily end up supporting the use of force to some degree to prevent property ownership from occurring.

— Parrish