A Society Built On Theft.

      Anyone who cares to take a look at the system under which we live, can see its glaring inequalities, and injustices. It is usually from this stand point of criticism that people get involved and try to "reform" the system, attempting to make it fair and just. What they fail to grasp is that it is not just an inequality and injustice of the present situation, it is the foundations on which the system was built. The inequalities arrived by coercion and plundering, theft of land, and state coercion to enforce and legitimise that theft. To reform the system we would have to return all that plundering and land theft to the people and remove the coercion of the state. There can never be equality and justice if we allow the thieves to hold onto their plunder, under the protection of the state. 

      A look at history tells us how we got here, and should make it glaringly obvious that we can't reform capitalism into something resembling equality and justice. It must be destroyed, we have to remove the plunderers and thieves and demolish the apparatus of the state that protects the wealth and power that stems from that plundering and theft.

A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention, however, to the role of past state coercion, in previous centuries, in laying the structural foundations of the present system. The extent to which present-day concentrations of wealth and corporate power are the legacy of past injustice, I call the subsidy of history.

The first and probably the most important subsidy of history is land theft, by which peasant majorities were deprived of their just property rights and turned into tenants forced to pay rent based on the artificial “property” titles of state-privileged elites.

Of course, all such artificial titles not founded on appropriation by individual labor are completely illegitimate.

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Socialism, the normal functioning of the market never results in a state of affairs in which most of the land of a country is “owned” by a tiny class of absentee landlords and the peasant majority pay rent for the land they work. Wherever it is found, it is the result of past coercion and robbery.

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