The Crisis, No. 14

On the nature of property

John Locke said that a man owns what he mixes his labor with. He walks to the edge of the commons, puts a fence around a piece of earth, works it with his hands, and it becomes his. The property exists because the labor does. The right is natural — it precedes the community, precedes the government, precedes the law. In the beginning was the man, and the land, and the fence. Everything else came after.

This is the most consequential normative commitment in American political life. And it presents itself as a fact.

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I want to be precise about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that property is an illusion. I am not arguing that property rights should be abolished. I am not arguing that the Marxist critique of private ownership is correct, or that the state should seize the means of production, or that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. I have no interest in replacing one absolutism with another.

I am arguing that property is real in the same way that memory is real, that witness is real, that citizenship is real. It is genuine. It matters. It is worth protecting. And it does not come first.

The question of what comes first is not an academic question. It is the question on which the republic turns. It has always been the question on which the republic turns. And the answer the founders gave — the answer that is under direct assault — is the most radical sentence in the American canon.

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Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government in the 1680s. His account of property begins in the state of nature — before governments, before laws, before the social contract that creates political society. In this state, the earth is given to mankind in common. No one owns anything. But God gave man reason and industry, and when a man labors upon a piece of the common, he removes it from the state of nature and makes it his own. The labor is his. Therefore, what the labor produces is his. Property is born.

It is an elegant argument. It is also a normative commitment disguised as a description.

Hume saw this. Hume saw everything Locke was hiding. In the Treatise of Human Nature, published fifty years after Locke’s Two Treatises, Hume dismantled the idea that property is natural. Property, he argued, is a convention. It arises not from the state of nature but from the needs of human society — from the fact that resources are scarce, that people live together, and that some system of stable possession is necessary for cooperation. The rules of property are not discovered in nature. They are invented by communities. They are useful, contingent, revisable, and real.

This is Hume’s guillotine applied to economics. You cannot derive the ought of ownership from the is of labor. The fact that I worked the land does not, by itself, produce the moral conclusion that the land is mine. That conclusion requires a normative commitment — a community that has agreed to recognize labor as a basis for ownership. Without the community, there is no property. There is only possession. And possession without recognition is just a man with a fence and the ability to defend it.

The difference between property and possession is the difference between civilization and the state of nature. And the difference is the community.

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Thomas Jefferson understood this. And he made a choice that changed the world.

Locke’s formulation was “life, liberty, and property.” These were the natural rights — the rights that existed before government, the rights that government was created to protect. Property stood alongside life and liberty as a co-equal foundation. This was the orthodoxy. This was what every educated man in the colonies had been taught.

Jefferson replaced “property” with “the pursuit of happiness.”

This was not a stylistic choice. This was not Jefferson reaching for a more elegant phrase. This was a deliberate, radical, philosophical act. Jefferson — who had read Hume, who had read the Scottish Enlightenment, who understood what Locke was claiming and what the claim concealed — removed property from the foundation.

Not from the structure. Property appears throughout the Constitution. It is protected. It is regulated. It is subject to due process before it can be taken. The founders were not hostile to property. Many of them were men of enormous property. They understood its importance. They protected it carefully.

But they did not make it primary. They placed it within a political order, not before it. Property in the American system is a right that citizens protect for each other, through institutions, accountably, revisably, within the framework of self-governance. It is downstream of citizenship. It is not the foundation. The foundation is the people — their right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of whatever they determine, through democratic deliberation, happiness to be.

That substitution was the founding. That is what made America something other than an extension of Lockean England. The founders built a house in which property has a room — a large room, a well-furnished room — but it is not the foundation on which the house stands. The foundation is the democratic compact. The consent of the governed. The sovereignty of the people.

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The project I traced in Crisis No. 2 — from Rothbard to Hoppe to Yarvin to Srinivasan to the network state — is, at its core, an attempt to reverse Jefferson’s substitution. To put property back in the foundation. To make ownership primary and citizenship secondary. To build a political order in which the rights of the owner precede the rights of the citizen — and in which the community exists to serve the property, not the other way around.

Murray Rothbard said it plainly: taxation is theft. Not excessive taxation. Not unjust taxation. Taxation — the mechanism by which a self-governing people fund the institutions that make collective life possible. If taxation is theft, then the political community has no legitimate claim on the resources of the individual. The owner is sovereign. The citizen is a fiction.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe went further. He argued that democracy itself is incompatible with property rights, because democracy allows the majority to redistribute the wealth of the minority. The solution is not to reform democracy but to replace it — with private communities governed by property owners, where the owner of the land sets the rules and those who disagree are free to leave. This is the network state. This is exit. This is the feudalism that calls itself freedom.

Balaji Srinivasan made it digital. The network state is a community organized around shared values and funded by shared investment, with governance determined by ownership stake. One dollar, one vote. The citizen is replaced by the shareholder. The polity is replaced by the portfolio. And property, which Jefferson deliberately removed from the foundation, is restored to its Lockean throne.

I wrote in Crisis No. 13 that the view from nowhere is how you make choices without answering for them. The claim that property is natural — that it exists before the community, that it precedes the political order — is the view from nowhere applied to ownership. It says: I did not choose to make property primary. Property simply is primary. It is a fact of nature. My wealth is not the product of a political order that I have obligations to. My wealth is mine by natural right, and the political order exists only to protect it.

Hume’s blade falls. Someone chose. Someone stood somewhere and decided that ownership would be the foundation. That choice was normative. It came from a position. It serves interests. And the refusal to name it as a choice — the insistence that property is simply there, like gravity, like the speed of light — is the same structure I identified in No. 13. It is the view from nowhere. It is the concealment of a normative commitment behind the language of natural law.

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This is not history. This is today. This is the operating system of the regime.

The Department of Government Efficiency was the purest expression of the property-first inversion in the history of American governance. Its premise was that government should be run like a business — that efficiency is the primary virtue of public administration, that the methods of the private sector should be applied to the public sector, that the man who has accumulated the most property is therefore the most qualified to govern.

This is Locke’s error given an office and a budget. It is the claim that the logic of ownership — optimization, return on investment, cost reduction, the elimination of waste — is the appropriate logic for democratic governance. It is not.

Democratic governance is not a business. It is not designed to be efficient. It is designed to be accountable. The redundancies that look like waste to the optimizer — the separation of powers, the procedural requirements, the civil service protections, the multiple layers of review — are not inefficiencies. They are the architecture of accountability. They are how a self-governing people ensure that power answers to the public and not to the shareholder.

When the property-first logic enters governance, accountability is the first casualty. The civil servant who follows procedure is “waste.” The regulation that protects the citizen is “red tape.” The institutional process that slows the exercise of executive power is “bureaucratic bloat.” And the solution, always, is to remove the obstacles — to make governance faster, leaner, more like the private sector. More like a company. More like something owned.

I traced the intellectual genealogy of this in Crisis No. 2. I traced the network of people who built it in the earlier essay I wrote, which I called “The Plot Against America.” What I can now name, with the tools that the last thirteen papers have built, is the epistemological structure of the claim. It is not merely that these people want to replace democracy with property. It is that they deny they are making a choice at all. They present the primacy of property as a fact — as natural, as pre-political, as simply the way things are. And from that fictional nowhere, they dismantle the political order that was built, deliberately, to place the citizen above the owner.

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Back to the man with the fence.

He stands at the edge of the commons. He has worked the land. He has mixed his labor with the earth. And he says: this is mine.

Is he wrong? No. Not exactly. The labor is real. The investment is real. The claim has weight. A just society should recognize it.

But here is what Locke left out of the story, and what the libertarian tradition has been leaving out ever since: the man with the fence is not alone.

There are other people at the edge of the commons. They have claims too — not to his specific plot, but to the common itself. To the water that runs through his land. To the air above it. To the road that leads to it. To the community that makes his labor meaningful — because without a community to trade with, to build with, to speak to, his labor produces nothing but subsistence. His property has value only because other people exist. His fence means something only because there is a community that has agreed to respect it.

Property is relational. It does not exist in isolation. It exists between people — between the owner and the community that recognizes the ownership. And that relationship comes with obligations. Not because the state imposes them. Because the relationship itself requires them. The community that recognizes your fence is the same community that maintains the road to your gate. The society that enforces your contract is the same society that educates the people you contract with. The political order that protects your wealth is the same political order that you are asking to be released from when you call taxation theft.

You cannot have the property without the community. You cannot have the fence without the commons. You cannot have the right without the relationship. And the relationship — the democratic compact, the consent of the governed, the political order that makes property possible — comes first. Not because I say so. Because it has to. Because without it, there is no property. There is only a man with a fence and a willingness to fight.

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The regime wants you to believe that property is the foundation and the political community is the superstructure. That the owner comes first and the citizen comes second. That the accumulation of wealth is the measure of a person’s right to govern, and that the democratic process is an obstacle to be optimized away.

Jefferson knew better. Hume knew better. The founders, for all their contradictions and failures, knew that the political community precedes the property it protects. They knew this because they had read the philosophers who proved it, and because they were building a nation on a principle that required it: that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Not from the wealth of the propertied. Not from the efficiency of the executive. From the consent of the people who have agreed to live together, to protect each other’s rights, and to govern themselves.

That compact is what DOGE sought to dismantle. Not in the name of fascism — they are not so honest. In the name of efficiency. In the name of optimization. In the name of the natural, self-evident, pre-political right of property that Locke asserted, Hume dismantled, Jefferson deliberately excluded from the foundation, and the libertarian movement has spent sixty years trying to restore.

They are not reforming government. They are replacing the logic of citizenship with the logic of ownership. And they are doing it while claiming — from nowhere, as always — that they are merely correcting inefficiencies. That they stand above politics. That the blade they wield is not a choice but a calculation.

Hume’s guillotine falls. It is always a choice. It always comes from somewhere. And this one comes from men who have accumulated more property than any human beings in the history of the species, and who have decided — from that position, from that somewhere — that property should come first.

It should not. It never should have. The founders knew this. We knew this. The man at the fence knows this, if he is honest — he knows that his fence means nothing without the neighbors who respect it.

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These are the times that try men’s souls.

The summer soldier will tell you that the market decides — that efficiency is neutrality, that optimization is objectivity, that the owner’s logic is the only logic, and that democratic accountability is a cost to be minimized.

But the citizen knows what the owner will not say: that property is real, and bounded, and contingent, and downstream of the compact that makes it possible. That we do not govern ourselves in order to protect the wealth of the few. That we protect the wealth of the few because we have chosen, together, to build a society in which rights are recognized, labor is honored, and no one is above the democratic order that makes all of it — the fence, the field, the road, the republic — possible.

Property has a room in this house. A large room. A room with a view.

But it is not the foundation. The foundation is us.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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