The Kingdom of Property

A reply to Patrick Carroll on libertarianism, definitions, and the road to feudalism

Patrick Carroll has written a response to my essay “Libertarianism is Dead”. It is a useful response. He has stripped the disagreement of every rhetorical courtesy that might obscure it and stated the Rothbardian position with admirable candor.

Libertarians, he says, do not necessarily oppose coercion, domination, hierarchy, or the end of democratic self-government. Those words have nonlibertarian meanings, and the resulting disputes bore him. He proposes that libertarians abandon the vocabulary of liberty altogether and say what they mean:

“I’d rather just say that, as a general rule, it is moral to respect property rights as libertarians understand them, and it is immoral to violate property rights as libertarians understand them.”

The phrase appears in Carroll’s essay “Does Libertarianism Reduce to Feudalism?”, and it contains the entire argument. Property rights are moral because libertarians understand them as moral. Exchanges are voluntary when property rights, as libertarians understand them, have not been violated. Hierarchies are acceptable when they arise from property rights, as libertarians understand them. The word legitimate enters whenever the conclusion requires it, carrying inside itself the theory that was supposed to establish legitimacy.

Carroll regards this as an escape from semantics. It is the captivity of his argument by semantics. The libertarian definition has swallowed the moral world and announced that everything outside it is a word game.

I know this world. I have read Mises, Rothbard, Nozick, Hoppe, and the long tail of arguments generated by their disagreements. I once took those arguments seriously enough to spend an embarrassing number of words identifying the point at which Misesian praxeology gets extended into a metaphysics of self-ownership it cannot support. I did not leave libertarianism because I failed to understand where the theory leads. I left because I understood it.

Carroll’s response gives me no reason to return.

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We should begin with the claim I actually made.

I did not write that libertarians are feudalists. I argued that a political order built from absolute property rights, voluntary contract, and a state limited to defense and contract enforcement will tend toward feudalistic arrangements. The distinction matters. One is an accusation about personal identity. The other is an argument about institutional consequences.

Carroll answers the first claim, which I did not make, by consulting Merriam-Webster. Historical feudalism, he observes, involved conquest, lords, vassals, military service, and land held in fee. Rothbard himself used feudalism to describe land seized through conquest and rented back to the people who worked it. Since libertarian property must be legitimate by definition, and feudal property arose through aggression, libertarianism cannot produce feudalism.

This is a genealogical answer to a structural argument.

The question is not whether a libertarian society would reproduce every institution of ninth-century Europe. It plainly would not. The question is whether its premises divide political sovereignty into privately controlled domains, make access to those domains conditional upon service or payment, attach practical rights to contractual status, and leave people without property dependent upon the terms offered by those who possess it. A modern arrangement can be feudalistic without containing knights, heraldry, or the precise land law of the Carolingian Empire.

This is not an idiosyncratic definition invented for a Substack argument. In 2001, the Rawlsian philosopher Samuel Freeman made the same structural case in “Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View”, published in Philosophy & Public Affairs. Freeman defined feudalism as a doctrine of political power, distinct from the manorial economy and the institution of serfdom. Its defining feature was a network of private contracts through which individuals personally acquire the authority to make and enforce political rules. “Those who exercise political power do so on behalf of others pursuant to their private contracts,” he wrote, and because the contracts differ, “there is no notion of a uniform body of law to be impartially applied to all individuals.” He pointed to feudal Japan to make the distinction explicit: feudal political relations do not require European serfdom. Libertarianism resembles feudalism because it converts political authority into a privately held contractual power. Carroll’s dictionary answers the costume. Freeman identified the structure.

Carroll eventually identifies the structure himself. He writes that I appear to use feudalism for a situation in which “someone can exercise absolute sovereignty over a piece of land and the people on it.” He acknowledges that libertarians endorse “a form of absolute sovereignty.” His objection is that libertarian sovereignty rests upon legitimate property rights.

That adjective performs all the work.

If the lord’s title is legitimate under libertarian rules, his dominion ceases to count as feudal. If every person living within the domain arrived through a valid chain of contracts, their subordination ceases to count as domination. If exit remains formally available, dependence ceases to count as coercive. The social relation has survived intact. The approved provenance of the title is supposed to transform its moral character.

This is why his response never reaches my argument. I am describing what power becomes when ownership carries the authority to govern. Carroll is inspecting the paperwork.

I ran this thought experiment publicly in December 2022, during an appearance on What Bitcoin Did called “The Reformed Libertarian”. I asked Peter McCormack to imagine a purely voluntarist society built from the ground up according to anarcho-capitalist rules. The purpose was to grant the theory its preferred initial conditions and see whether those conditions could survive their own consequences.

A man named Bob buys a thousand-square-mile island. The title is immaculate. The island was properly homesteaded, every transfer in the chain was voluntary, and no conquest or theft stains the acquisition. Bob divides the island into parcels, builds roads, attracts businesses, and offers long leases to people who agree by contract to follow his rules. Hundreds of thousands arrive. Skyscrapers rise. Bob’s Island becomes a business paradise. Bob is, as I put it then, “the CEO of the island.”

Years pass. Bob dies and leaves the island to his son, Peter. Peter is unstable. He quarrels with business leaders and governs the island with increasing cruelty. One day a seven-year-old child trespasses and breaks a window. Peter orders the family to remove the child from the island. They have nowhere to go. Peter gives them two hours to leave his property and threatens to throw the child into the ocean if they refuse.

Nothing in the sequence violates anarcho-capitalist principle. Bob acquired legitimate title. Every resident entered voluntarily. The leases disclosed his authority. Peter inherited the property through a valid transfer. The child trespassed. Once the family refuses to leave, the nonaggression principle identifies them as the aggressors and authorizes Peter to use force in defense of his property.

The question I asked McCormack was simple: “How is that not a state?” He agreed that it was “a state of sorts.” Yet no state had been declared and no libertarian rule had been broken. Contractualism, voluntarism, inheritance, and the nonaggression principle had generated a territorial sovereign with the recognized right to use violence against a resident child.

I have put versions of this thought experiment directly to serious libertarian thinkers for more than two decades, face-to-face. Jan Narveson, when I put it to him, did not dispute the structure: libertarianism had no clean moral response to the degenerate hypothetical. His comfort rested on the belief that a genuinely libertarian world would make the outcome highly improbable. This has always been the answer. Competition among jurisdictions would discipline Bob. Residents would leave before Peter’s rule became intolerable. A proprietor who threw children into the ocean would suffer reputational damage and lose customers.

This is a prediction about incentives offered in place of a moral argument. It concedes that the ethic permits the outcome. Libertarian voluntarism has no principle with which to condemn Peter once the title and contracts are clean. It can only reassure us that someone in Peter’s position probably will not use the authority the theory gives him.

An account of political legitimacy cannot rest on the permanent good sense of proprietors. The question political philosophy must answer is what may be done when the unlikely man arrives, inherits the island, commands the security force, and possesses a theory telling him that his violence is defensive. Liberal constitutionalism was built around this question. Libertarianism answers with a market forecast.

I have always found these responses suspicious. “Unlikely” is what a theory says when it has lost the argument about permissibility and wants probability to do the work of principle.

McCormack then asked how I would have defended the arrangement when I was still a libertarian. I answered that I would probably have made a special-pleading argument about competition among jurisdictions. People could always leave. Market incentives would prevent proprietors from behaving this way. Age and experience made that answer impossible to sustain. Human beings act against their interests, power attracts the malevolent, and the cost of exit rises with every home, livelihood, relationship, and institution built inside a place. Market forces cannot be trusted to prevent political domination after the market has assigned political authority to an owner.

Carroll’s response arrives almost four years later and vindicates the thought experiment. He does not deny Peter’s authority. He gives us the rule by which it becomes legitimate: respect “property rights as libertarians understand them.” The clean title settles the matter. The contractual history converts the island’s population into voluntary subjects. The violence at the end remains defensive because the proprietor’s victim has become a trespasser.

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Nozick could never entirely escape the initial-conditions problem. His entitlement theory made the justice of a present holding depend upon its history: just acquisition, just transfer, or the rectification of prior injustice. The chain of title was therefore doing nearly all the moral work. Once the history contains conquest, theft, slavery, enclosure, fraudulent transfer, or grants from states that never possessed legitimate title themselves, the theory needs a principle of rectification capable of telling us which present holdings are legitimate. Nozick acknowledged the need and never produced a complete theory of it.

This was more than a missing technical appendix. If the justice of every subsequent exchange depends upon the justice of the starting distribution, and the starting distribution cannot be established, the theory cannot tell us whether the market outcome it defends is an exercise of liberty or the continuation of theft. “Voluntary exchange” inherits the moral uncertainty of the title being exchanged. The pristine initial condition performs the same service here that the permanent good sense of proprietors performs in the island argument: it assumes away the circumstance under which the theory would have to prove its worth.

Nozick later put explicit distance between himself and the hard libertarianism of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In The Examined Life, he wrote that “the libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate”, in part because it had failed to knit humane considerations and joint cooperative activity into its fabric and had neglected the symbolic importance of a political community expressing public concern. His stated reasons were broader than the initial-conditions problem, and it would be dishonest to conscript him into saying otherwise. The retreat matters because it records a serious thinker discovering that a political philosophy assembled from private entitlement and side constraints had left too much of political morality outside the frame.

He later qualified the qualification. In his final interview, Nozick said that he was “no longer as hardcore a libertarian” as he had once been and that reports of his apostasy had been exaggerated. Fair enough. But this does not restore the certainty of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It leaves us with its author acknowledging that the clean system did not survive contact with the moral world.

Property rights cannot do the work Carroll assigns them until a political order has answered the questions hidden inside the word property.

What may be owned? How does an unowned thing first become property? What counts as abandonment? Which uses constitute nuisance? How far below a parcel does ownership extend, and how far above it? Who owns a river, a watershed, a migratory resource, the atmosphere, a coastline, a genome, an algorithm, or the information produced by millions of people acting together? What makes a contract unconscionable? What constitutes fraud when one party controls the information required to recognize it? What happens when performance becomes impossible? Which liabilities follow an asset after transfer? What does a person inherit along with title, and what debts can bind people who never consented to them?

Contract enforcement cannot begin until these questions have answers. Defense cannot know what it is defending until some institution has drawn the boundaries. Property is a legal relation among people concerning things. It does not announce its own content.

Rothbard understood at least part of this difficulty. His theory of title required original appropriation, voluntary transfer, and rectification where property had been stolen. The real world presents no clean ledger. Land has been conquered, enclosed, granted by states, taken from Indigenous peoples, accumulated through slavery, passed through corporations, reorganized through bankruptcy, and inherited across generations. Rothbard’s discussion of disputed titles permits expropriation where identifiable victims or heirs can establish a superior claim, and in some cases recognizes current possessors as owners when no legitimate claimant can be found.

The theory therefore requires an authority capable of reconstructing title across centuries, judging evidence, identifying heirs, determining when claims have lapsed, and enforcing the resulting transfers. The night-watchman has acquired an archive, a judiciary, a theory of evidence, a law of succession, and armed officers. He has become a government while continuing to insist that he merely protects what was already there.

Privatize those functions and the problem changes form. Competing protection agencies must decide which claims they recognize and what procedures they accept. Conflict among them ends through agreement, cartelization, territorial division, or violence. A successful agency gains the power to prohibit rival enforcement methods it considers unreliable. Nozick’s famous route from private protection to the minimal state proceeds through the emergence of exactly such a dominant protective association, one that acquires a de facto monopoly and must compensate independents whose enforcement it forbids.

The destination is government because the function is government. Calling its officers contractors does not alter the function. Calling its territory property does not disperse its sovereignty.

Where multiple territorial authorities remain, the result resembles a map of private jurisdictions. Your rights depend upon the rules of the domain you enter and the contract under which you enter it. The proprietor supplies law, security, adjudication, and the conditions of residence. The resident possesses exit, assuming another proprietor will admit him and assuming he can bear the cost of leaving.

That arrangement has many possible names. Feudalistic remains a good one.

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Carroll thinks the dispute can be resolved by assigning every contested word a libertarian and nonlibertarian definition.

Under the libertarian definition, Carroll writes, “work or starve” is voluntary. Private actors rarely violate property rights, so private power does not usually trouble the theory. A hierarchy created without a property-rights violation is acceptable. Government regulation can promote what I call freedom while reducing what he calls freedom. Once we admit that the vocabularies differ, we can stop accusing one another of inconsistency.

This sounds clear because the circularity has been made explicit.

Voluntary action is action consistent with libertarian property rights. Libertarian property rights are justified because respecting them is moral. Their moral status comes from an account of self-ownership, and self-ownership is described as the only coherent way to recognize human agency. Each definition supplies the premise needed by the next. By the time the circle closes, the conclusion appears inescapable.

Misesian praxeology cannot establish the missing moral premise. Praxeology begins from the claim that human beings act: they employ means in pursuit of chosen ends. Mises treated the discipline as value-free. It can explain that a person acts, what constraints action encounters, and how means relate to ends. It cannot derive a moral title from the fact of agency. In “Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy”, Rothbard himself distinguished the value-free character of economic analysis from the ethical judgments required for public policy.

The fact that I control my body in action does not establish that my relationship to my body is ownership. Control is a fact. Ownership is a normative institution. A prisoner controls his hand when he lifts it. A child controls her voice when she speaks. Neither fact tells us the full set of rights, duties, and claims that ought to govern what follows.

Rothbard’s self-ownership argument moves too quickly from agency to property. Someone must control each body, the argument runs. Control must therefore belong to the person, to another person, or to the collective. Ownership by others produces slavery. Collective ownership is impracticable because everyone would need permission from everyone else before acting. Individual self-ownership remains.

The trilemma works only after every morally relevant relationship to a person has been translated into ownership. That translation is the disputed step. Bodily autonomy can rest upon personhood, dignity, agency, or a prohibition against treating persons as objects. None requires us to imagine the self as both proprietor and property. The grammar of ownership is imposed before the alternatives are counted.

Even a successful argument for bodily self-ownership would not establish absolute rights over the external world. My authority over my body does not tell me how much unowned land I may appropriate, whether labor creates perpetual title, what obligations attach to resources others need to live, or why descendants should inherit the full political consequences of an ancestor’s acquisition. The bridge from agency to an entire property regime is built from moral premises praxeology never supplied.

Carroll calls the resulting regime property rights as libertarians understand them. That is honest. It is also fatal to his claim that definitions have ended the argument. The definition is the argument.

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There is a strange parallel here with the Marxist social theory libertarians regard as their opposite.

Marxism and Rothbardian libertarianism begin from opposing moral commitments. They resemble one another in method. Each selects a master relation and uses it to decode the rest of social life. For the Marxist, ownership of the means of production organizes class domination and turns liberal rights into superstructure. For the Rothbardian, legitimate title organizes moral reality and turns public claims into disguised aggression.

Both systems promise to reveal the coercion hidden by ordinary political language. Both distrust the mixed institutions through which actual societies negotiate competing goods. Both imagine that once the foundational relation has been purified, social order can emerge without the compromises that politics exists to manage.

Their defenses against counterexample also rhyme. The Marxist can explain the failures of a revolutionary state as residues of capitalism, foreign sabotage, or deviations from the true theory. The libertarian can explain concentrated private power as the residue of state privilege, stolen title, regulatory capture, or a market not yet made free. Every ugly outcome belongs to the contaminated transition. The purified system waits beyond history, innocent of the arrangements produced in its name.

This does not make libertarianism Marxist. It exposes a shared metaphysical temptation: the belief that one relation can make the human world morally legible from top to bottom. Class performs the work in one system. Property title performs it in the other.

Actual freedom is institutionally plural. It depends upon property and contract, because people need stable control over resources and reliable expectations. It also depends upon public goods, common resources, civic status, labor power, family obligations, democratic voice, and protections that cannot be reduced to title. A society must decide how these goods coexist. The decision cannot be avoided by defining one of them as the source of all the others.

Libertarianism calls that decision aggression. Marxism calls it class rule. Politics returns anyway.

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Carroll is especially amused by my sentence that freedom requires constraint. He asks whether I am doing an Orwell impression.

The sentence is ordinary liberalism.

Every right constrains someone. My property right limits what you may do with an object. My right to speak limits what a public official may do to silence me. My bodily autonomy limits what everyone else may do to my body. A contract creates constraints that did not exist before the agreement. The question has always been which constraints make reciprocal freedom possible, which protect domination, and which institutions can distinguish between them.

Property is among the most extensive systems of constraint human beings have devised. An owner may exclude the rest of the world from a resource. The libertarian does not object to the constraint because he believes it justified. Fine. The dispute concerns the justification and the institutional consequences. Renaming justified constraints freedom while reserving constraint for everything else supplies no answer.

Democratic government can dominate. Majorities can persecute minorities. Agencies can become arbitrary, police can become predatory, and law can become an instrument of private interests. Liberal constitutionalism exists because public power is dangerous.

It also recognizes a distinction Carroll’s theory erases. A citizen stands inside the institution that governs him with rights of voice, contestation, due process, and equal status that do not depend upon a proprietor’s permission. A tenant or employee stands inside a private order on terms ultimately set by the owner. Albert O. Hirschman’s distinction between exit and voice names the choice. Exit may discipline that owner when alternatives are plentiful and the costs of movement are low. Voice becomes indispensable when work, housing, healthcare, family, and community make exit expensive.

Democracy does not make public power pure. It makes power answerable in a way private sovereignty is not. Constitutional rights place some questions beyond ordinary majorities. Elections permit peaceful removal. Courts require reasons. Public law applies through a status of citizenship shared by people who own unequal amounts of property.

The alternative Carroll defends makes the right to govern an incident of ownership. Hoppe’s covenant communities carry the premise to its conclusion: proprietors may construct communities around restrictive covenants and exclude people whose presence or conduct violates the owners’ terms. “Yes, we absolutely embrace the right to exclude being absolute,” Carroll writes, while insisting that defending the right differs from endorsing each exclusion.

For the excluded person, the distinction offers little shelter. His practical liberty depends upon finding an owner willing to tolerate him.

This was the point of my reference to a fascist tendency. I did not claim that libertarianism and fascism are identical doctrines. Fascism worships the state; anarcho-capitalism formally abolishes it. The tendency appears where each produces domains of unanswerable authority, normalizes expulsion as an instrument of social order, and makes the standing of disfavored people depend upon the permission of rulers they cannot meaningfully contest. The routes differ. Some of the relations at the destination look familiar.

I made this distinction explicitly more than two years ago in “The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline”. I wrote at the outset that I was “not saying that if you are a libertarian that you are fascist, or that you are on your way to becoming a fascist.” The essay treated libertarianism and fascism as tendencies, then asked how the first can collapse into the second. Its answer was the common good. Once every countervailing public claim is dismissed as aggression, the economically dominant acquire the practical power to project their moral preferences through ownership. The philosophy that began with the desire to escape control arrives at a system in which owners may control everyone who needs access to what they own.

The pipeline runs through exclusion. As I wrote then, the project eventually asks a governing question: “who can I exclude?” Hoppe’s covenant community supplies the answer through private title. Carroll’s response supplies the justification. He accepts that the right to exclude is absolute, accepts the hierarchies that follow from it, and rejects democratic claims against them as violations of the property regime. No conversion to a state-worshipping doctrine is required. The owner already possesses the authority that matters inside his domain.

Carroll responds that they cannot be fascist because fascism is statist. Once again, the dictionary guards the gate while power walks around it.

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Carroll does make one important correction to my original essay.

I asked libertarians whether they wanted their philosophy to provide cover for people working to end democratic self-government and build a new aristocracy. I suggested they might return to classical liberalism because it better fulfills values they already hold.

Carroll answers: “We chose libertarianism over classical liberalism because we knew and liked the fact that it is ‘working to end democratic self-governance’ and so on.” Later, speaking of committed libertarians who had followed the philosophy to its conclusion, he writes that “we saw where this philosophy goes when you take it all the way and we loved the idea.”

I accept the correction. My appeal was addressed to libertarians who still believe their highest commitment is human liberty, who regard dispersed power as a good, and who imagine democracy as one of the institutions that protects them from rule by other people. Carroll speaks for those whose highest commitment is the Rothbardian property regime itself. They do not share the values to which I appealed.

This narrows the audience. It strengthens the indictment.

The original essay argued that libertarian rhetoric was being weaponized by people building post-democratic systems of private power. Carroll’s answer is that some libertarians understand this perfectly and approve. I documented the broader intellectual genealogy in “The Plot Against America”, tracing the movement from libertarian hostility toward the state through neoreaction and into the Silicon Valley project to replace democratic government with proprietary systems. In “The Sovereign Individual Was the Blueprint”, I followed the more specific path from the language of exit and competitive governance to a political project aimed at making democratic sovereignty obsolete. Carroll declines the cover story. He wants the exit.

The disagreement is now clean.

I believe liberty belongs to persons before it belongs to property. Property rights are among the institutions that protect liberty, and their legitimacy depends upon the human goods they serve. Carroll believes the libertarian property regime supplies the moral standard by which liberty, coercion, domination, and hierarchy must be understood. Where democratic self-government violates that regime, democracy is wrong.

He is entitled to hold that position. He is not entitled to declare the argument over because the libertarian dictionary agrees with him.

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“Call it what you want,” Carroll writes.

Very well.

Call it a society in which ownership carries sovereignty. Call it a legal order in which the people who possess territory determine the rules for those who need access to it. Call it a system where protection, adjudication, residence, and practical liberty depend upon contract with private authorities. Call it an arrangement where exit replaces voice and where people without property move among jurisdictions built by people who have it.

I call that feudalistic because the word identifies the political relation that matters: private dominion joined to material dependence.

Carroll calls it liberty because every title is legitimate under rules supplied by the theory that declares the titles legitimate.

His response does not demolish my argument. It demonstrates the mechanism I was describing. The philosophy encounters domination and asks whether the paperwork is in order. It encounters hierarchy and asks whether the hierarchy arose by contract. It encounters private government and asks whether the governors own the land. When each answer satisfies the libertarian definition, the moral inquiry ends.

That is the fatal conceit of the argument. Human freedom has been compressed into a theory of title, and the theory mistakes the tidiness of its definitions for the justice of the world they would produce.

Libertarianism remains alive as an identity, a subculture, and an intellectual tradition. Carroll is right about that. As a theory capable of delivering the liberty it advertises, it has reached the end of the road.

At the end stands a gate.

Someone owns it.

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