Importance of Rational Philosophy in Validating Private Property Rights Against Force

Why Libertarians Saying They Oppose the ‘Initiation of Force’ Is Meaningless in Absence of the Proper Rational Philosophic Justification for That Opposition

Stuart K. Hayashi

In the 1970s, many libertarians rallied around the principle that it is morally wrong for anyone, including any government, to initiate the use of force against a person or his belongings. Murray Rothbard called this the “non-aggression axiom,” even though this principle is derived from other principles and therefore not an actual axiom. And it is indeed an important principle. But many libertarians of the 1970s talked as if agreement on this stated principle was adequate to form and maintain a coalition of likeminded people. They talked about how the principle of non-force was an axiomatic First Principle — initially an arbitrary one, apparently — that later could be rationalized after-the-fact through citing Christianity, Buddhism, Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or any other philosophic framework. As quoted years ago by Objectivist writer Peter Schwartz, Rothbard asserts,

As a political theory, libertarianism is a coalition of adherents from all manner of philosophic (or non-philosophic) positions including emotivism, hedonism, Kantian à-priorism , and many others. My own position grounds libertarianism on a natural rights theory embedded in a wider system of Aristotelian-Lockean natural law and a realist ontology and metaphysics. But although those of us taking this position believe that it only provides a satisfactory groundwork and basis for individual liberty, this is an argument within the libertarian camp about the proper basis and grounding of libertarianism rather than about the doctrine itself.

Actually, contrary to Rothbard, “the proper basis and grounding” of the doctrine of the non-initiation-of-force is “the doctrine itself,” or at least necessarily a major component to it. Absent of having the “proper basis and grounding” for the principle of the non-initiation-of-force, there is no “doctrine” at all. 

A conclusion about ethics is only as worthwhile as the justification on which it rests. That is because the justification for a conclusion is the very context that gives the conclusion its meaning. To separate the conclusion from its justification is to remove it from the very context in which it is to be understood and applied. 

 Hence, the mere verbalization about the immorality of force’s initiation, which includes the immorality of using force to despoil the rights of others to their own private property, is necessary but not sufficient. If you want a consistent defense of free enterprise and the right to the wealth you have produced, you must also identify the source of your rightful ownership of wealth. And you must show that your rightful control over the value that you have created is something much more important than merely a method by which efficient use of resources is incentivized and through which courts engage in dispute resolution. It is also important that you can elaborate on how the justification of your rightful control over your wealth is that you can be objectively identified as the primary creator of this very same quantity of economic value. 

When it comes to the matter over why the uninitiated ought to accept the principle that force is wrong, what I have just named are the vital considerations that Murray Rothbard handwaves as inessential to the “doctrine itself.” Accordingly, my conclusion that the non-force principle is necessary but not sufficient is demonstrated by another group of people who claim to oppose the initiation of the use of force. It’s not the group whom many free-enterprisers would expect.




That Laws Are Ultimately Enforced at Gunpoint: These People Agree With Free-Enterprisers About That . . . or Do They?
I often point out that even in an entirely legitimate constitutional-liberal republican Night Watchman State, the threat to escalate violence to penalize ceaseless noncompliance is what underpins the government’s power to enforce any law on what people may or may not do. The same fact applies to any law on what people must or must not do. Even if the initial penalty for breaking a law is a very small fine, persisting in refusal to comply with the law will bring about a ratcheting-up in penalties. If you persist in refraining from discharging the small fine, eventually you will be ruled to be in Criminal Indirect Contempt of Court. And enforcement requires that armed men be dispatched upon you by the State.

Of course, Democrats and Republicans are fond of agitating for new legislation that encroaches upon what peaceful private parties may do with their own belongings and households. Thus, upon being reminded that their favorite legislation initiates violent threats upon peaceful people, these Democrats and Republicans get huffy toward me. At me, they do Rousseau’s Social Contract Song-and-Dance. They recite this big fiction about how, by being born and living among other people, I implicitly consented to a Prime Contract in which I authorize that, for society’s collective benefit, the State may rightfully overrule my peaceful decisions and actual contracts. According to that presumption, if you refrain from following any of the government’s capricious edicts to micromanage your life and private property, it is you who initiated force against the State through breaching the contract that you implicitly entered into with the State. 

Then, continues the presumption, when the State dispatches police against you, the State is merely retaliating against the contract-breach you initiated against it. And, even then, Democrats and Republicans feel incensed when you bring up how the threat of physical force has always been in the picture. But in contrast to conventional Democrats and Republicans, there is a group of people — emphatically not fans of large-scale commercial enterprises — who agree and understand that laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint.

In contrast to conventional Democrats and Republicans, one woman from this other group denounces governmental institutions, implicitly including the welfare state, for “stealing in the form of taxes...” And just like free-enterprisers such as Frédéric Bastiat and Leonard E. Read, this woman recognizes that “all forms of government rest on violence...” That includes democracies, welfare states, and even proper constitutional-liberal republican Night Watchman States. In agreement with this perspective is someone whom I will call Man No. 1, who says that when the State takes action upon you who have done nothing to warrant that, it is for you

to be...inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled,...censored, ordered about... [It] is to be at... every transaction, ... registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped,...licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be...ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, [upon] resistance,...repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, ... imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed...

Also in agreement is Man No. 2. Man No. 2 points out that inhering in the very institution of government is “armed power” carried out by “armed men” and other such “coercive institutions.” Citing Man No. 2 is Man No. 3, who continues that the defining trait of the institution of the State is that it is “power” that “consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.”

The woman I quoted earlier was “Red” Emma Goldman, the anarcho-collectivist mistress to Alexander Berkman. In the late nineteenth century, Berkman tried to assassinate the chairman of Carnegie Steel, and almost succeeded at that. Man No. 1 was Pierre Proudhon, a contemporary and “frienemy” to Karl Marx. Man No. 2 was Marx’s own writing partner, Friedrich Engels. And Man No. 3 was Vladimir Lenin, who would himself become a head of State. And similar to them was Upton Sinclair. In words he attributed inaccurately to George Washington, Sinclair admitted, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force.”

Anarcho-collectivists acknowledge the correctness of free-enterprisers in pointing out how laws, taxes, and government regulations are ultimately enforced at gunpoint. Yet these anarcho-collectivists do not agree with free-enterprisers about what constitutes the initiation of the use of force by one person against another to snatch the second person’s resources.




Does a Mansion Owner Initiate the Use of Force By Calling the Cops on Burglars?
Consider the case of Charles Martin Hall who, on account of years of doing his own research-and-development, devised a new efficient method for producing aluminum, and became a multimillionaire from that devising. Nouveau-riche, he dabbled in art collection. Suppose that a gang of burglars break into Hall’s mansion to loot him. And suppose Hall calls the police on them. The police arrive and stop the burglars.

Free-enterprisers would say that the burglars were initiating the use of force upon Charles Hall, who was minding his own business. And they would continue that the police apprehending the burglars was the proper exercise of force in retaliation only against the force that was initiated. But the anarcho-collectivists have an entirely different take on this scenario.

To the anarcho-collectivists, once you have performed manual labor, you have sufficiently earned a share of resources — economic value — that is equal to that of everyone else’s. For anarcho-collectivists — even if they give some lip service to the value of inventors and engineers — it is the case that by owning and controlling a share of economic value in society that dwarfs that of most men, Charles Hall has absconded with a quantity that is not rightfully his. By claiming control over a share of economic value far greater than what other men have, conclude the anarcho-collectivists, it is Charles Hall who has initiated the use of force against everyone else. In the anarcho-collectivists’ estimate, Charles Hall is hoarding an unfair share by means of physical force. Charles Hall’s option to call the police to guard this stash for him is, to the anarcho-collectivists, proof that it is Charles Hall holding the power to call upon armed men to uphold and enforce his wrongdoing.

And, continue the anarcho-collectivists, the burglars have the moral high ground. By trying to burgle Charles Hall, they say, the burglars are merely trying to retrieve and reclaim some of the wealth that is rightfully theirs. On that interpretation, it is the burglars who are using rightful retaliatory force against the party that initiated it.

At root, the area of disagreement is the ethics over Charles Hall expecting the police to guard what Charles Hall insists is his own rightful private property. There are laws against burglarizing someone’s mansion. And, as understood both by free-enterprisers and anarcho-collectivists, laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint. When the police stop the burglars, it is an example of the government using force. 

For free-enterprisers who wince at rent control and minimum-wage legislation, one of the few legitimate uses of force by the State would be for the police to stop the burglarizing of a mansion. Even a constitutional-liberal republican Night Watchman State favored by free-enterprisers like Frédéric Bastiat and Auberon Herbert would have punished burglars for hurting Charles Hall. But for anarcho-collectivists such as “Red” Emma Goldman, the protection of rich people’s private ownership rights is the central evil of the State. For Emma Goldman, police foiling the burglary of a mansion is actually the main case studying proving that the institution of government is the violent enforcer of evil. 

For anarcho-collectivists, the ability of a multimillionaire like Charles Hall to call the cops to protect his private property from burglars is no better than an intensifying of Hall’s initiation of the use of force against the burglars. The very fact that a mansion owner can call the cops on burglars is the reason why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sniffed in their Communist Manifesto that the “executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” That is exactly what Marx and Engels wanted to be changed.

That is why it is necessary but not sufficient for you as a free-enterpriser to say, “I am opposed to the initiation of the use of force.” “Red” Emma Goldman and Karl Marx’s contemporary and frienemy, Pierre Proudhon, claim to hold that same position. Nor is it even adequate to say that you oppose it when one man tries to take from others what is not rightfully his. Emma Goldman and Pierre Proudhon would say that they hold this position as well, and it is exactly why they believe the burglars are in the right, not Charles Martin Hall. And anarcho-collectivists would interpret the story the same way if the rich man in question was not Charles Hall but instead Henry Bessemer, the nineteenth-century British man who got rich from his own improved method of steelmaking.

Some English-language translations of Pierre Proudhon superficially resemble, at first glance, statements from Objectivists. Proudhon explicitly rejects rationalizations for government regulations from Democrats and Republicans that rely upon invocations to their precious Rousseauian interpretation of some supreme Social Contract. And in a move that is more seemingly impressive, Proudhon praises what he calls economic “producers” — producer is the word in the English translations of Proudhon. But to Pierre Proudhon, the only economic producers are manual laborers, not CEOs or inventor-engineers. 

Nor does Proudhon sympathize with investors. Investors risk their own resources by providing, to the CEO, control over such resources, hoping those resources will be inputted in such a way that they produce a final product that satisfies customers. Investors do that out of hope for a material return. And those investors have to do without those resources in the meantime even if they do get a return. But to Proudhon, only the manual laborers are the “producers” who contribute to the enterprise’s success.

Anarcho-collectivists, as with other opponents of free enterprise, implicitly presume that the quantity of wealth in an economy — the quantity of all economic value in the world — is fixed. That would mean that any one person getting more wealth spells less of it for everyone else. As Proudhon says it,

The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in... Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these sales multiply, and soon the people...will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright...

On that interpretation, if Charles Martin Hall had a net worth of 5.8 million US dollars, then that deprives everyone else in society of 5.8 million US dollars’ worth of resources. Who is Charles Martin Hall to have so much when the burglars have so much less? That is the mentality behind the presumption that those who would burglarize Charles Hall or Henry Bessemer are the ones who have the moral high ground. That is how Proudhon concludes, “Property is the [false] right of increase claimed by the proprietor over any thing which he has stamped as his own. . . . The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.”

That attitude of Pierre Proudhon’s and “Red” Emma Goldman’s remains pervasive to the day of this writing. Hypocritical internet-based multimillionaire commentator Hasan Piker tells an uncritical and tacitly approving New York Times, “I’m pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers. . . . I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in. ...it’s a cliché at this point but wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.” Once again the insinuation is that for the corporation to have a billion dollars is necessarily for the corporation to deprive everyone else of a billion dollars’ worth of resources, and therefore to steal from the corporation is merely to retrieve from the corporation what the corporation stole first.

As far as Hasan Piker is concerned, “If someone needs the food,” that person “should absolutely steal it.” Earlier in the interview he spells out, “Yeah, I’m pro-piracy all the way — across the board. ‘Would you pirate a car?’ Yes, you know, if you could.” Alluding to well-known television advertisements imploring people not to pirate intellectual property, Hasan says, “ ‘Would you steal a car?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ If I could get away with it — if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property — I would do it.” Here, Hasan omits mention of the fact that he himself is a multimillionaire trust-fund baby with a $3 million mansion and a $200,000 Porsche, and that, by his own standard, it would be social justice if someone stole his Porsche.




The Philosophic Premise Upon Which the Anarcho-Collectivists Base Their Interpretation Is More Mainstream Than Libertarians Want to Admit
Many libertarians praise the philosopher Immanuel Kant, as can be seen at the Institute for Humane Studies (1, 2), at the Cato Institute, and at the Mises Institute. Such libertarians honor him for his epistemology opposing inductive reason, and they also say he was an important contributor to free-enterprise advocacy itself. They are correct that Kant popularized the observation that the more two countries liberalize themselves domestically and trade with one another, the more that discourages warfare between them. 

Still, many aspects of Kant’s philosophizing actually lend support to anti-capitalists such as Proudhon. In this context, Kant implicitly endorses the notions that there is a fixed quantity of wealth and that you can only give or take wealth but never produce a net increase in the total existing quantity of wealth.

In giving to a person in need of charity, the giver “makes restitution” for an injustice... ...in giving to an unfortunate man we do not give him a gratuity but only help to return to his that of which the general injustice of our [social] system [such as of private property] has deprived him. For if none of us drew to himself a greater share of the world’s wealth than his neighbor, there would be no rich or poor. Even charity therefore is an act of duty imposed upon us by the rights of others and the debt we owe to them.

And this sounds like a repetition of Christianity’s early Church Fathers, as noted by Stephen Hicks. Pope Francis loved to quote John Chrysostom saying, “Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them... It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs.”

St. Gregory likewise propounded, “When we furnish the destitute with any necessity we render them what is theirs, not bestow on them what is ours; we pay the debt of justice rather than perform the works of mercy.”

Basil of Caesarea similarly proclaimed, “The bread in your hoard belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute.”

And St. Ambrose concurred, “You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his.” Yes, it is the tradition of the early Church Fathers, Immanuel Kant, and the anarcho-collectivists to presume that the quantity of wealth that can be enjoyed by the human population to be static. On that assumption, someone getting more wealth translates to less for everyone else.

Were Rothbard correct that no one philosophy is necessarily more valid than others in justifying the position that it is wrong to initiate the use of physical force, then it stands to reason that one following Rothbard’s approach should not reject the interpretation of Pierre Proudhon, “Red” Emma Goldman, and other anti-capitalists. After all, Rothbard’s approach does not reject the philosophic position of Immanuel Kant and the Church Fathers. And on the matter of the economics of resources, Immanuel Kant and the Church Fathers start from the premise that everyone is born with an equal claim on all the resources and economic value existing. 

Hence, if someone has a larger share than others, it follows from that starting premise that this richer person is the one who stole that share from — and thus initiated the use of force against — all those who have fewer resources. The anti-capitalists, including big-government Lenin, are merely embracing the position of Kant and the Church Fathers that Rothbard finds tacitly admissible, and then taking that position to its logical conclusion.

The truth is that free-enterprise opposition to the initiation of force does have one best philosophic foundation, a single rational foundation. Philosophers who were not of the Objectivist school have contributed to the rational foundation. The foundational argument is greatly strengthened by insights from John Locke, the French Enlightenment philosophes Jean-Baptiste Say and Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy, and twentieth-century business management scholar Julian L. Simon. The rational philosophic foundation can even cite findings of the twenty-first-century Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer and the science journalist Ronald Bailey. Nonetheless, even with due credit to all of these thinkers from other philosophic schools, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism remains central to the rational foundational argument. With acknowledgments to Locke, Say, Tracy, and Simon, it is time for us to consider what Objectivism has to offer. With that in mind, let us now look at how one gets rich by means other than manual labor.




Multimillionaire Inventor Charles Martin Hall Did Not Steal His Wealth — His Volitional Mind Produced It
First, the usefulness of a quantity of a natural resource — the value it provides economically — is not innate and forever-fixed. That is, it is not a fixed rule that the value you get out of a quantity of units of a particular natural resource will forever correspond exactly to the size of that quantity. Rather, through technological improvements, a single unit of a natural resource can be made more useful than it had been in years past. And that usefulness — that economic value — is the true definition of wealth. If these improvements have been made over the past five years, than a particular quantity of a natural resource can produce more wealth for us today than that same quantity could have five years ago.

The use of electricity in production involves using up natural resources, using up coal and oil and natural gas and biomass. And aluminum is a very useful metal, being strong yet lightweight in comparison to others. But for most of human history, it was difficult to isolate the aluminum from the ore encasing it. That meant you could not get purified aluminum to use it for the best purposes. It was only in 1825 when the scientist Hans Christian Oersted separated a few micrograms of aluminum from ore.

Aluminum was so difficult to separate from ore that, by 1850, aluminum cost more per ounce than gold did. When Emperor Napoléon III had guests over for dinner, he treated them differently according to social rank. Somewhat-high-ranking guests got to eat with forks and knives made from gold. But the highest-ranking guests ate with forks and knives made from aluminum.

But after arduous periods of research-and-development, Charles Martin Hall devised a method of using electricity to separate aluminum from the ore encasing it. Whereas it previously took over 74 kilowatts to produce a single kilogram of aluminum — kilowatts that expended natural resources such as coal — by 1886 that same kilogram of aluminum could be produced after the exertion of 40 kilowatts. By 1890, Charles Hall got that down to 15 kilowatts. This means that in 1890, a kilogram of coal that you invested in the aluminum market would avail to people over four times as much aluminum as that same quantity of coal would have in 1825. In the aluminum market between 1825 and 1890, Charles Hall quadrupled the usefulness and economic value of a kilogram of coal. Aluminum’s real price declined by a factor of 200.

Charles Hall making aluminum so widely available, and therefore cheap, had many benefits. To construct the sort of engine that was necessary for their airplane to fly, the Wright brothers needed a metal that was both lightweight and cost-effective. The metal that suited their purposes was aluminum. Had Charles Hall not made his breakthrough when he did, it likewise would have been much more difficult for the Wright brothers to put together the airplane when they did.

Other industrialists, Henry Bessemer and James Beaumont Neilson, made comparable advancements — Bessemer with steel and Neilson with both iron and steel. The people of Afro-Eurasia had been forging iron as early as 1200 BCE. But it was in the Industrial Revolution that inventor-industrialists such as Neilson had devised cost-effective methods for producing it on a then-unprecedented scale. In the year 1800, it took six to seven tons of purified coal — called “coke” — to produce a single ton of iron. Then in 1828 Neilson introduced to the market his new hot-blast furnace. By 1870, it took only two tons of coke to produce that same ton of iron. In 1900, it was down to a single ton of coke. Within a few paragraphs, we will delve deeper into the further developments responsible for the figure being so low for iron by the turn of the twentieth century.

As steel is a more purified form of iron, that same century saw similar figures in the manner in which both Neilson and Bessemer improved steel production. Steel production goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire. But, as with aluminum in 1825, it was always difficult to produce in large quantities, definitely more difficult than the iron from which it came. 

In the year 1850, mills had to burn seven tons of coal to generate the amount of heat necessary to produce a single ton of steel. But, as Charles Hall did years after him, Henry Bessemer expended investors’ valuable resources in a risky duration of research-and-development. Through such R-and-D, Bessemer learned that if you quickly blasted jets of cold air on the chunk of steel as it was newly minted, it removed impurities and resulted in the metal being purer and more durable. 

On account of Neilson’s hot-blast furnaces and the Bessemer converter and Process, by 1862 it took 2.5 tons of coal to produce a stronger ton of steel. This means that, on account of Neilson and Bessemer, in 1862 a ton of coal could produce over twice as much steel as it could have in 1850. Between 1850 and 1862 in the steel market, Bessemer more-than-doubled the usefulness and economic value of a single ton of coal. Neilson died in the year 1865. But from the introduction of the hot-blast furnace in 1828 to 1870 — five year subsequent to his death — the usefulness and economic value of a ton of coal in iron-smelting had tripled, largely on account of Neilson’s improvements.

And into the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, innovations in ironmaking and steelmaking continued. The reader will recall that the boyfriend of one of the anarcho-collectivists I quoted earlier had tried to murder the chairman of Carnegie Steel. The Carnegie Steel Company made great strides in energy efficiency, especially on account of one of its engineer-executives, the inventor and chemist and metallurgist James Gayley.

Both before and during his stint at Carnegie Steel — he joined the company in 1885 — Gayley had many of his own U.S. utility patents for various inventions. And as a scientist, Gayley published numerous academic papers on his discoveries, as displayed here, here, here, and here. Particularly helpful was his method that was known as the “dry-air blast.” Even in spite of the improvements by James Beaumont Neilson and Henry Bessemer, in the 1870s a major problem continued to besiege steel production. Water vapor in the air would enter the furnaces and degrade much of the pig iron as it was being processed. But by 1894 Gayley thought to place a condenser inside furnace’s blast engine, taking into itself the moisture from the air. This resulted in greater yields of iron of a much more consistent high quality.

That air was particularly important as it involved an earlier innovation by Gayley. He developed his own blowing engine to place greater quantities of air into the furnace at a time. Simultaneously, Gayley had the process incorporate changing bins wherein the materials used would not be piled on top of one another but instead mixed to the extent that all of the materials burned more evenly than before. Those innovations likewise produced increased quantities of output from smaller quantities of the same inputs.

James Howard Bridge’s book The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company provides a table showcasing the net gains in efficiency. In April 1880, it took 2,536 pounds of coke — purified coal — to produce a ton of iron. By May 1890, with Gayley’s methods, Carnegie Steel produced that same ton of iron with 1,884 pounds of coke. Over the course of a decade we find that in terms of each unit produced, that is a 25-percent reduction for that particular natural-resource input.

The direct mirror to the net increases in economic value that Gayley had created was the increase in economic value that he enjoyed personally. As he introduced greater methods of improving efficiency, Gayley was likewise promoted to more lucrative positions in the Carnegie Steel Company. By 1897 he was a managing director. But his highest position followed the merger of Carnegie Steel into a new, larger company — U.S. Steel. There, Gayley was made vice president. A multimillionaire, Gayley became rich enough to purchase a mansion in New York and finance personally the construction of an entire Chemistry-and-Metallurgy-Department building for Lafayette College.

Other Case Studies of Wealth-Creators
Even more foundational to producing such net increases in economic value was James Watt. Even prior to Watt’s time, a very large steam engine introduced in 1712 was used to pump water out of mines. From those mines would be come much great economic value, but a prerequisite to that was getting the water out. When it came to pumping the water from the mines, an important unit was a bushel, which was equal to the burning of 84 pounds of coal. The burning of this coal produced the steam that moved the pump. For every pound of coal burned, the device from 1712 could lift 107 pounds of water by a single foot. When James Watt introduced his steam engine in 1778, burning that same pound of coal could lift 225 pounds of water a single foot. That was more than double. That is, when it came to availing to people the valuable minerals to be mined, Watt’s engine in 1778 enabled a pound of coal to do more than double the work it did in that endeavor than that same pound of coal could have done in 1712.

That it took smaller quantities of coal to produce larger quantities of aluminum and steel and to move water out of mines was a fact that also made larger quantities of coal available for other endeavors still.

Historians know that Charles Martin Hall became a multimillionaire, but they do not have a firm estimate of how many millions he had. Historians are, however, more confident in their estimates on how rich James Beaumont Neilson and James Watt were when they died.

From 1840 to his death in 1865, through royalties for his invention Neilson had accrued revenues of £30,000 per year. In 2024, that would amount to £2.5 million annually. In 2024 U.S. dollars, with a single British pound being worth 1.34 U.S. dollars, that would be a yearly 3.3 million U.S. dollars. Neilson’s successful patent lawsuit in 1843 netted him £140,000. In 2024, that would be £4.4 million and 5.8 million U.S. dollars.

According to the historian Peter Tevjan, when James Watt died in 1819 his net worth was £60,000, which in the year 2020 would have the purchasing power of £80 million. Converting that into U.S. dollars in the year 2024 (again, one British pound equaling 1.34 U.S. dollars) would make it over 108 million U.S. dollars — all well-earned.

Let us consider what it would mean if Charles Hall’s net worth was the same, in today’s money, as James Beaumont Neilson’s. If Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson each received what is — in today’s money — 5.8 million U.S. dollars, it is because, from one end of the supply chain to the other, customers valued the newly-plentiful-on-the-market aluminum and iron, respectively, more than they valued the quantity of money that they exchanged for it. And the amount of money coming in from customers totaled $5.8 million. Had the economic value that Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson provided not been worth as much to his customers, these customers would not have made those transactions. Thus, Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson each gained $5.8 million only insofar as the customers valued, in total, the man’s innovation at least as much as $5.8 million.

We can see this same phenomenon in a more-recent case study, one involving television screens. When it comes to economic value provided by televisions, fuel burned in the provision of electricity that powers the TVs will go a longer way on account of profit-motivated innovations. The big cube-shaped television sets from the 1950s were called CRT TVs — CRT standing for “cathode-ray tube.” The TVs were big because the cathode-ray tubes inside of them were such. TV manufacturers like Sony wanted to move onto more energy-efficient LED screens but there remained a problem they couldn’t crack — they couldn’t identify the chemicals that enabled the screens to show the color blue. Hence, images on the screen could appear in red and green but not blue. 

That was finally solved by the chemical engineer Shuji Nakamura. Absent of Nakamura clearing this hurdle, TVs and computer monitors and smartphones with LED (light-emitting diode) screens would not have gone on the market as soon as they did. Companies tried to weasel out of paying the royalties they owed Nakamura — very much like Murray Rothbard-influenced patent-hating libertarians on their part. Fortunately, Nakamura prevailed in litigation and, in a settlement, companies finally paid him the millions they owed him.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, CRT TVs consumed 60 to 150 watts per hour, electricity generated from the burning of fuels such as coal. By contrast, subsequent to Nakamura’s solution — LED screens possessing Nakamura’s blue — LED TVs and LED screens on other devices consume 50 to 100 watts per hour. On the whole, an LED screen from the year 2024 consumed less than half as much energy as a CRT TV did. Nakamura’s efforts greatly contributed to the fact that the burning of fuel in the provision of electronic video has doubled in the economic value that it previously provided. The equivalent of millions of U.S. dollars entering Nakamura’s bank account was a quantity in direct proportion to the net increase in economic value wrought from his creative choices.




Economically Electrifying
Here is another example of how efficiency-related technological improvements allow for greater economic value to be generated from smaller and fewer inputs of natural resources. More telecommunications at a faster rate and greater quality can be performed today than in the 1960s from smaller quantities of material, smaller in terms of mass and weight. A copper wire in the Telstar-1 satellite in 1962 transmitted 1.5 megabytes or 24 voice channels of information per second. Hence, that satellite allowed for 600 long-distance telephone calls at the same time. But, adjusting for inflation, copper was getting scarcer and more expensive. Resultantly, for the purpose of aiding the telecommunications firms, inventor-engineer-entrepreneurs sought a cheaper substitute. Among these seekers was Narinder Singh Kapany, who would eventually go on to be a university professor of both physics and business and have over 120 patents. He and some other engineers found that substitute in the form of fiber-optic cables made of glass, itself made from sand.

Fiber-optic cables make use of lasers, and so inventor-engineer-entrepreneurs who pioneered this technology, such as Gordon Gould, also played a role. The general principle of transmitting data through a beam of light was already achieved in the late 1800s by Alexander Graham Bell subsequent to his invention of the electric telephone. But Bell did not know how to make his “photo-phone” economical. It was a more-than-half-century later that Gordon Gould and Narinder Singh Kapany were able to make that a reality.

By the year 2001, a fiber-optic cable thinner and lighter than a copper wire transmitted over 2.5 gigabytes or 32,000 voice channels of information per second. Hence that year an Intelsat satellite allowed for 120,000 long-distance telephone calls and three TV channels simultaneously. Between 1962 and 2002, the switch to a material of a smaller mass enabled a thousand-and-a-half-fold increase in the information transmitted. In effect, more people were able to make more and longer long-distance calls, and requiring smaller quantities of natural-resource inputs per telephone call, to do so. In the two decades that followed, it also eased up marketplace demand for copper, allowing for its inflation-adjusted real price to decline. More copper became available for other uses than there otherwise would have been.

Such technological advancements made both Narinder Singh Kapany and Gordon Gould into multimillionaires — in the latter man’s case, this onetime member of the Communist Party of the USA gained $46 million. Gould would ultimately tell interviewer Kenneth A. Brown of his chagrin at the “dead weight created by all that red tape” that the State imposes on innovators. And Gould continued, “Government regulations are even worse than industrial lab regulations at deadening invention, and they certainly deaden entrepreneurship” (Inventors at Work: Interviews With Sixteen Notable Inventors, {Lake Leelanau, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988}, 324).

And there are plenty of other instances of increases in quantities of wealth being wrung from smaller and fewer inputs of resources. The economists Roger Foquet and Peter Pearson have estimated the inflation-adjusted price of artificial light over history from 1300 CE onward. The unit of shine from light is called lumens. In the year 1300, if you wanted an hour’s worth of artificial light shining at a single lumen, you would have to pay £25,000 in year-2000-CE British pounds. That is, to obtain that much light from a candle, you’d have to do £25,000 worth of work or trade £25,000 worth of resources — in year-2000-CE values — for it.

By the year 1800 with whale-oil lamps powered by kerosene, that same hour’s worth of one-lumen artificial light was priced at £12,000 (all monetary figures are in year-2000-CE pounds). Then Thomas Edison introduced the electric light in 1882, with George Westinghouse selling a rival version in 1886. They got it down to £3,000 for that same hour’s worth of single-lumen artificial light. In effect, on account of entrepreneurial efforts from those like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, your labor and resources could get you a quantity of artificial light in 1886 that was quadruple as much they would have gotten you in the year 1800. 

That is why Edison and Westinghouse were rewarded so handsomely. At his death in 1931, Edison had a net worth of $12 million. In inflation-adjusted 2024 U.S. dollars, that is over $200 million; Edison was one-fifth on his way to becoming a billionaire. on that basis, Forbes magazine admits that Edison’s net worth was substantial enough “to have put him on the Forbes 400 list, had it then existed.” As for Westinghouse, at his death in 1914 his net worth was $50 million — over $1 billion in today’s money.

Naturally, there were still improvements to be made. The first electric generators provided by Edison and Westinghouse separately were powered by reciprocating steam engines that had 2.5 percent thermal efficiency. Those steam engines were eclipsed by inventor-engineer-entrepreneur Charles Algernon Parsons’s steam turbine engines. Those are still the sorts of turbines used in power plants at the time of my writing this. By the year 1930, a year prior to Parsons’s death, his steam turbines were at 36 percent efficiency.

Prior, Westinghouse recognized the superior efficiency of Parsons’s engines and incorporated them into his own electricity generation systems, as did Edison’s former employee Samuel Insull. This means that by 1930, a pound of coal in an electric power plant using Parsons’s technology could generate over ten times as much electricity to homes as could that same pound of coal when Edison first introduced electricity generation. That made Charles Parsons very rich as well. When he died in 1931 he had a net worth exceeding £1.2 million. In 1930, a single British pound was worth over three U.S. dollars. In 1930 U.S. dollars, that would mean Parsons had over $3.6 million. In 2024 U.S. dollars, that would be over $60.7 million.




A Rich Inventor’s Property Isn’t Theft But Proportional in Size to the Quantity of Economic Value He Created
The benefits provided by the innovative inventor-entrepreneurs I profiled were not the result of them pilfering from everyone else a share of a fixed quantity of resources such as coal. Instead, each quantity of coal could produce more economic value for people than that quantity could have before any of the aforementioned inventor-entrepreneurs came along. If you had a quantity of coal and wanted it applied to producing iron or steel, your ton of coal was over twice as valuable as it would have been had Neilson and Bessemer not taken action. Likewise, if you had only a kilogram of coal and wanted it applied to making aluminum available to consumers, your kilogram of coal became over four times as useful and valuable as it would have been had Charles Hall not intervened.

Any time you produce wealth through your labor, that economic value is stored in the direct product of that labor. And maybe you exchange the product of labor for something else. Should you exchange your labor for money or other items, it is the case that you did not directly produce units of that money or those other items. Nevertheless, you retain the economic value that you produced originally. That economic value is now stored in the money or other items for which you exchanged the more-direct products of your labor.

The same principle applies to efficiency-boosting inventions. An inventor-entrepreneur may sell his patent. As another alternative, he may keep his patent and rightfully use the more well-known method of recouping the costs of the units of resources he expended. After all, those resources were expended in the research-and-development and experimentation needed to arrive at the functional design and delineation that was needed for the invention to perform as intended. Such costs of the units of resources is recouped through licensing — properly selling access to the invention’s functional design. And when money and other items are exchanged for this access, the economic value of the invention is then stored in the money and other items exchanged to the inventor for it.

“Once it is admitted,” Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger has us consider, “that wealth is the product of individual thought and effort, the question arises: Who should own the product? On an ethics of rational egoism, the answer is: he who created it” (H. Binswanger, “The Dollar and the Gun,” 269–275: 274, in eds. Debi Ghate and Richard E. Ralston, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy: The Capitalist’s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, {New York: Penguin, [1999] 2011 revised and expanded ed.}, 274). 

That is the crucial point that is missing from all of the pro-capitalism thinkers whom I credited who are not Objectivist, such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Julian Simon. Those other thinkers did well to explain how all the wealth that exists was created primarily from the application of the mind’s powers by specific individuals. Yet, except for John Locke, those other non-Objectivists hardly touch on the corollary fact that it is exactly the individual whose mind it was that created that new value, who should likewise have first claim over use — and, with that, private ownership — of it. And none of those other thinkers — not even Locke — explicitly acknowledge that the ethics of rational self-interest provide the valid ethical basis for that corollary private ownership.

Yes, first dibs on ownership of an economic value rightfully goes to the person who produced that economic value. That is why an inventor has rightful ownership over the specific plan for implementation in production of still more net increases in economic value, that specific plan being the invention codified in patent. It is also why the inventor gains a quantity of resources — millions or billions of U.S. dollars’ worth. That quantity, which was justly traded to the inventor in exchange for him offering access to the fruits of his intellectual efforts and the investments of his own resources to those efforts, is no greater than the net increase in economic value that the inventor-entrepreneur’s productive choices brought into being.

Not at all an exercise in grabbing an unfair share of a fixed quantity of economic value in society, the wealth enjoyed by the historical inventor-entrepreneurs I have profiled was commensurate — no greater — than the net increase in economic value they had availed to the world in total through their finding and applying new methods to produce greater economic value from the existing quantity of resources. Whatever the exact figure, Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson rightfully owned the millions they did because that was the quantity of wealth that they created. 

Here, I have provided case studies on inventors and engineers who directly produced new designs that, when applied to mass production, allowed for greater economic value to be produced from the same, or smaller, quantities of natural-resource inputs. Here, even if anti-capitalists concede that the inventors and engineers created a net increase in economic value, it is tempting for anti-capitalists to proclaim that the same does not apply to rich businesspersons who are not inventors. James Gayley got rich at Carnegie Steel, but the company’s namesake — Andrew Carnegie — got even richer than he did and, unlike Gayley, Andrew Carnegie did not invent the dry-air blast.

Actually, the principles I explained do apply to businesspersons who are not inventors. Note that I said in the previous paragraph that the invention produces a net increase in economic value when applied to mass production. In the division of labor, it is the businessperson tasked with making informed choices on how to organize the roles played by the inventors and engineers, such as with making adjustments to the machine plans to accommodate new circumstances; tasked with instructing the engineers properly and procuring for them the equipment they need; and in making the best choices of how to route the output through the supply chain so that it reaches the consumers intended. 

Absent of anyone performing those tasks, the invention in question will not be able to benefit anyone other than the inventor. Inventors and engineers take part in those other important roles only insofar as they take on business management positions themselves, as James Gayley did. In their management positions at Carnegie Steel, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick and Charles M. Schwab got rich to the same extent that they employed James Gayley’s inventions in producing greater wealth for Gayley and their customers. Here, too, the net profit to Carnegie and Frick and Schwab was commensurate with the net increase in economic value they produced in their choices to maximize efficiency in the use of resources.

As also explained by Objectivism, in the long run, even when someone inherits billions of U.S. dollars, the size of his fortune ultimately matches the quantity of economic value he has rationally maintained and produced on his own (1, 2, 3). Those are the just deserts of Charles Martin Hal and James Beaumont Neilson peacefully pursuing their own interests. Note that this is the ethical argument from Objectivism and which is not found in the other philosophic traditions that Rothbard named as being at least as valid in explaining how it is wrong to initiate the use of force against private property rights.




Conclusion
There is a pattern among the inventor-entrepreneurs I have profiled. They all grew rich only to the extent that they had enriched other people who consumed the output of these entrepreneurs’ innovations. And this enrichment came in the form of improved methodology that enriches people far beyond the mere number of units in natural resources available. That net increase in economic value that these inventor-entrepreneurs each produced — a quantity of value that was and remains gigantic in size — redounded upon each of them in their respective personal fortunes. Private property rights enabled these innovators to pursue such endeavors, and private property rights enabled these innovators to enjoy the just deserts of those efforts. That is what we find with Charles Martin Hall, James Beaumont Neilson, Henry Bessemer, James Gayley, James Watt, Shuji Nakamura, Narinder Singh Kapany, Gordon Gould, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Charles Algernon Parsons. And, again, the principle also applies to business executives who are not inventors but still invest wisely in inventions and other methods of maximizing efficiency, as did Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Charles M. Schwab.  

Far from private property rights being just a mere method for dispute resolution in court, private property rights — especially the intellectual sort — are a documentation of financial identity. They help to identify particular creative efforts by a particular creative party, and thereby assist customers in identifying and recompensing the specific creative party that provided them the specific value.

It is good to educate people about the principle that it is wrong to initiate the use of force. But what is equally needed is more than what Murray Rothbard and many other libertarians cared to provide in the 1970s. Absent of the further clarification, people will not gain any more insight into the need for free enterprise than did Pierre Proudhon, “Red” Emma Goldman, or Friedrich Engels.

If you think a productive inventor is right to call the police on people who burglarize his home, then you need to understand what important consideration was missing when libertarians in the 1970s assumed it was adequate simply to unite behind the declaration that they opposed any initiation of the use of force by governments and private citizens. The corollary imperative is to understand that the biggest driver in creating wealth — the wealth that becomes the property at risk of being stolen — is human rationality and its application by inventor-entrepreneurs. Absent of this philosophical understanding that intellectual effort — intellectual property — is the basis for rightful ownership over anything tangible, any libertarian proclamation of the wrongness in initiating force against private property rights will be worse than incomplete.

That is the fundamental flaw of libertarian “anarchists” influenced by Rothbard proclaiming that opposition to “the initiation of force” is sufficient without a proper philosophic basis. It shows they do not understand what does and does not constitute a wrongful initiation of force against one’s rights to control the resources that one needs to survive and thrive. It leaves such libertarians helpless in debate against the alternative interpretation from anti-capitalists like Pierre Proudhon.  Even with Marx, Engels, and Lenin being discredited overall, their assertion that everyone is born with a rightful claim to an equal share to all economic value, which means anyone richer than others is stealing the birthrights of those others, is an assertion properly answered by Objectivism but remains unanswered by libertarians like Rothbard. That is the fatal weakness of libertarians who object to the forceful taking of rich people’s wealth but fail to explain that those rich people created that wealth in the first place and thereby do have rightful claim over it. 

Lacking in the proper philosophic foundation for defending private property rights, libertarians influenced by Rothbard talking up physical coercion versus self-defense against are comparable to a parrot squawking, “Two plus three equals five.” All the right words can be used here, but the parrot does not know the meaning of “two,” “three,” “five,” “plus,” or “equals.” The same principles applies in any attempt to bypass the rational philosophic foundation of these concepts when using words such as initiation of the use of force.





On Friday, September 5, 2025, I added the paragraph at the end mentioning the squawking of parrots. On Monday, September 29, 2025, I added the parts about Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. On Tuesday, October 14, 2025, I added the case studies of James Beaumont Neilson, James Watt, and Shuji Nakamura. On Thursday, November 11, 2025, I added the quotation from Harry Binswanger about how first dibs on ownership over a net increase in economic value that is created must rightfully go to the party that created it. On Saturday, December 6, 2025, I added the section about electric lighting from Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Charles Algernon Parsons. On Sunday, December 7, 2025, I added the section on James Gayley. On Saturday, December 20, 2025, I added the paragraphs about businesspersons who are not inventors. On Sunday, December 21, 2025, I added James Eckford Lauder’s 1855 painting of James Watt and his steam engine. On Tuesday, December 23, 2025, I added the section on Narinder Singh Kapany and Gordon Gould. On Friday, April 24, 2026, I added the Hasan Piker quotations.

My Mar. 4, 2024 Letter to the Newspaper Against Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Their Apologists

Stuart K. Hayashi

Reading the local newspaper, I have been troubled, but not surprised, to see letters to the editor trying to whitewash Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and their abuses of individual rights. One especially creepy letter came at the end of February in 2024 by one Lane Yoder. Mr. Yoder has had a role in the Libertarian Party of Hawaii. I met him face-to-face years ago. Although it is clearly a self-contradiction for a self-proclaimed advocate of liberty to whitewash someone such as Donald Trump, I found it consistent with how Mr. Yoder has behaved in the past. 

I wrote a letter in response, which the Honolulu Star-Advertiser published on March 4. First I will show the version the newspaper printed. Below that I will provide the version I sent to the newspaper.

____________


Newspaper version:

A recent letter poses, “After railing against Donald Trump as a compulsive liar, those with Trump derangement syndrome are lecturing us to ‘take him literally’ when he says he will encourage Vladimir Putin to attack countries that are delinquent in their NATO payments” (“Make up your mind on Trump’s credibility,” Star-Advertiser, Feb. 22).

Far from what the author insinuates, there is no internal contradiction there. When someone who has shown himself to be both dangerous and wishy-washy issues threats, erring on the side of caution means still having to take those threats seriously.

It is not advisable to cave in to Trump’s extortion. And the actual “Trump derangement” is not a legitimate concern about his dangerous actions, but the insistence on excusing them. 

Stuart K. Hayashi

Mililani

____________

What I sent to the newspaper:

In his Feb. 22 letter, Lane Yoder poses, “After railing against Donald Trump as a compulsive liar, those with Trump derangement syndrome are lecturing us to ‘take him literally’ when he says he will encourage Vladimir Putin to attack countries that are delinquent in their NATO payments.” Far from what Mr. Yoder insinuates, there is no internal contradiction there. When someone who has shown himself to be both dangerous and wishy-washy issues threats, erring on the side of caution means still having to take those threats seriously.

Mr. Yoder then challenges, “If they really believe Trump’s word has somehow become gospel, why aren’t they devoting their energies to warning delinquent NATO countries to pay up?” Simple. It is not advisable to cave in to Trump’s extortion. 

And the actual “Trump derangement” is not our legitimate concern about his dangerous actions, but this insistence on excusing them.

Democrats Who Invoke ‘Democracy,’ Collective Consent, and Rousseau’s Social Contract Can Have All That Thrown Back at Them

Stuart K. Hayashi




I have previously written (1, 2) of the ethical problems of trying to justify governmental actions by appealing to the idea that there is a “Social Contract.” I especially warn of the horrors that come with the interpretation advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. The alternative interpretation of Social Contracts that is promoted by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Paradise Lost author John Milton, and Aristotle is more benign and pro-liberty, but remains ultimately inadequate. In reality, having a morally-just constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State does not hinge upon any sort of Social Contract.

 

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The Fundamental Difference Between Governmental and Nongovernmental Action

The big-governism interpretation of the Social Contract, as advanced Rousseau and Hobbes, is implicitly a rebuttal to any free-enterpriser’s objection to intrusive governmental action. We free enterprisers advocate a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State. Free-enterprisers recognize what is the fundamental distinction between action that is governmental versus action that is nongovernmental. Civilians are supposed to be peaceful. True, sometimes the government can delegate some authority to specific private citizens to carry out specific forms of violence. That is what the Confederate States of America did for private slaveholders — delegate to them the authority to wield violence against slaves. But, for the most part, except for such cases, violence by private citizens is unlawful. Hence, when Private Citizen A initiates the use of force against Private Citizen B or her private property, it is proper for the government to apply retaliatory force against Private Citizen A.

In contrast to private citizens, the ability to threaten and exercise violence against those who oppose its will, is inherent to the institution of government. If you break the government’s laws, the government will punish you. The more you resist compliance in receiving the punishment, the more the government will escalate the degree of physical coercion. That applies even if the initial penalty is a civil fine. Someone who consistently refuses to discharge a civil fine is deemed to be In Criminal Contempt of Court. The government does send armed men after those who are in criminal contempt. Someone who resists police too vigorously will be met with violence. That is the reason for deaths that come from altercations with police.

The institution of government is in contrast to the peacefulness that is expected of private civilians. As noted by Mohandas Gandhi, the very nature and job of government — as an institution — is to threaten violence on those who oppose its will. And this violence by the State is at least tacitly authorized by a large enough proportion of the citizenry. That tacit approval is part of the Social Contract argument of Rousseau and Hobbes. However, as we shall see, that tacit authorization is not as strong a foundation for ethical argument as Rousseau and Hobbes presume it to be.

Governmental action is ultimately enforced at gunpoint. For that reason, we free-enterprisers caution that governmental action must be applied only sparingly. Governmental action is only justified properly in response to violence against person or property that someone has started. The State is right to intervene against physical battery, and to stop and punish rape and murder. It is also to intercede against one party poisoning another, whether this poisoning is intentional or not. 

Moreover, you cannot live your life peaceably and sustain yourself if others can exercise force to deprive you of control over your physical possessions. Hence, a State is right to penalize property damage, vandalism, and theft. The category of “theft” properly includes violation of a content-creator’s intellectual property rights. Fraud, contract breach, and even defamation are indirect methods whereby a perpetrator deprives innocent victims of their-needed control over their private property. Consequently, the State is right to quash fraud, contract breach, and defamation.

What makes a contract breach so wrongful is pertinent here. The wrongness of an actual breach of contract, after all, is invoked implicitly in support of the version of the Social Contract foisted by Rousseau and Hobbes.

Suppose that Steve and I forge a contract. Steve agrees to relinquish ownership over his car to me. In exchange, I perform a peaceful service for him. First Steve hands me the car keys and I drive off with his automobile. Then I never perform the service. The ultimate result, then, is theft. It is physical coercion in two respects. First, Steve relinquishes control over the car to me only upon fulfillment of a particular condition: that I perform the service. In the absence of my fulfillment of the condition, I am physically possessing and maneuvering the car against Steve’s consent.

And there is a second, more subtle, use of force. Steve handing me the car keys was only willful on the condition that, upon the the mutually-agreed future date, I perform the task Steve wanted. As I failed to perform the service, Steve handing me the car keys was ultimately not something to which Steve consented. Here, Steve placing the keys in my hands was a form of physical force — I manipulated Steve into making bodily movements that did him harm.

When the government comes after someone for having breached contract, then, the government is merely retaliating against the party that started the force. This understanding of contracts, as we shall revisit, is twisted in the version of Social Contract ideology that is propounded by Rousseau and is implicitly invoked by modern politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

 

 
Rousseau’s Social Contract Rationalizes That You Authorized Every Imposition, and Therefore These Are Not Impositions
Prior to the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump, we have often heard the USA flatteringly described as a liberal democracy. But few among who have used that term have noticed that among those two words, the one that is more important is liberal. Liberal, in this context, refers to the classical-liberal laissez-faire liberalization that is embodied most consistently in a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State. This means that even as majority votes decide which persons get into office, the government recognizes that your right to live peaceably is so important that this right is something not subject to any vote — no voting majority and no democratically voted-in official can overrule it. The State should have such little say over peaceful behavior that even if the President of the United States is someone as crummy as Donald Trump, you would not need to worry because that person has no authority to overrule the peaceful actions of your private life. To the extent that freedom can be preserved against Donald Trump, the American republic — at its best — was founded to be less of a liberal democracy than a democratic liberality.

Yet, beyond contracts, the sad truth is that much legislation, even in voting democracies, is not to counter the initiations of the use of physical coercion. Nay, the legislation targets nonviolent people, and that means the government is the perpetrator instigating the force. Suppose you are alone in the privacy of the home that you own, and you smoke a joint. And suppose that marijuana is illegal where you live. And imagine that police are sent to apprehend you over this. This is an instance of the government instigating the force upon an innocent person.

And that happens with governmental controls over many commercial transactions. Suppose Jake and I have an arrangement. The law is that no one is to be paid for work for less than $15 an hour. Yet I agree to work for Jake for $4 per hour. Jake and I are not harming anyone physically. Yet insofar as the law is enforced, the government is tasked with threatening punishment upon Jake. There is nothing new about this. It is not as though this started only with the horrid 2024 reelection of Donald Trump.

Here is the rebuttal from the version of Social Contract theory by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. It is as follows. You, sir or madam, think that if you disobey the law but do not hurt someone else’s life or belongings directly, that the State is the party that is starting the violence upon you. You think the government is starting the fight and violating your consent. You think that if you are being peaceful in paying someone an agreed-to wage that is less than the legally mandated minimum wage, that is okay because all parties consented. Likewise, you believe that if you smoke a joint in private on land that you own yourself, even as that is unlawful, it is still the case that all pertinent parties consented. But no, that is not the case.

The Rousseauian version of the Social Contract theory continues. It says that by being born into, and living in, society, you tacitly sign an implicit contract with the rest of society. In this implicit contract you agree to conform to every ordinance and statute enacted. And, Rousseau says, this agreement on your part to follow every law — no matter how misguided you personally judge that statute or ordinance to be — rightfully overrides all your personal rights to life and belongings. 

As stated in an English translation of Rousseau’s French, living in society is “the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community...” This “alienation” from total autonomy is “without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be...” The reason is that the “constant will of all the members of the State is the general will...” Ultimately “The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them.” 

Agreement with that argument comes from Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte (who coined the word altruism), Plato, and Romans 13. 1–7.

Yes, continues the argument, by living in society you tacitly agreed to obey every law, as foolish as you may perceive any of them. That includes laws against smoking marijuana privately on land that you own. Should you do that, you instigate a breach of contract. You have violated the contract you have made with the rest of society. Hence, when the government comes after you, the government is not the party that has ignited the use of force. A far as the use of force goes, you started it. On this interpretation, the State penalizing you is only your just deserts. This argument is what I call “The Social Contract Song-and-Dance.”

 

 
There Is an Implicit Mutual Understanding Between Government and Governed, But That Is Not a Contract
Rousseau and Hobbes are correct that there is always an at-least-tacit mutual understanding between the government and the governed. Suppose that Ted is the government’s chief executive, and Mike, Wade, and Joe are under Ted’s jurisdiction. Then Ted takes police action against Mike. Ted has Mike apprehended. And suppose that Wade and Joe are aware of what Ted is doing to Mike. But, like the rest of the people under Ted’s jurisdiction, both Wade and Joe refrain from violently coming to Mike’s aid against Ted. 

In this instance, there is an at-least-tacit mutual understanding between two parties: (1) Ted and (2) Wade-and-Joe. Wade-and-Joe at-least-tacitly agree with Ted that Ted will be able to enforce his will upon all residents as Wade-and-Joe employ no physical force of their own to counter Ted’s will. Thus, when I say there is an implicit mutual understanding between the government and the governed, this is what I mean. It is that both parties know what behavior is expected of the other in this arrangement, and neither party will undertake dramatic action to change this arrangement.

I agree with Rousseau and Hobbes that there exists this implicit mutual understanding between an administration and those its reigns over. And, for many people, observation of this implicit mutual understanding makes it seem plausible that working government and civilization gain their legitimacy from adhering to something that resembles an underlying contract. Even if the arrangement is not exactly a contract, people assume, the resemblance is close enough to a contract to justify properly the use of that word to describe it.  Insofar as a contractual agreement is valid, after all, there should be a mutual understanding between the parties involved. 

However, contrary to Rousseau and Hobbes, this implicit mutual understanding should not be confused with contractual consent. Rather, when it comes to fulfilling the conditions needed for a contract to be sound, the presence of mutual understanding is necessary but not sufficient.

Indeed, this sort of implicit mutual understanding between government and the governed, is something that exists in all governments, no matter how oppressive. That implicit mutual understanding existed between the dictator Idi Amin and the Ugandans he oppressed. That implicit mutual understanding also exists between a mafioso and the small businesses from whom he extorts money. It also exists in intimate-partner abuse, between the abuser and the abused. In all of these cases there is an implicit mutual understanding, and Rousseau and Hobbes ignore the actual reason why the governed people refrain from resisting the government. It is not that the governed people necessarily find themselves morally condoning the government’s behavior deep down in their hearts. More often than not, it is that these governed people are simply complying under duress.

And that can apply to the above scenario with Ted imposing his will on Mike as Wade and Joe look on. Suppose Mike smoked a joint on his own land, despite smoking a joint being illegal. Maybe Mike paid another consenting adult a wage that was below the assigned minimum. Ted, as government official, is the party instigating the force. If Wade and Joe privately sympathize with Mike, but lift no finger to defend him, it is because they, too, are fearful and cowed into submission to Ted.

 

 
The Modern First-World Version of Rousseau’s Social Contract Argument Adds “Democracy” and the Distortion of the Idea of Consent As Something Offered Collectively
Modern politicians in the First World are at least somewhat aware of objections like the one I have made above. For that reason, modern politicians who repeat Rousseau’s argument will emphasize two other components that Rousseau did not place as much emphasis on. 

These modern First-World politicians say that our having a “democracy” is what especially justifies the Rousseauian Social Contract. They combine this appeal to “democracy” with their own presumption that consent is not something offered or withheld by any individual, but is instead something offered or withheld by some collective of society. That presumption is based on the broader premise that decision-making, in general, is something that is not done by the individual but instead by some collective of society. (This notion that the unit that makes decisions is a social collective, rather than the human individual, is one I refute in further detail here.)

The new version of the argument goes like this: Maybe it is true that, contrary to that monarchy apologist Thomas Hobbes, there is no actual Social Contract between a king and his subjects. Not one peasant had any say in whom the next monarch should be. Most monarchies are hereditary, after all. But in our times, we live in a democracy in which adults can vote. We can vote for representatives who draft the laws and enforce them. And the officials whom we elected are also the ones who appoint and confirm judges for our courts.  Sometimes there are even ballot initiatives on which we, the citizens, can vote directly on what a law is to be. Maybe the majority of people votes that anyone who has been caught imbibing marijuana on her own private real estate should be criminally charged. Furthermore, maybe the minority of voters has voted against this law.

The argument goes on: once this statute is enacted, it is not the case that individuals in the majority are imposing their wills on the individuals who are in the minority. Nay. There is one body-politic, one people. The outcome of the vote is, to employ a term of Rousseau’s, the “general will” of that one body-politic. Maybe you want to smoke a joint in private on land that you own. And maybe you voted against the statute that criminalized such an action. If it was a ballot initiative, you may have voted against it directly. 

You may even have voted against the statute indirectly if the statute was the result of a vote by a legislative body. If that was what happened, then when you voted on which lawmaker would represent your district, you made sure to cast your ballot against the incumbent whom you knew would vote to maintain the criminal ban on cannabis.

But, the argument concludes, you forget that you are just part of the greater collective of the body-politic. In the vote, the collective decided for itself that it would criminally punish the smoking of marijuana. And as you are just part of the collective, it follows that, for all practical purposes, you yourself decided for yourself that smoking marijuana should be illegal.  And now we find that you opted to inhale the weed on your own land anyway. Well, the State comes after you. It was not that you were minding your own business, and then the government started the violence on you. No. It was you who has inflamed this contract breach, breaking your contract with the collective. And as you are part of the collective, you even broke your own promise to yourself to follow all the laws. Therefore, when the government manhandles you, it is not some majority of individuals imposing their will upon some recalcitrant individual. It is better than that — you are with the collective, and therefore the punishment inflicted upon you is actually your very own personal will being visited upon you.

Former President Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have invoked such a collectivist version of the Rousseauian Social Contract. They did so to rationalize their intrusions about what individuals can do with their own private possessions.

Obama explained how he would set straight the right-wingers who cry, “I need a gun to protect myself from the government.” As this is a democracy, Obama continued, it is myopic for you to distinguish yourself from the government, as if you and the government that imprisons you are separate entities. Remember, he said, “the government is us. These officials are elected by you. . . . I am elected by you. . . . It’s a government of and by and for the people” (emphases Obama’s). Therefore, when Obama placed restrictions on your guns, it was not Obama overpowering you. No, it was your own will being done upon you.

Likewise, Sen. Ocasio-Cortez tells you, “[...I]n a democracy, the government is us. ...the government is The Public, and The Public decides what is good for itself” (emphasis hers).

She was speaking about business regulations and new taxes. Yet that logic is equally applicable to the scenario where the majority votes to maintain criminal penalties for smoking marijuana in private on your own land. The government that comes after you for smoking marijuana . . . is us. In effect, that very same government . . . is you. The government coming after you in this instance is only The Public — which is you — deciding what is good for itself.

President Obama and Sen. Ocasio-Cortez are far from alone in invoking “democracy” and social collectivism in this Rousseauian Social Contract argument. At the newspaper The Miami Herald, regular columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., waves off people who “wax eloquent about what great things the free market and the free American could do if government would just get off their backs.” He asserts that governmental penalties on you is your own will visited upon you. “Government is the imperfect embodiment of our common will.” Observe that the “common will” that Pitts mentions is what English translations of Rousseau phrase as the “general will.”

And the filmmaker Michael Moore agrees. The TV reporter John Stossel once pointed out to him that the government ultimately enforces its statutes at gunpoint. To that, Michael Moore retorted, “No, it doesn’t, actually.” The reason why the U.S. government cannot impose its will on you is that the government is us. And that means the government is you. As Moore phrases it, “The government is of, by, and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they’ll allow the government” to do anything that it does, punitive or otherwise.

There are many flaws in the these Rousseauain Social Contract arguments. I exposed the fallacy of the broader Rousseauian/Hobbesian argument in the essay “Bound to the Social Contract Under Duress.”

Then we come to the assertion that having a voting “democracy” justifies every statute, as all the voting citizens are a collective, which means the government punishing you is just your own will being enacted upon you. That argument came from even more convoluted rationalizing. I explain its wrongness in the essay “Exposing the Fallacy of the Presumptive Collective.” Importantly, that essay explains how we know it is that decisions are made by individuals, not collectives, and of how unanimity consists not of a collective but is an instance of individuals, each choosing privately, to come together to act in concert.

Here, in the blog post you now read, I want to expose the wrongness of the collectivist presumption of Obama and AOC in a manner far simpler than I did in my other essay. It is that AOC does not even apply her own Social Contract argument consistently. And this is for a very good reason.

 

 
Throwing Rousseau’s Social Contract, “Democracy,” and Collective Consent Back at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
There are many state governments in the USA controlled by the Religious Right. And, to the extent that they engage in forms of suppression of voters from particular demographics, these states are not as democratic as they should be. But, for the most part, these states are still overall democratic in AOC’s understanding of the term. It is not as though the voting districts of New York, which AOC represents, are substantially better. And in the states controlled by the Religious Right, state governments have democratically ratified and enforced statues that initiate the use of force upon private individuals. That is is the case with abortion bans. It is also the case of threatening punishment upon parents for the alleged misdeed of allowing their transgender children to obtain the gender-affirming care that they need.

And Sen. Ocasio-Cortez correctly objects to these statutes as violations of rights, as of initiations of force on peaceful people. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority enabled state governments to outlaw abortion, Sen. Ocasio-Cortez hollered, “People will die because of this decision.”

She also correctly said that for Texas governor Greg Abbott to punish parents for letting their kids have gender-affirming care is an attempt to “control people who are not cisgender men.” She concluded that anti-LGBGTQIA2S+ measures, such as by Gov. Abbott, are “hurting people across the country.”

I agree with all of her assessments there. But the problem is that these measures are the result of democracy. It is illiberal democracy, yes, but still democracy in terms of voting majorities enacting what they claim to be the common will. This is the result of the same process of voting by what AOC calls “The Public” — the democratic process that Sen. Ocasio-Cortez invokes as morally unassailable when it enacts the sorts of impositions that she wants.

U.S. Supreme Court justices are not elected directly by the majority of registered voters. However, they come to power as a result of the representative democracy that AOC has upheld. Potential justices are nominated by a chief executive who was elected democratically. And these candidates are approved for the Supreme Court by those of whom the general voters had elected democratically to represent them in Congress.

Thus, the very Rousseauian rationalizations employed by AOC and Obama can be thrown back at them.

AOC complains about these individual rights being violated. But if any Texans voice the same objections as AOC, Gov. Greg Abbott can repeat Obama’s own words for these Texans. Any Texan who does not like the actions of Abbott and other anti-queer officials can be reminded: “the government is us. These officials are elected by you. . . . I am elected by you. . . . It’s a government of and by and for the people” (emphases originally Obama’s). Ergo, Gov. Abbott can retort that these measures against queer people are just the will of the collective general public . . . which means it is even the will of the queer people themselves.

And then there are AOC’s own words: “[...I]n a democracy, the government is us. ...the government is The Public, and The Public decides what is good for itself” (emphasis originally hers). In this case,  Religious-Right voters can tell AOC that the state-level abortion bans and the hostility toward queer people is just The Public deciding what is good for itself.

Take, for instance, the horrifying results of the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump was undemocratic in denying the results of the 2020 election and sending a mob to instigate a coup. But in 2024, it was indeed a democratic majority that put Trump back into the White House. He got the popularity vote this time. And he won in each battleground state. 
 

 

 
Conclusion
Of course, I do not condone abortion bans, these state actions against transgender people, or the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump.

The point here is that if there was any merit to the Rousseauian rationalizations of AOC, President Obama, Michael Moore, and Leonard Pitts, then their argument would have to apply consistently. Yet AOC talks as if the rationalization does not apply when state governments use the democratic process to undertake these actions that she correctly identifies as wrongful. And although AOC will not phrase it this way, these actions are wrong because they are indeed instances of voting democratic majorities imposing their will on individuals.

No, AOC, even in democracies it is the case that, to the degree that democratic voting is prioritized above the laissez-faire liberal principles of the Night Watchman State, the majority can and will oppress the minority. No, AOC, no majority vote over legislation on economic actions is The Public deciding what is good for itself. That is because there is no Public beyond the individuals that comprise it. The individuals of The Public frequently disagree with one another over what is the best sort of lifestyle. Therefore it is best that insofar as these people disagree on something so important, they be able to leave one another be. That means the State does not intervene. Merely as a form of dispute resolution, some democratic votes may properly be used in determining which willing candidates shall enter public office. But democratic votes are never ethical justification in having the power of the State overrule what people do peaceably in their own personal lives with their own wealth. 

Let us, then, reexamine the addition of invocations of “democracy” and collective consent to Rousseau’s Social Contract argument. It starts by acknowledging that you may say that you were minding your own business until the voting majority imposed its own will upon you. And the voting majority’s will is enforced at gunpoint. But when collective consent is invoked in the Social Contract argument, it blurs the distinction between you and the voting majority. It says the voting majority is not divided from nonvoters or the voting minority. Nay, it continues, there is but one unit — the collective — and therefore the legislative or judicial outcome is what “The Public decides...is good for itself.”

That argument is really just a pretentious way of saying that might makes right. More specifically, the message is that the might of the majority makes right, as its greater number overpowers the minority. And, to cover up that this is about some individuals overpowering others, the majority and minority are nebulized together. The outcome is said, by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to be what “The Public...decides its good for itself.” AOC has lost all moral authority, then, when she protests in horror about how voting majorities in other U.S. states perform actions that both she and I abhor. If the democratic majority is merely what the “Public...decides its good for itself,” then the 2024 election in favor of the illiberal Trumpian agenda was also what the Public decided was “good for itself.”

The individual deserves freedom. Therefore, it is true that no individual should be ruled over by a mob that tries to override the voters and install Donald Trump in a coup as dictator. And it is also true that it is your sacred right, as an individual, to go about your personal and economic affairs peaceably — not to be put to a vote by any public.

 

 
For further exploration:

* “Bound to the Social Contract Under Duress”

* “Exposing the Fallacy of the Presumptive Collective”

On Monday, July 29, 2024, I added the point about calling the Rousseauian argument the Social Contract Song-and-Dance. On Tuesday, November 12, 2024, I added the point about the 2024 U.S. presidential election. On Wednesday, November 13, 2024, I added the point about liberal democracy and the USA having been founded more as a democratic liberality.