Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Paul Erlich is Dead, his Environmentalism is (still) refuted

Environmentalist Paul Erlich alarmed the world back in 1968 predicting a "population explosion" which forecast “the greatest cataclysm in the history of man” -- food shortages escalating hunger and starvation “into famines of unbelievable proportions.”

In the obituary for the 93-year-old doom-monger, who died this week, the New York Times called his predictions "premature." But they weren't even wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will. (See above for how cataclysmically wrong the catastrophiser really was.)

Some of his other failed and frankly nasty predictions:
  • "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
  • "In ten years [this was 1970] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
  • "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
  • “Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
  • “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
  • “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
  • "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
Yet despite being wrong about everything, the failed forecaster made a million and was showered with awards.

He never recanted.

Doom sells. Sadly. Still.

He was a gambler. A few years back, I wrote about a famous bet, for which this is the winning cheque:

Several decades ago, gloom-monger Paul Erlich and techno-optimist Julian Simon had a bet.

Erlich was certain resources were running out and humanity was doomed. Simon asserted they weren't and wouldn't be. The bet was that, by the end of that decade, a basket of resources chosen by Erlich would cost more to buy — more, said Erlich, because by then those resources would be running out. Less, said Simon in reponse. (Simon, you see, was confident that the ultimate resource, from which all others derive, is the human mind — a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.) 

Simon won. 

Resources weren't running out. 

They still aren't.

The "Simon Abundance Index" (SAI, below),which measures the relative abundance of resources since that bet, now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!

How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!! 

Turns out that as global population increases, that "virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?"

Unlike Erlich and the sundry other doom-sayers who litter the planet today, Simon recognised that without the knowledge of how to use them, raw materials have no economic value whatsoever. They are just so much stuff. What transforms a raw material into a resource is knowledge — knowledge of how that stuff might satisfy a human need, and how to place it in a causal connection to satisfy that need. (The great Carl Menger explained this process way back in 1870!) And since new knowledge is potentially limitless, so too are resources.

 Infinite, because the ultimate resource is the human mind.

In this sense, as George Reisman puts it, environmentalism is refuted.

The Simon Abundance Index: 1980-2023 (1980=100)


Marian Tupy points out some interesting parallels with other catastrophisers:
1. Malthus published his book on English overpopulation and overconsumption in 1798. Thereafter, the population of England rose, and the prices of wheat fell relative to wages.
2. Marx published 'Das Kapital' in 1867, arguing that workers' wages would be squeezed to zero by capitalist competition (based on a much-debated and probably incorrect "Engels' Pause"). Thereafter, English wages skyrocketed.
3. Ehrlich published his book about coming global famines in 1968. Thereafter, global famines collapsed, and standards of living across much of the world rose.
Forget these failed forecasters. Sign up to Tupy's Human Progress agenda instead.

RELATED:









Sunday, 1 March 2026

BOOK REVIEW: 'Who Was Behind the Bolshevik Revolution?' by Ron Asher [updated with reply by publisher]


I have in front of me a new book by Tross Publishing, which I have been invited to review. Having written a chapter or two for the publisher, it is my unpleasant job not just to recommend you not buy it, but that the publisher withdraw it. (Recommending withdrawal is not a matter of "free speech" -- the right to speak includes the right to take the consequences, including criticism -- simply a recommendation for good editorial hygiene.) Withdraw, because it sits poorly with his other titles, because it sits badly with genuine scholarship on any subject. ...

... and because it's not even a good read.

In 1917 in the midst of a war for survival on the First World War's eastern front, Bolshevists seized power from a provisional Russian government fighting the war, and proceeded to enact terror on the population and thereafter on the world. Far from a revolution, it was a squalid little coup, and what came of it was disaster, starvation, death, and mass-murder. 

There had been a revolution that swept away the Tsar -- swept away him and his autocratic regime -- what Ayn Rand was to call "the good revolution." But it wasn't the Bolsheviks who revolted against the Tsar's regime; they came to power instead in a squalid little backdoor coup eight months later -- orchestrated in part by the Imperial German High Command, who had sent Lenin into Russia to kill the war on their terms -- a backroom revolt that stabbed in the back the Provisional Government and squashed like a bug Russia's first stumbling chance at real freedom. 

The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back.

And our friend Mr Asher has now written 93 pages (and 5 pages of notes) to tell us who really did it. And oddly, the important wartime context is never mentioned ...

The wartime context of the coup. (From Louis Fischer's
 The Life of Lenin (NY: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 109

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS SUPPOSED TO have said that "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

This short book claims to reveal who was really behind the Bolshevik Revolution. Really and truly. And it will do so, we are promised, "with meticulous care and references" [p. 5; all uncredited page notes will refer to Mr Asher (2026)]. Take careful note: This is not a book about the ideas that caused the event in question. It is about the people. And, spoiler alert, our author says it was the Jews wot dunnit. They were driven to it, says the author, because they were Jews. 

That's it. That really is it.

And note the argument: it wasn't that those who driven to it because they happened to be Jews. They were driven to it because they were Jews. It was "vengeance," says our author, for earlier Russian pogroms against Jews. Or just because their religion was weird. Or ... something.

A remarkable claim, not least because head Bolshevik and the revolution's driving force was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was not at all Jewish. (He was raised in a Russian Orthodox Christian family, baptised as an infant, and identified culturally and ethnically as Russian; historians who have examined distant links, such as the author of Lenin's Jewish Question, emphasise any link was irrelevant to his identity, ideology, or actions: he critiqued all religion, including Judaism, and saw ethnicity as secondary to class struggle). Nor was Lenin's successor known as Stalin any more Jewish (he was, famously, an ethnic Georgian christened as Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), and nor was the head of Lenin's feared secret police, the Cheka (the brutal Feliz Dzerzhinsky, who was a Pole). 

None of the heads of the snake were Jewish.

Indeed, of the 21 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in August 1917, there were at most just six who could be categorised that way. Such niceties however do not disturb our author. (Indeed, he adds three more, without any reference for doing so.) 

And in any case.a similar ethnic make-up can be found for many other Russian movements of the time, including the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the rival Menshevik party (whose founders were both Jewish, and which actually had double the proportion of ethnic Jews to the Bolshies), and of course the Jewish Bund (a secular Jewish socialist party active between 1897 and 1920). A similar make-up can be found because any intellectual movement attracts intellectuals -- and Jewish Russians were among the most educated of the time, and were barred by the Tsar's regime from other political involvement.

So the claim is not just remarkable for being bold, but also (as we will see) for lacking the kind of "meticulous care and references" the boldness demands. It's true that historians of the various Russian revolutions and coups d'etat have generally recognised that Jews were represented in early Bolshevik leadership, but so were many other educated ethnic minorities who all faced persecution under the Tsar. (Most of whom were excluded by being non-Russian from advancement in Russian culture or in the vast Russian bureaucracy.) And of course the vast majority of Jews were not Bolsheviks, and Jews as a community suffered enormously under Soviet rule.

This is especially important today to understand. The book comes at a time when ethnic Russian fascism and anti-Semitism has escalated dramatically following Putin's insane aspirations for empire, and Hamas's murderous October 7 attack followed by Israel's bloody response. It's said that Hamas's “Sinwar placed his money on the 2,000-year belief that Jews were inherently vengeful, greedy, and lustful for the blood of innocents and children [and] in betting on Jew-hatred, Sinwar hit the jackpot."  

The irrational hatred continues even here in New Zealand, once considered a relatively safe environment for Jewish folk, and yet the NZ Jewish Council recorded 227 antisemitic incidents in the 12 months following October 7 -- more than the 166 recorded across the entire eight-and-a-half years prior.

So things are ramping up, and you might well ask yourself about such a book's publication: "Why now?" 

And about the thesis, even if proven: "So what?"

WHILE YOU PONDER THOSE QUESTIONS, consider again what such a proof might look like -- proof that it was the Jews wot dunnit -- and about that promise of "meticulous care and references." 

Let's begin by looking at some contemporary (or near-contemporary) quotes adduced by Mr Asher to describe the Bolshevik coup and the Jews' alleged responsibility for it: some examples drawn from a diplomat's alarmed despatch, a gossip columnist's interview, a White Russian general's memoir, and a State Department intelligence file drawing on a known forgery -- all of which are treated as equivalent historical evidence ...

Wednesday, 19 November 2025

Marx's inner contradictions explained


Today's guest post from Students for Liberty explains that Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian economists didn't just refute Marx's economics, they exposed contradictions in Marx's thinking so devastating that the entire system collapsed. ...
Marx built his system on "historical materialism." Socialism [he claimed] would arrive with "the inexorability of a law of nature." Material forces determine everything, he said: History has a predetermined path; human agency is an illusion.
Mises saw the fatal flaw immediately: Marx's philosophy refutes itself. His actions contradict his theory. His method destroys his conclusions. ... 
1. The Activist Paradox
Marx declared that socialism must arrive through inevitable material forces. Nothing can stop it. History has already decided. So Mises asked the obvious question:
If socialism is inevitable, why did Marx spend his entire life writing manifestos, organising workers, and agitating for revolution?
If material forces determine everything, why does human action matter?
Marx lived as if ideas could change history, while writing that ideas are powerless against material forces.
His life contradicted his philosophy. 
2. The Polylogism Trap
Marx claimed all ideas are products of class interests. 
Bourgeois thinkers produce bourgeois ideology. Proletarian thinkers produce proletarian truth.
Mises called this "polylogism." Different classes have different logics.
The problem? First, Marx couldn't even define the term! And second, this principle applies to Marx himself. 
If all thought is class-determined, then Marx's theory is just bourgeois ideology. He was, after all, a wealthy intellectual, not a factory worker.
You cannot claim "all ideas are ideological" while exempting your own theory from that rule.
The system refutes itself. 
3. The Origin Problem
Marx said "material productive forces" determine everything. That tools, machines, and technology create society. Law, culture, and ideas all flow from the means of production.
But Mises identified a fatal circularity:
Tools and machines don't fall from heaven. They are themselves products of ideas.
Before you can build a steam engine, someone must think of a steam engine.
Marx tried to explain ideas through tools. But tools only exist because of prior ideas.
You cannot explain the origin of society by pointing to things that can only exist within a society built on prior ideas.
Cause and effect, inverted. 

 

4. The Blueprint That Doesn't Exist
Marx spent decades critiquing capitalism. He preached its inevitable collapse. He promised a socialist paradise.
But he refused to describe how socialism would actually work. He called detailed planning "utopian."
Ludwig Von Mises exposed the consequences: Marx advocated destroying the most productive economic system in history to replace it with a system whose institutions he never analysed.
When Mises later proved that socialist calculation was impossible, Marxists had no answer.
Because Marx never thought about how his system would actually function.
He tore down without building up. He promised without planning. He diagnosed without prescribing.
This is what they don't teach in your political philosophy class:
The entire Marxist edifice rests on self-refuting contradictions that were exposed over a century ago.
Mises didn't just win on economics. He showed that Marx's philosophy itself was intellectually bankrupt.
Historical determinism makes activism pointless. Polylogism that invalidates its own claims. Material explanation that requires immaterial origins. A revolutionary program with no coherent plan.
One economist dismantled the entire system.
And many academics still pretend it never happened.
Every libertarian learns about Mises, the economist.
Few learn about Mises, the philosopher, who exposed the contradictions at the heart of the most influential ideology of the modern age.
These aren't obscure academic quibbles. These are fundamental logical errors.
Once you understand them, you can dismantle Marxist arguments at their foundation. Not with emotion, but with cold, clear logic.

This is the intellectual ammunition they don't want you to have. 

Wednesday, 10 September 2025

15 YEARS AGO: Getting property rights right: 'Mixing my labour'?

 Here's a NOT PC post from fifteen years ago correcting a major error: the importance and defence of your rights in property.

Despite scoring well in international surveys, which manage to award NZ high scores for property rights despite any real support, a recent Treasury report acknowledged "New Zealand is distinguished by having among the weakest protection of private rights in the OECD, a history of confiscation of private property rights, and a long-standing failure to recognise the protection of the basic human right of property rights."

On the rare occasion that property rights are mentioned, or even more rarely supported, proponents will talk about the rights being derived from something called "mixing one's labour" with the property in question. 

I hate to dump on John Locke, who famously made that claim, but that's no more accurate than Karl Marx's misbegotten notion that value is derived by the amount of physical labour mixed with a thing ...

WHERE DO PROPERTY RIGHTS come from? And what did John Locke get right?

It’s important to remember that the concept even of individual rights “is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.”  Indeed, only two centuries before Europeans arrived in New Zealand, to most Europeans as well they remained a complete mystery.

In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature. 
    “The Declaration of Independence stated that men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival. 
    “The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” 

Flawed beginnings

But where do rights come from, what is their source? Some men assert that rights are either a gift of God or a gift of society -- that men are either “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” or are endowed by legislators with certain contingent rights that they may alienate at any time of their choosing.

Neither is particularly compelling on its own.

Neither is it enough to say that because we own our bodies, then we must therefore also own all the products of our bodies—it should be obvious this is a species of begging the question.  Not to mention tremendously confusing for our bodily wastes.

And it’s not correct to say that the source of property is that the concept makes goods “non-rivalrous” –since this confuses a consequence for a cause: everyone knows whose goods are whose because folk do have various rights in those goods. But that doesn’t explain why they do.

John Locke famously argued that we acquire rights in the property with which we mix our own labour:

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he re-moves out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labourwith, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the un-questionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.

You see immediately that, right from the off, Locke virtually assumes his own conclusion: that every Man has a Property in his own Person means the concept of Property is already assumedBut he does take it some way further.

But what exactly does it mean to say that we have mixed our labour with something? Locke gives a 3-stage process for this:

  1. I remove something from the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in
  2. I mix my labour with it 
  3. By so doing, I “join to it” something I already own.

Thus and so, the thing I first espied in nature and then worked with is now mine. But that still leaves many questions.

  • First, why did I choose those particular things to remove from nature? What about them made them so special?
  • What does it mean to “mix my labour” with something? Does dropping my ham sandwich into a concrete block, asks Jeremy Waldron, make that block mine once it hardens? 
  • How much mixing might be necessary? Would walking across an uninhabited continent make it mine, as some Australian aboriginals have claimed?
  • What exactly do I “join to it”? Something tangible? Or, as Karl Olivecrona contends, something intangible like some “spiritual ego”?
  • If something tangible, then may it at some stage be removed? If something intangible (spiritual and perhaps permanent), must ownership rights continue in perpetuity, as tangata whenua sometimes says they do?
  • And why isn’t mixing what I own with what I don’t own a way of losing what I do own, asks Robert Nozick, rather than a way of gaining what I don’t? 

If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?

Fortunately, Locke himself gives some guidance. He gives examples of “mixing labour”: gathering nuts, growing vegetables and fruits, mining ore, drawing water, killing a deer, catching fish, hunting a hare, cultivating land for farming, sewing clothes, baking bread, felling timber, fermenting wine. (Never forget fermenting wine.) So labour is in this sense a goal-directed productive activity – “a rational (or purposeful), value-creating activity,” argues modern-day Lockean Stephen Buckle. “Tis Labour then which puts the greatest part of Value upon Land,” says Locke, “without which it would scarcely be worth any thing: ‘tis to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful Products.” In other words (the words of Adam Mossoff, from whom this short summary comes), 

Labour creates valuable products—and turns worthless land into valuable real estate—because “labour” in this context means production.

And production in Locke’s context is a moral virtue.

If it is a moral obligation for people to preserve themselves, then it follows as a corollary that the means of this preservation is a moral virtue. For mankind, the means of survival are produced goods, such as shelter, clothing and food. Production therefore is the moral action by which a man fulfils his fundamental moral duty: preservation of his life.

Labour in this context means production. And production means a rational (or purposeful), value-creating activity. The result being the fulfilment of a moral duty: the preservation of the labourer’s life.

But these are the words of two modern-day interpreters trying to understand Locke’s infelicitous metaphor, not those of Locke’s himself—which are nowhere near as clear. And they still don’t get us fully down to the root of our cause for which we’re searching.

What is the real root of your rights in property?

The real root of rights

THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTS is the human need to take action to survive, and the means by which human beings each elect to achieve it. 

Individual rights are ultimately based on the needs of man’s life—they recognise man as a causal agent in his life, and frame the “moral space” within which he may take the actions as of right that are necessary to sustain it.  Unlike other animals we cannot survive as we come into the world; in order to stay alive and to flourish we each need to choose our own means of survival and flourishing (this needing to be first identified before it can be acted upon), and then to produce and to keep the fruits of our production (this needing to be kept so as to make our survival plan worthwhile). If our minds are our means of survival – as Julian Simon used to say, our Ultimate Resource – then property is the result of applying the creative potential of our minds to reality in order to enhance and promote our lives and those we love and interact with.

Other animals survive by acting automatically, instinctively; man survives by using his mind. Animals survive by repeating their actions of the past, by doing what worked yesterday; man survives by by looking towards the future, by using reason.

The protection of individual rights makes the world safe for reason.

The influence of reason shows up in the development of the individual’s conceptual ability to give a sense of present reality to his life in decades to come, and in his identification of himself as a self-responsible causal agent with the power to improve his life. This combination of ideas is what produced in people such attitudes as the realization that hard work pays and that they must accept responsibility for their future by means of saving. The same combination of ideas helped to provide the intellectual foundation for the establishment and extension of private property rights as incentives to production and saving. Private property rights rest on the recognition of the principle of causality in the form that those who are to implement the causes must be motivated by being able to benefit from the effects they create. They also rest on a foundation of secularism—of the recognition of the rightness of being concerned with material improvement.  
                                        (George Reisman, ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Capitalism and Economic Activity,’ in Capitalism)

So how exactly does reason “mix” with reality?  Consider that first question in the section above: why did I choose those particular things to remove from their “State of Nature”? What was it about those particular things made them so special? Carl Menger explains that what we are doing fundamentally in taking things from “the state of nature” is transforming things into goods on the basis of our human reason:

  Things that can be placed in a causal connection with the satisfaction of human needs we term useful things[“Nützlichkeiten”]. If, however, we both recognize this causal connection, and have the power actually to direct the useful things to the satisfaction of our needs, we call them goods
     “If a thing is to become a good, or in other words, if it is to acquire goods-character, all four of the following prerequisites must be simultaneously present: 
     1. A human need. 
     2. Such properties as render the thing capable of being brought into a causal connection with the satisfaction 
        of this need. 
     3. Human knowledge of this causal connection. 
     4. Command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need.  
        Only when all four of these prerequisites are present simultaneously can a thing become a good.

                                      (Carl Menger, ‘The General Theory of The Good,’ Principles of Economics)

This is the process by which resources are continually created where before there might have been none – how oil turned from bane to boon and desert turned to pasture. All four of Menger’s “prerequisites” require human reason—Menger saying bluntly that it is not primarily a property of the goods themselves that gives them good-character, “but merely a relationship between certain things and men, the things obviously ceasing to be goods with the disappearance of this relationship.” 

At the very first stage of productive labour then, we see that the “labour” that is most important here is not physical, but intellectual—intellectual effort directed outward to make nature more humane.

Labour is the means by which man’s mind transmits his designs and purposes to matter. It is man’s application of his bodily and mental faculties for the purpose of altering matter in form or location and thereby making the matter thus altered serve a further purpose. . .  
    The physical matter of which natural resources a composed is, of course, not made by man—it is nature-given. Nevertheless, the wealth-character of natural resources is man-made: it is the result of human labour. It is the result of the labour that discovers the uses to which the natural resources can be put, and of the labour that enable them to become accessible in ways that they can be used gainfully. Thus, it is labour [mainly of an intellectual character] that establishes the character of natural resources as goods, and thus as wealth.”  
                                    (George Reisman, ‘Wealth & Labour,’ Capitalism)

Hence:

The source of the goods-character of things is ultimately within us. Goods derive their character as goods by virtue of their ability to benefit human beings. 
                                     (George Reisman, ‘Wealth & Goods,’ in Capitalism)

We’re having a right-old relationship with our goods

And as Menger identifies above, it is the relationship that results between certain things and men that is the primary product of this intellectual labour. Because it’s important to recognise that property cannot simply be equated with objects. More accurately, property refers to a relationship—something tangible (or intangible) in which we have property.  “As long as this is understood, we may use the term ‘property’ to refer either to the object owned or to the relationship of ownership.” [Tara Smith.] It’s more accurate, strictly speaking, to say we have “property in” this or that than it is to say that this or that is property.

We frequently speak as if property denotes goods that a person owns. (‘Leave that alone, it’s my property.’)  Yet property does not refer to objects per se.  For an object is just that. . . An object qualifies as property only insofar as it stands in a certain relationship to some person.  
                                                (Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom)

A man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.  
                                    (James Madison)

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values. 
                                   (Ayn Rand, ‘Man’s Rights’)

And this relationship clearly does not accrue to every man. Because specific individuals have identified these specific things with which they have formed a goods-relationship –those goods being perhaps part of some multi-period production plan requiring the certainty that can only be given by right.

Because, you see, the stuff that sustains human life all has to be createdgoods have to be created--wealth has to be created.  All the wealth in the world that now exists in the world had to be created.  The very act of creating new wealth brings it into a property relationship with the creator.  

Because when we create new wealth, we create new valuesThose new values have an owner.

Individuals do not possess property rights simply because material goods are part of what life requires.  The other essential leg of the case stems from the origin of goods’ value.  
                                  (Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom)

So the reason new values have an owner, is because without that owner those new values wouldn’t exist.

Mixing labour? Or rewarding good judgement.

So to return to our start and then reach a conclusion. John Locke’s brilliant analysis of how property rights are applied is undercut by his flawed argument for their justification—and particularly by his flawed metaphor of labour-mixing.  Tibor Machan amends the flaw and concludes as I have here that the fundamental justification for property rights is an entrepreneurial one--not based on a “labour theory of value,” where labour is identified only on its purely physical component, but on the crucially important identification of the role of the mind in production

It’s in this sense that we can understand Ayn Rand’s saying that at root “all property is intellectual property.”

John Locke advanced the theory that when one mixes one’s labour with nature, one gains ownership of that part of nature with which the labour is mixed. Thus, for example, if I gather wood from the forest for a fire, or for materials to build a shelter, I have a ‘natural right’ to what I have gathered, inasmuch as I have ‘mixed my labour’ with it and to that extent put some of myself into it. Since I have a self-evident right to my own body, including my labour, that part of nature that includes myself (i.e., my labour) is also mine. Though Locke held that nature is initially a gift from God to us all, he argued that once we individually mix our labour with some portion of it, it becomes ours alone.  
    This idea, though perhaps commonsensically compelling when limited to simple examples of physical labour such as gathering wood, has not carried wide conviction, mainly because the idea of ‘mixing labour with nature’ is too vague. Does discovering an island count as an act of labour—never mind ‘mixing’ one’s labour? Does exploring the island? Fencing it in? Does identifying (discovering) a scientific truth count as mixing labour with nature? What about inventing a new device based on scientific information available to all? Or trade—should the act of coming to an agreement count as mixing one’s labour with something of value? Challenging examples to Locke’s principle abound.  
    A revised Lockean notion has been advanced in current libertarian thought by way of a theory of entrepreneurship, an idea advanced at about the same time by philosopher James Sadowsky of Fordham University and by economist Israel Kirzner of New York University. The novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, perhaps the modern era’s most fervent advocate of capitalism based on a theory of the inalienable individual right to life, liberty, and property, also emphasised the moral role of individual judgment and initiative or entrepreneurship. 
    “According to the entrepreneurial model, it is the judgment—no small matter in human affairs where instincts play hardly any role—that fixes something as possessing (potential) value (to oneself or others); and therefore the making of this judgment and acting on it—the alertness and attentiveness of it all—is what earns oneself the status of a property holder. The rational process of forming a judgment is neither automatic nor passive; neither does the process involve more than a minimum overt physical effort, but it is an act of labour nonetheless. What gives the judgment its moral significance is that it is a freely made, initiated choice involving the unique human capacity to reason things out, applied to some aspect of reality and its relationship to one’s purposes and life goals. One exerts the effort to choose to identify something as having potential or actual value. This imparts to it a practical dimension, something to guide one’s actions in life. Whether one is correct or not in any given instance remains to be seen, but in either case the judgment brings the item under one’s jurisdiction on something like a “first come, first served” basis.  
    For example, assume that George identifies some portion of unowned land as being of potential value. Having made this judgment, George now has rightful jurisdiction over the property, so that others may not (rightfully) prevent him from exploring it for oil or minerals, or simply using it to build a museum or a private home. His judgment may have been in error: the land may turn out to be infertile or otherwise unsuitable for his purposes. Even so, given that people require for their lives a sphere of jurisdiction, by having first made and acted upon the decision to select the land, he has appropriated it in a way that cannot be objectionable—indeed, is a prudent effort, at least.
  
                                        (Tibor Machan, ‘The Right to Private Property’)

Property creates new value

So ultimately, what we’re creating with our good judgement is new values.  By identifying and rearranging what nature has given use, we raise materials from a lower value (in relation to us) to a higher value (in relation to us); they move from being things to goods, from being materials to being resources. It is their creation as new goods that is the economic component. It is their creation as new values that is the moral component.

    Consider those things that people hold as property.  What makes the possession of these things desirable is that they serve human purposes. . .  All the things that individuals own … are valuable insofar as they contribute to the fulfilment of some purpose. . .  
    The point is, the goods that individuals own are valuable because of individuals’ efforts. [Individuals had to figure out, for example, that coal could be burnt to produce energy, how it might do so, what ends this might accomplish, and then proceed to locate, extract, transport, and burn coal under suitable conditions to serve those ends. Individuals had to figure out that rubber could be converted into tires, how to do so, why that might be useful, and proceed to harvest and treat the rubber in order to make it serve that function.] These goods are not intrinsically valuable.  Their value is not buried within them, like gifts in boxes, simply awaiting our discovery.  Things’ desirability does not precede individuals’ moulding resources to accomplish various purposes.  It is individuals’ deliberate employment of materials to serve certain needs that supplies things’ value.  Before that human contribution, naturally available resources hold merely the potential to be of value to people, if they are tapped in appropriate ways.  
    The relevance of all this to the defence of property rights is straightforward.  If objects’ value is the result of individual efforts, them objects are valuable only because particular individuals have worked in constructive ways to make things serve some ends.  When this realization is teamed with the egoistic premise that a person is entitled to live for her own benefit, it becomes clear that the value a person creates should be hers to keep and control.   
    Since human effort creates the value that any object possesses—since individuals are responsible for all of a thing’s value—it is appropriate to recognise property rights belonging to the individuals who generate the relevant value.  If a person is entitled to act to promote her own eudaimonia and through her actions creates something that is valuable to her, we have no grounds for denying her right to that product.  
                                 (Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom)

Let’s spell out that last again: 

  • Individuals are responsible for all of a thing’s value.
  • that value is a recognition that these things serve individuals’ purposes 
  • it is appropriate to recognise property rights belonging to the individuals who generate the relevant value.  
  • If a person is entitled to act to promote her own eudaimonia and through her actions creates something that is valuable to her, we have no grounds for denying her right to that product.

As we see, this entrepreneurial argument for property is very far removed from the simple notion of “mixing one’s labour.”

And as we saw yesterday, and as explained especially by Ayn Rand and the Austrian economists, it is not just the individual who benefits from that right – though it is not the primary justification of any theory of rights, there is a general benefit from the private ownership of the means of production that can be achieved no other way.  Because in the same way that Thomas Edison’s cleaning lady benefits in her wage packet from the enormous productivity of her employer, so every individual in a division-of-labour society benefits from the creation, production and trade of these new values.

And that is good. And right.

Saturday, 14 June 2025

Let’s call ‘taxing the rich’ what it really is: Theft

Picture of New Zealand's richest man. Guaranteed a reaction
 against his success by a certain sort of commentator ...

EVERY SO OFTEN A PIECE of dross comes over my monitor that just cries out to be fisked. Like this rant against the latest NBR Rich List by someone called Dr Neal Curtis. His piece argues that "as society groans under the weight of wealth inequality" (can you hear the groans, readers?) there should be a "different slogan to ‘tax the rich'." The one he favours: "reclaim the wealth'."

Yes, he's an ultra-redistributionist. Aka, a thief. Walter Williams knows the type:

Dr Curtis's piece is of course a reaction to publication of the NBR Rich List, which without fail gets a certain sort of person to hyperventilate.

Dr Curtis is that sort of person.

And this screed vomiting forth at Newsroom is the result.

Dr Curtis, by the way, is said by his bio to be "a comics scholar and critical theorist with wide-ranging interests." Lead item on his Areas of Expertise is: Comics. So let's just call him Mr Curtis.

MR CURTIS BGINS: THIS Government, he says, is "gutting government departments and cutting public services."

I wish this were true instead of comical. (Spending is now higher under Nicola Willis than under Grant Robertson. Full-time employees under the Luxon Government was 64,222 when elected, and is now 63,238. There have been cuts, it's true, but none anywhere near as big as I would hope.)

But his beginning is only a drive-by to pass off his credentials. Three paragraphs in we get to the meat. So it's here that I'll begin my fisking.

MR CURTIS: [There are] three central assumptions of current economic dogma that those who question are branded as ‘radical leftists.’ These assumptions are underpinned by the beliefs that wealth trickles down; deregulation is good for business; and the state should stay out of the market and everything should be privatised.

Should I cry "strawman" this early in the piece? Each of these pieces of alleged dogma is both fly-blown and overblown. No-one outside a piss-poor public-choice lecture would anyone say everything should be privatised. (Courts? Police? Army?) And no-one anywhere advocates so-called "trickle-down." His point here is not to make sense, however, it's simply to damn the rich so he can later advocate their being eaten.

So he ploughs on regardless, challenging each of the assertions he's just straw-manned. Like his logic, let's looks at each of them in reverse.

MR CURTIS: ...the state has always been an economic entrepreneur funding all kinds of technological innovation, such as the internet, but this often goes unreported in the dominant economic journalism.

"Always" is doing a lot of work here. There's a reason so much government entrepreneurialism goes unreported in any economic journalism: it's because it's so rare. Sure, the government defence project ARPANET linking dozens of people was transformed into something that now links five billion. But that wasn't a Ministry of Doing Shit that did that. It was private entrepreneurs who turned the great idea into a GREAT IDEA. 

MR CURTIS: ... seen from a purely corporate perspective deregulation is no doubt a path to profit. However, it is also socially disastrous as costs of deregulation are outsourced via public bailouts following financial crises, for example, that are directly caused by the rolling back of legislation designed to safeguard the wider economy.

Without going too much further than this one paragraph (though we can if you wish), let us agree that there is more than one kind of deregulation. There is the kind that mandates safety and (may) safeguard the wider economy. There is regulation that protects intellectual and real property, and that allows for the enforcement of contracts. And then there is regulation about how curved a banana should be, or how far apart hairdressing salon seats should be. You'll notice how carefully Mr Curtis conflates these. And why.

MR CURTIS: ... wealth, especially when given away in tax cuts, does not trickle down. It stays at the top. Ever-increasing wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient or any study of income trends show this.

Now, it's Mr Curtis who insists this to be economic dogma, i.e., that wealth "trickles down." Yet the author of Basic Economics,  Thomas Sowell, insists that there is no-one anywhere outside a lunatic asylum or a comics convention who holds it to be true, let alone as dogma.
Years ago [writes Sowell, I] challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this “trickle-down” theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a “trickle-down” policy. They could never name that somebody else and quote them, though.

[Mr Curtis] is by no means the first [person] to denounce this nonexistent theory. Back in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama attacked what he called “an economic philosophy” that “says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”

Let’s do something completely unexpected: Let’s stop and think. Why would anyone advocate that we “give” something to A in hopes that it would trickle down to B? Why in the world would any sane person not give it to B and cut out the middleman? All this is moot, however, because there was no trickle-down theory about giving something to anybody in the first place. 

Sowell wrote a whole book exposing the nonsense of those who believe this trickle-down fantasy. [It's free, you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE.] And as I've pointed out myself on occasion, if there is a trickle-down system in operation it's the one whereby large gobs of your own money are taken from you by government, and trickled back down to you in the form of favours, and subsidies and social welfare for working families and the like.

There is an argument however for having capitalists keep their own capital, however— an economic argument, as well as the strictly-speaking moral argument that it's their goddamn money. Mr Curtis et al would like to think that if the "one percent's" capital were not stripped from them it would perhaps be baked into pies or used to light cigars—or would be emptied into money bins so that, like Scrooge McDuck, the owner of capital can spend his time rolling around in it.

This is truly a comic-book version of reality that only one ignorant of the division of labour could hold. 

Because, as George Reisman explains,  the vast majority of the wealth owned by the so-called “one-percent” is not held in the form of chocolate bars or champagne bottles or pies, but in the form of the capital goods and equipment that produce the consumer goods on which we (and Mr Curtis) all depend—capital goods that only come to represent wealth to the extent they are used to produce the goods and services people, in their capacity as consumers, really want. Per-Olof Samuelsson observes
"The productive rich (think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etcetera, etcetera) actually flood the rest of us with wealth (and themselves become wealthy in the process). Taxing or expropriating them simply means to dam this flood. And this may make it appear 'trickle-down'— because governments and politicians will only allow a small portion of this wealth to trickle down to us; the rest of it lands in their own pockets."
Many of the wealthiest people on earth hold their wealth in the form of a financial asset, like stock in a successful company. And the very wealthiest have no time to swim in cartoon-style money bins because they're also successfully running these companies.
[Mr Curtis and his readers] have no awareness of this, because they see the world through an intellectual lens that is inappropriate to life under capitalism and its market economy. They see a world, still present in some places, and present everywhere a few centuries ago, of self-sufficient farm families, each producing for its own consumption and having no essential connection to markets.
    In such a world, if one sees a farmer’s field, or his barn, or plough, or draft animals, and asks who do these means of production serve, the answer is the farmer and his family, and no one else. In such a world, apart from the receipt of occasional charity from the owners, those who are not owners of means of production cannot benefit from means of production unless and until they themselves somehow become owners of means of production. They cannot benefit from other people’s means of production except by inheriting them or by seizing them.
But in the modern world (at least, to the extent that the so-called “one-percent” are not simply milking government subsidies and bailouts, which is how so many seem to think business should work), all of us benefit from the private ownership of their means of production whoever owns them—just as long as the owners are left free to produce and innovate. We all get the benefit of their production, both as buyers of the products of those means of production, but also as sellers of labour employed to work with those means of production.
The wealth of the capitalists, in other words, is the source both of the supply of products that non-owners of the means of production buy and of the demand for the labour that non-owners of the means of production sell. It follows that the larger the number and greater the wealth of the capitalists, the greater is both the supply of products and the demand for labor, and thus the lower are prices and the higher are wages, i.e., the higher is the standard of living of everyone. Nothing is more to the self-interest of the average person than to live in a society that is filled with multi-billionaire capitalists and their corporations, all busy using their vast wealth to produce the products he buys and to compete for the labour he sells.
    Nevertheless, the world [
Mr Curtis and his readers] yearn for is a world from which the billionaire capitalists and their corporations have been banished, replaced by small, poor producers, who would not be significantly richer than they themselves are, which is to say, impoverished. They expect that in a world of such producers, producers who lack the capital required to produce very much of anything, let alone carry on the mass production of the technologically advanced products of modern capitalism, they will somehow be economically better off than they are now. Obviously, [they] could not be more deluded.

AND IT'S NOW, WITH HIS three dogmas exposed, that we can see Mr Curtis's error more plainly. Like many who are branded as "radical leftists," not only is there an inherent wish to damn the rich, all of them, there is also a paucity of understanding of how the deserving rich got that way. 

Yes, there is more than one way to get rich. One may pull favours and subsidies from government, as cronies all try to, or one may be the government and sell Shitcoins (as one particularly egregious entity is currently doing). Or one may sit tight and rely on central banks inflating monetary assets (what is often called the Cantillon Effect, after the eighteenth-century ex-banker who called attention to this phenomenon of long-term capital consumption). But neither of those examples is any more than short-term, and no amount of short-term skimming is going to get you to the top of even a New Zealand rich list.

Even in this small pond, it does take an entrepreneur risking his or her own capital to really roll in the big returns.

Mr Curtis would like you to conflate all three, as he proceeds to draw his conclusion.

But first, his corollary: that it is government spending that makes us all rich. Mr Curtis phrases it this way.

MR CURTIS: All this [leaving capital in the hands of its owners] results in top-heavy, financially starved economies as governments continually try to make the wealth giveaways fit into a budget by stripping support for public services or selling off public assets at knockdown prices. ...
    The fact that the global economic outlook as well as specific national economies remain so fragile and unstable ... is surely enough evidence that the principle of continually moving wealth upwards doesn’t work...

He really does think that money in the hands of government grows economies, whereas money in the hands of those who made it simply squanders it. 

It's deluded.

And sure enough, having made his three points of alleged dogma, and delivered his corollary, he gets to start eating his meat. 

MR CURTIS: Just as there is no economic justification for structuring an economy in which only the very wealthy are the true beneficiaries, there is also no moral justification.... As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich.
Mr Curtis is, of course, in favour. And now, bringing together what passes for his argument, is his payoff:
MR CURTIS: Instead of a call to ‘tax the rich’, the call should be to ‘reclaim the wealth’. I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created. It is also a call to give back even just a small amount of what was taken through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few.

You can see his own dogma peering out from under his comical version of how an economic system works:

"Commonly created."

"Give back."

"Reclaim."

One question should be enough to puncture the deceit, and with it we return to Walter Williams at the top of this post. The question is: Who created this wealth?

Nick Mowbray is an almost perfect example here. 

The wealth represented by Mr Mowbray's Zuru Toys quite literally did not exist before Mr Mowbray created Zuru's toys. Pre-Mowbray, there was a pile of stuff. Post-Mowbray and his identification of the value to human beings to be delivered by his toys, there's enough value in them to make him this county's richest man.

I know that can be hard to get your head around, but there it is. Value, in the economic sense, is in the eye of the consumer. Consumers' "vote" every day, with their own hard-earned money on their devices, for Zuru's toys creates a socially-objective price for Mr Mowbray's offerings, and allows him to grow his capital. Which he can then use to create more toys, which creates more capital, which .....

All going well, especially if you like children's toys, that's a life-enhancing spiral that costs no-one else anything.

LET'S NOT BOTHER TOO MUCH to investigate further into the mind of someone who would despise that.

Let's ask instead only what they're trying to achieve. For. Mr Curtis, here's his payoff here, he hopes (now with an added noteto identify his errors:

MR CURTIS: As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth [sic] that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich.

I love the use of the passive verb: "there have been calls..." instead of "I and my colleagues have been demanding..." 

MR CURTIS: In keeping with the dogma [sic], conservative supporters have made tax a dirty word [I wish! -Ed.]. Rather than tax being an individual or corporate contribution to the maintenance of a functioning society, the corporatist right has over the past four decades tried to make it a synonym for theft [I wish - Ed.]. The idea that taxing the rich is really a form of theft also makes it easy for the dogmatists [sic] to present the call as a form of envy; a petty resentment of the successful.
And isn't it envy? Envy, for example, that one person making toys that delight people will earn more in his lifetime than someone with pretensions to intelligence making his living from analysing comic books and posting snide articles on a web page. The envy fair oozes out this piece, and other similar rants by the usual suspects.
MR CURTIS: Instead of a call to ‘tax the rich’, the call should be to ‘reclaim the wealth.

Ah. Here we go: an all-but explicit claim from the mire that "you didn't build that." Which in the next sentence is made explicit:

MR CURTIS: I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created.

So, in what will no doubt be a surprise to Messrs Mowbray, Hart et al, everybody created the toys for which the world is clamouring, the companies made more efficient, the plastics that store food better, the films that folk queue up for ... We all did it, he claims.

In the end, after all the verbage, that's his major claim. That we made it—an absurdity—so therefore we should keep it. A nonsense.

It is also a call to give back [sic] even just a small amount of what was taken [sic] through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few.
The irony is that, if Mr Curtis lifted his head from his comic books and looked properly at the world around him and at the division-of-labour system that allows even sad sacks like himself to survive and even flourish, he'd understand that (even imperfectly) it already is benefitting all of us.

If there's one benefit of watching a US president tearing down everything that made his own country prosperous, it's that his many political enemies are slowly discovering this truth.  

Many are discovering anew that it is actually poverty that is mankind’s natural state, that it is past wealth production (not redistribution) that has been rescuing people from poverty worldwide in ever-expanding numbers—the great (but almost unheard) story of our era that allows today's worker more easily-available health, wealth, and luxuries than even a king enjoyed in all previous centuries—and that efforts to simply legislate higher wages by law amounts to little more than a “loot and plunder” approach to economics.

The fundamental policy tools of statist politicians [explains George Reisman] are clubs, guns, and prisons... What allows statist politicians to conceal the fact that they’re thugs is the belief that they have a special account with Santa Claus. As though Santa Claus, rather than extortion, were the source of the funds extorted by the politicians.
The statist politicians and the leftist “intellectuals” dismiss the teachings of sound economics by calling it “trickle down.” They do not allow themselves to see that their theory of economics is the loot and plunder theory.
Some have realised and reconsidered. I invite Mr Curtis to consider it too.

PS: Mr and Mrs Marx were at least fully aware of how envy towards the rich is a psychological problem, not an philosophical—or economic—one. Writing to their "embittered" son after yet another tantrum at the world, Heinrich Marx said:
Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?

Is it?