The Capitalist Case for Land Redistribution

From Libertatem

This was written by President Pevvania...


Capitalism is not merely an economic system characterised by private ownership of property, it is one based on natural rights and voluntary exchange. The fruits of one's labour belong to the individual. That is the case for property rights and of human civilisation itself.

Based on this fundamental axiom, one can deduct that the system of feudalism is incompatible with this principle. It is a system based on predatory exchanges and war. It postulates a vicious form of economic warfare, in which warlords are rewarded by their brutal conquests with the property and individuals who have been defeated by superior force. Of course, this does not constitute voluntary exchange. It is essentially localized statism. This is the prime example of a parasitic, involuntary exchange.

Historically, the system of feudalism originated in Europe during the various conquests of the Medieval Era, and similar systems developed in Asia - most notably Japan with the shoguns - around the same time period. A monarch would divide his 'kingdom' up amongst his political allies and friends (who were granted titles like duke, or earl), who would require the peasants within their portion of land to pay tribute to the landlord, who would use it to manage the land they controlled and raise armies for the monarch.

The peasants who suddenly found themselves living under these dukes and earls had been systematically robbed - they had mixed their labour with the soil, they had worked the land that they were now compensating someone else to control. Peasants had no incentive to economise or to make production more efficient; they often focused on simply amassing enough wealth needed by the landlord. Over the next several centuries, although Europe was able to break free of feudalism through the Crisis of the 14th Century, which planted the seeds of capitalism, this did not happen in Asia and many other parts of the world that ran on similar systems that were often related to colonialism. In dozens of nations, even in ones where feudalism had been abolished, the descendents of the pillagers and warlords still controlled vast swathes of land that justly belonged to the individuals who were originally expropriated from, and or their descendants. Rather than a less violent transition to capitalism, many nations and governments adopted ambitious land reform policies, which very often led to instability and violence that sometimes acted as an interim stage before a socialist state. Cuba, Vietnam, China and to a lesser extent Russia saw such reforms in order to more equally endow the working class with property.

Under a system of absolute property rights, all individuals who mixed their labour with land not previously transformed would be the natural owners of it, and have the right to exercise force in order to retain it. The argument for land reform is often a leftist one based on more utilitarian concerns for "inequality" and "fairness". But I, as a libertarian committed to property rights, assert that it can be a very capitalist one as well. Therefore, according to Lockean property rights theory, all stolen land should rightfully be returned to their original owners or their closest living descendants or relatives.