DemocracyThe God That Failed (44 page)

For representative examples of left-libertarian thought see, for instance, Clint Bolick,
Grassroots
Tyranny:
The
Limits
of
Federalism
(Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1993); idem,
The
Affirmative
Action
Fraud:
Can
We
Restore
the
American
Civil
Rights
Vision?
(Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996); and David Boaz,
Libertarianism:
A
Primer
(New York: Free Press, 1997); for a rebuttal of the left-libertarian views of Bolick and Boaz from the right or "paleo-libertarian" perspective see Murray N. Rothbard, "The Big Government Libertarians: The Anti-Left-Libertarian Manifesto,"
Rothbard-Rockwell
Report
4, no. 12 (December 1993); idem, "Big Government Libertarians,"
Rothbard-Rockwell
Report
5, no. 11 (November 1994); and Jeffrey A. Tucker's review of Boaz' book in
the
Journal
of
Libertarian
Studies
13, no. 1 (1997).

The modern welfare state has largely stripped private property owners of the right to exclusion implied in the concept of private property. Discrimination is outlawed. Employers cannot hire whom they want. Landlords cannot rent to whom they want. Sellers cannot sell to whomever they wish; buyers cannot buy from whomever they wish to buy. And groups of private property owners are not permitted to enter in whatever restrictive covenant they believe to be mutually beneficial. The state has thus robbed the people of much of their personal and physical protection. Not to be able to exclude others means not to be able to protect oneself. The result of this erosion of private property rights under the democratic welfare state is forced integration. Forced integration is ubiquitous. Americans must accept immigrants they do not want. Teachers cannot get rid of lousy or ill-behaved students, employers are stuck with poor or destructive employees, landlords are forced to live with bad renters, banks and insurance companies are not allowed to avoid bad risks, restaurants and bars must accommodate unwelcome customers, and private clubs and covenants are compelled to accept members and actions in violation of their very own rules and restrictions. Moreover, on public, i.e., government property in particular, forced integration has taken on a dangerous form: of norm and lawlessness.
²⁴

²⁴
"Every property owner," Murray N. Rothbard elaborated,

should have the absolute right to sell, hire, or lease his money or other property to anyone whom he chooses, which means he has the absolute right to "discriminate" all he damn pleases. If I have a plant and want to hire only six-foot albinos, and I can find willing employees, I should have the right to do so, even though I might well lose my shirt doing so. ... If I own an apartment complex and want to rent only to Swedes without children, I should have the right to do so. Etc. Outlawing such discrimination, and restrictive covenants upholding it, was the original sin from which all other problems followed. Once admit that principle, and everything else follows as the night the day.... For if it is right and proper to outlaw my discriminating against blacks, then it is just as right and proper for the government to figure out if I am discriminating or not, and in that case, it is perfectly legitimate for them to employ quotas to test the proposition.... So what is the remedy for all
this? ... What has to be done is to repudiate "civil rights" and antidiscrimination laws totally, and in the meanwhile, on a separate but parallel track, try to privatize as much and as fully as we can. ("Marshall, Civil Rights, and the Court,"
Rothbard-Rockwell
Report
2, no. 8 [August 1991]: 4 and 6)

To exclude other people from one's own property is the very means by which an owner can avoid "bads" from happening: events that will lower the value of one's property. In not being permitted to freely exclude, the incidence of bads—ill-behaved, lazy, unreliable, rotten students, employees, customers—will increase and property values will fall. In fact, forced integration (the result of all nondiscrimination policies) breeds ill behavior and bad character. In civilized society, the ultimate price for ill behavior is expulsion, and all-around ill-behaved or rotten characters (even if they commit no criminal offense) will find themselves quickly expelled from everywhere and by everyone and become outcasts, physically removed from civilization. This is a stiff price to pay; hence, the frequency of such behavior is reduced. By contrast, if one is prevented from expelling others from one's property whenever their presence is deemed undesirable, ill behavior, misconduct, and outright rotten characters are encouraged (rendered less costly). Rather than being isolated and ultimately entirely removed from society, the "bums"—in every conceivable area of incompetency (bumhood)—are permitted to perpetrate their unpleasantries everywhere, so bum-like behavior and bums will proliferate. The results of forced integration are only too visible. All social relations—whether in private or business life—have become increasingly egalitarian (everyone is on a first name basis with everyone else) and uncivilized.

In distinct contrast, a society in which the right to exclusion is fully restored to owners of private property would be profoundly unegalitarian, intolerant, and discriminatory. There would be little or no "tolerance" and "open-mindedness" so dear to left-libertarians. Instead, one would be on the right path toward restoring the freedom of association and exclusion implied in the institution of private property, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. There would be signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and, once in town, requirements for entering specific pieces of property (for example, no beggars, bums, or homeless, but also no homosexuals, drug users, Jews, Moslems, Germans, or Zulus), and those who did not meet these entrance requirements would be kicked out as trespassers. Almost instantly, cultural and moral normalcy would reassert itself.

Left-libertarians and multi- or countercultural lifestyle experimentalists, even if they were not engaged in any crime, would once again have to pay a price for their behavior. If they continued with their behavior or lifestyle, they would be barred from civilized society and live physically separate from it, in ghettos or on the fringes of society, and many positions or professions would be unattainable to them. In contrast, if they wished to live and advance within society, they would have to adjust and assimilate to the moral and cultural norms of the society they wanted to enter. To thus assimilate would not necessarily imply that one would have to give up one's substandard or abnormal behavior or lifestyle altogether. It would imply, however, that one could no longer "come out" and exhibit one's alternative behavior or lifestyle in public. Such behavior would have to stay in the closet, hidden from the public eye, and physically restricted to the total privacy of one's own four walls. Advertising or displaying it in public would lead to expulsion.
²⁵

²⁵
To avoid any misunderstanding, it might be useful to point out that the predicted rise in discrimination in a purely libertarian world does
not
imply that the form and extent of discrimination will be the same or similar everywhere. To the contrary, a libertarian world could and likely would be one with a great variety of locally separated communities engaging in distinctly different and far-reaching discrimination. Explains Murray N. Rothbard:

In a country, or a world, of totally private property, including streets, and of private contractual neighborhoods consisting of property-owners, these owners can make any sort of neighborhood-contracts they wish. In practice, then, the country would be a truly "gorgeous mosaic,". . . ranging from rowdy Greenwich Village-type contractual neighborhoods, to socially conservative homogeneous WASP neighborhoods. Remember that all deeds and covenants would once again be totally legal and enforceable, with no meddling government restrictions upon them. So that considering the drug question, if a proprietary neighborhood contracted that no one would use drugs, and Jones violated the contract and used them, his fellow community-contractors could simply enforce the contract and kick him out. Or, since no advance contract can allow for all conceivable circumstances, suppose that Smith became so personally obnoxious that his fellow neighborhood-owners wanted him ejected. They would then have to buy him out—probably on terms set contractually in advance in accordance with some "obnoxious" clause. ("The 'New Fusionism': A Movement For Our Time,"
Rothbard-Rockwell
Report
2, no. 1 [January 1991]: 9-10)

Notwithstanding the variety of discriminatory policies pursued by different proprietary communities, however, and as will be further argued in the following above, for the sake of self-preservation each of these communities will have to recognize and enforce some strict and rather inflexible limitations with respect to its internal tolerance; that is,
no
proprietary community can be as "tolerant" and "nondiscriminatory" as left-libertarians wish
every
place to be.

Moreover, true conservative libertarians—in contrast to left-libertarians—must not only recognize and emphasize the
fact
that there
will
be
a sharp increase in discrimination (exclusion, expulsion) in a libertarian society wherein private property rights are fully restored to the owners of private households and estates; more importantly, they will have to recognize—and conservatives and conservative insights can be helpful in achieving this—that this
ought
to be so: that is, that there
should
be strict discrimination
if
one wants to reach the goal of a private property anarchy (or a pure private law society). Without continued and relentless discrimination, a libertarian society would quickly erode and degenerate into welfare state socialism. Every social order, including a libertarian or conservative one, requires a self-enforcement mechanism. More precisely, social orders (unlike mechanical or biological systems) are not maintained automatically; they require conscious effort and purposeful action on the part of the members of society to prevent them from disintegrating.
²⁶

VI

The standard libertarian model of a community is one of individuals who, instead of living physically separated and isolated from one another, associate with each other as neighbors living on adjacent but separately owned pieces of land. However, this model is too simplistic. Presumably, the reason for choosing neighbors over isolation is the fact that for individuals participating in and partaking of the benefits of the division of labor, a neighborhood offers the added advantage of lower transaction costs; that is, a neighborhood facilitates exchange. As a consequence, the value of an individually owned piece of land will be enhanced by the existence of neighboring pieces of land owned by others. However, while this may indeed be true and constitute a valid reason for choosing a neighborhood over physical isolation, it is by no means always true. A neighborhood also involves risks and may lead to falling rather than increasing property values, for even if one assumes, in accordance with the model under consideration, that the
initial
establishment of neighboring property was mutually beneficial, and even if it is further assumed that all members of a community refrain from criminal activity, it might still happen that a formerly "good" neighbor turns obnoxious, that he does not take care of his property or changes it so as to negatively affect the property values of other community members, or that he simply refuses to participate in any cooperative effort directed at
improving the value of the community as a whole.
²⁷
Hence, in order to overcome the difficulties inherent in community development when the land is held in divided ownership, the formation of neighborhoods and communities has in fact proceeded along different lines from those suggested in the above mentioned model.

²⁶
See on this in particular Mises,
Human
Action,
esp. chap. 9; Joseph T. Salerno, "Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist,"
Review
of
Austrian
Economics
4 (1990).

Rather than being composed of adjacent pieces of land owned in severalty, then, neighborhoods have typically been proprietary or covenantal communities, founded and owned by a single proprietor who would "lease" separate parts of the land under specified conditions to selected individuals." Originally, such covenants were based on kinship relations, with the role of the proprietor performed by the head of a family or clan. In other words, just as the actions of the immediate family members are coordinated by the head and owner of the household within a single family household, so was the function of directing and
coordinating the land uses of groups of neighboring households traditionally fulfilled by the head of an extended kinship group.
²⁹
In modern times, characterized by massive population growth and a significant loss in the importance of kinship relations, this original libertarian model of a proprietary community has been replaced by new and familiar developments such as shopping malls and "gated communities." Both shopping centers and gated residential communities are owned by a single entity, either an individual or a private corporation, and the relationship between the community proprietor and his renters and residents is purely contractual. The proprietor is an entrepreneur seeking profits from developing and managing residential and /or business communities which attract people as places where they want to reside and/or carry on their business. "The proprietor," elaborates Spencer MacCallum,

²⁷
See on this Spencer H. MacCallum,
The
Art
of
Community
(Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970). "So long as individuals have ownership in parts less than the whole," notes MacCallum,

their interests will collide with the interests of others and with the common interest in any proposal that would affect land values unevenly. Yet, to avoid such measures would be to throw out planning and coordination of land uses completely, and with it ultimately all land value.... Aggravating the situation further is the absence of effective leadership to arbitrate the conflicts or to salvage the best of the bad situation. Lacking is someone who, while not identified with any special interest in the community, is at the same time strongly concerned for the success of the community as a whole, (p. 57)

[Property in land cannot be moved to an environment more favorable for its use. Its value as an economic good is a function of its surroundings. Its higher use therefore depends upon rearranging the environment to conform to it. . . . Since the possible uses of a site depend on surrounding land uses (ultimately, all human action is land use of one kind or another), it is essential for its most productive use that the uses of accessible surrounding land be coordinated. Seldom can this be done effectively under a multiplicity of separate authorities. If surrounding sites are owned in severalty, the several owners may or may not be able to accommodate their various uses to a comprehensive plan, depending on many, often fortuitous, factors affecting the ability and wishes of each. They are neighbors of circumstance, not of convenience. (p. 78)

²⁸
To avoid any misunderstanding, the term "lease" is used here to include the sale of anything less than the full title to this thing. Thus, for example, the proprietor may sell all the rights to a house and a piece of land,
except
for the right to build a house over a certain height or of other than a certain design or to use the land for any other than residential purposes, etc., which rights are retained by the proprietary seller. See on this Rothbard,
The
Ethics
of
Liberty,
p. 146.