Against Libertarian Economics

Property Ought Serve A Purpose

This article about property and duty in the American tradition is one that a paid subscriber asked me to write, as was my recent article on Georgism and property taxes. As a reminder, paid subscribers are always welcome to send in topics or ideas, and I will get to them eventually! Listen to the audio version here:

[AUDIO] Against Libertarian Economics

The current view of property, generally, is that it exists so that those who own it can do with it as they please, free from all constraints regarding pro-social behavior. Particularly, there is no conception of any duty being attached to ownership of property other than the Dodge v. Ford Motors-created mandate¹ that public companies maximize shareholder returns. That this case was sparked by Ford wanting to pay his employees better and hold cash in reserve for future expansion—something with which the Dodge brothers disagreed—shows its momentous import: the only “duty” as regards property in post-Managerial Revolution American life is that of short-termism and maximal extraction. This is un-American, in addition to being socially caustic, for it is the opposite of the view of the men who built America.

The ways in which this is socially caustic should be obvious.

“Libertarian Economics” and National Decline

For one, there’s offshoring, outsourcing, H-1B visas, and all the rest: left unprotected by tariffs, squeezed by communist-connected trade unions,² and facing the depredations of a hostile government, business leaders started offshoring some industry in the mid-20th century. Even as regulations were loosened by Reagan and HW in the later decades, the trickle of offshoring turned into a flood with the opening of China and the rise of globalization. Entire communities saw the work on which they relied gradually wiped away, America lost much of her industrial base, and the idea that perhaps deindustrialization and the dispossession of the American worker ought be treated with some degree of seriousness and duty was waved away with scorn. Higher market returns, Big Business mouthpieces like the National Review insisted, were all that mattered.

This, broadly, is the libertarian view of property—“libertarian economics,” as the subscriber who asked me to write this article refers to it—in its most basic form: it exists to produce a return tomorrow, and that return is the highest god. Anything else is either irrelevant or damnable, or perhaps both. It is good for a factory owner to import Haitians to work in the factory rather than training the locals to do so, we are told by proponents of this argument, because the Haitians will work for lower wages and thus the factory’s profits will be higher.

Ignored is that the Haitians and their dependents rely on welfare, bring blight to those communities in which they live, and simply aren’t and won’t ever be Americans. All that matters is that the factory will be somewhat more profitable tomorrow; the owner of it is not seen, by proponents of this view of economics, as having any duties as to the community in which he built his industrial plant, the people in it, or his countrymen.

Capital is merely a number that ought earn the highest possible return, not a tool to assume the burden of duty and make the place in which one lives—at the local, state, or federal level—better. That view isn’t expressed in the work of von Mises, Hayek, or the others that libertarians cite. But as our country has gotten dumber and reads less, every concept involving the general public gets reduced to its most basic and imbecilic variant, and that is where we now are.

In any case, such an attitude toward capital and society is excoriated by JD Vance in his Hillbilly Elegy: the American worker was left to rot, and treated as an outmoded piece of equipment rather than a fellow citizen worthy of some consideration. The problem has gotten worse with its extension to the tech sector through the H-1B visa. Now Americans are being displaced by imported foreign labor that works for peanuts, and are told that is a good thing because of some vague concept of efficiency and the Dodge-demanded quest for higher returns. The problem will get worse as AI wipes away yet more middle-class work.

But it leads to much more than poor industrial and labor policy. “Die with Nothing”, a horrific concept my friend Johann Kurtz has done much to combat,³ is an outgrowth of this idea: it is a horrendously nihilistic belief that could only stem from the belief that this is all there is, and thus that extraction and hedonism ought be prized above all else. Build a great fortune, so that it can be spent on cruises and donated to some NGO that hates your progeny, if you had any. There is no sense of stewardship or greatness to such an idea, just the hedonism that grows from thinking of life and property as separate.

Then there is the general refusal of our “business leaders” to actually be leaders. Britain’s landed elite suffered a 20% death rate in the Great War, one comparable to the worst periods of the Middle Ages, such as the War of the Roses. America’s oligarchic families all had college degrees to obtain, or heel spurs and asthma, when their time came in the 20th century. A few exceptions abound; Teddy Roosevelt’s son died like a lion and earned the Medal of Honor. But those exceptions stand out because they are the exception that proves the rule. It’s impossible to imagine Sam Altman answering the call of duty, or even to think of the average successful businessman uttering an unpopular opinion in public. Complain as they might in private about crime or floods of cheap Chinese goods, they have no conception that they ought be the ones—successful and secure as they are—to try to alter politics for the better. That might impede further “wealth creation”! Disconnected from duty, they instead focus on maximum returns.

All of those outgrowths of the same general perspective boil down to the same basic problem: whereas once we were governed by gentlemen with a shared sense of duty and purpose, now we are ruled by a conceited collection of bureaucrats and plutocrats whose basic conception of life is that “get yours” is the highest good. Left uneducated about the traditional American alternative, those who could and should do better and push back against such a view instead just generally shrug and try to get theirs. Perhaps they donate a few dollars to a candidate or NGO about whom they know nothing, but that is it. Wealth has been severed from church and state, much to our detriment.

The American Alternative in Which Our Founders Believed

There is an alternative to this, and it is the sort of duty-centered mindset that built Virginia. As Virginia produced the majority of the crop of men who led the Revolution and the Early Republic, understanding how those men viewed the world, particularly the interaction between duty and property, is of critical importance. Their belief stands as a sterling rebuke of “libertarian economics”.

The Cavalier View of the World

To understand the American system that developed in Virginia, it is necessary to understand what created it: the Cavalier conception of society as a triune whole composed of property, church, and state. This is the idea that sits at the center of Morris Talpalar’s superb The Sociology of Colonial Virginia. As he recognized, under the Cavalier view, property, church, and state are not tripartite but triune, and in a properly ordered society are organized toward the cultivation of a flourishing and traditional society. As Talpalar puts it:

The supporters of the feudal society, called Cavaliers, were dedicated to three basic principles: no country without a king, no church without a bishop, no land without a lord which established a union of state, church and property.

Yet further, the organization of this society was to be such that those at the center of it—landed gentlemen, trained in virtue and duty by the Church and the Classics—were to be ever-watchful for both tyranny and social disorder. The duty of a landed gentleman was to protect his people from the tyranny of a centralized state in addition to the society-shredding chaos of an anarchic world.⁴ For this reason, the Cavaliers would not and could not isolate church, state, and property. Their society required that religious authority, political governance, and land ownership be permanently interwoven to sustain the hierarchical world governed by gentlemen.

Indeed, the way in which those three pillars of their civilization were interwoven ensured that they complemented each other. The autarkic landed unit enabled the lord of it to lead resistance to a would-be tyrant, as shown at Runnymede when Magna Carta was forced upon King John by landed lords and their landed gentry retainers.⁵ The Established church kept social subversion—both of the moral and egalitarian⁶ varieties—at bay. The king (or state generally, as time went on) ensured order within his dominions, and relied upon his lords to handle the administrative burden at the local level while also standing ready to resist foreign threats.⁷ As land was the basis of the system, primogeniture and entail were used by Property to pass it on, and this was not just respected but protected by the state. Each party of the system complemented the others.

This philosophy rejected the idea of separating social institutions, and instead forged a powerful union between the state, the Anglican Church, and real estate to create and preserve a ruling landed elite.

Such is why, for example, the Virginia gentry worked with Gov. Sir William Berkeley (with the governor and his Council effectively serving as the king in the colony) to expel the Quakers and Puritans.⁸ They were seen as disorder-bringing subversives⁹ who would weaken the Established Church and thus the ordered, traditional, and moral society that it anchored. In wanting to sever property, church, and state, they were seen as inviting disorder of a sort that would bring tyranny and social harm.

Given that the Quakers steadfastly refused to help defend the colony from murderous savages,¹⁰ the authorities were obviously correct in wanting them removed and replaced with those who would be valuable and participatory members of society. That the Quakers could be “remorselessly erased”¹¹ as they were was because church, state, and property were organized around the same general view of societal flourishing and how to establish it; such a society did not allow the shirking of duty from any of its members, high or low.

To the Cavaliers who arrived in, leavened, and built Virginia under Berkeley—a mixture of great and humble alike—land was not just an investment nor a mere commodity to be bought and sold in search for a return, but rather the sacred foundation of social station, personal freedom, and political prerogative.

The American Innovation

Thus, what developed in Virginia was a triune whole consisting of the plantation (the economic unit), the county (the legislative and judicial unit), and the parish (the ecclesiastical unit). All three of these pillars were tightly controlled by the same colonial gentry,¹² and are what allowed the state to develop into the “Golden Age” that produced our Founders.

As disgust with the Stuarts turned formerly staunch Royalists into Whigs with the arrival of foreign monarchs after the passing of Queen Anne,¹³ this formulation changed somewhat, but only slightly: the king gradually lost his exalted place and was replaced by the society of landed gentlemen.

Their society was a pyramid, with varying rights and responsibilities depending on which part of the pyramid one inhabited, but it had no apex.¹⁴ Instead, the ever-permeable class of governing families was to be defined by its property, acting in support of the Established Church, and composing the governing bodies and infrastructure of the state.

The remainder of this article—covering how the Cavalier view was adapted to America, how it built the nation, how we could adapt it to modern America, and why doing so would be good for the right—is for paid subscribers. All those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, get ad-free versions of my history videos, and read this article in full.