On the Recent Disparagement of Property Rights

I am quite pleased to see the recent outpouring of anger at police misconduct after the killing of George Floyd. I've been following police misconduct stories for many years. I used to post outrage stories to social media on an almost daily basis, and nobody seemed to care. I always have a "glad you could make it" reaction when the public finally comes around on an important issue like this. People are suddenly recognizing that a problem exists, and it looks like something good will come of it. 

That being said, I find it disturbing that some people seem to be glorifying the random destruction of property and the outright looting that's taking place alongside legitimate protests. An equally disturbing tendency is when someone points out that destruction and theft of property are wrong, the response is something like "I see that you care more about things than about people." There is this nasty insinuation that people care about property to the exclusion of other people's lives, as if it's an either-or. It's often followed up with a simplistic hashtag-length slogan, like "people over property" or some variant of it. Some of these commentators want to treat property rights as a "second class" set of civil rights, categorically less important than the right to bodily integrity or the right to choose your companion. "Property" is just "stuff", in this view. And what kind of crass materialist would place a higher value on mere stuff than on a human life? Or even a human's well-being? 

I want to state very clearly that there is no way to actually make this "people over property" formulation work. Property rights do not stem from an obsession with stuff. Property rights are a means of avoiding conflict between human beings. As long as there is uncertainty in how a piece of property can rightfully be used, there will be conflict between the competing claims for that property. Given enough of these conflicts, some of the disputants will inevitably turn to violence, and some of that violence will turn lethal. (I made a detailed version of this argument in this post. Please read it, too.) That consideration aside, bear in mind that you can't secure any of your other civil rights without property rights. Your political party wants a place to congregate? Too bad. The commissar will not grant you a building in which you can conduct party business. Not even a conference room. (Or, assuming anarcho-syndicalism in which there's no central commissar, perhaps your party manages to acquire an office. But without property rights you have no means of excluding disruptive rabble-rousers or other interlopers.)  You want a printing press, paper, and ink to spread the word? Nope, the central planner cannot justify using scarce resources on such a frivolous purpose. Or, again, assuming no central planner, you have no way of stopping someone from intercepting your paper and ink or smashing your printing press. (Of course, this argument about using state control over the means of production to shut down unfriendly publications is entirely theoretical.) Even your private life is not safe. In what sense can you "choose your partner" if you lack the right to exclude rude interlopers from your home? Without property rights, none of your other civil rights are secure. Property rights are part and parcel of your rights to assemble, speak, worship, and petition for a redress of grievances.  

If you want a stark but familiar example of how uncertain property rights lead to conflict, here's one. Imagine a department store during normal times. Basically no fist fights, basically peaceful commerce. Shoppers have no beef with each other. Shelves are fully stocked, and there is no sense that "If I don't grab it now, somebody else will." Now imagine a department store during a "Black Friday" sale. Suddenly, two shoppers eyeing the last Tickle Me Elmo doll might come to blows over who gets it. A shopping cart containing the latest-model XBox, left momentarily unattended, is now considered "fair game." The people are mostly the same. Their nature is no different than it was the week before, when the same people shopped peacefully at the same store. What has changed is the nature of property rights. They have become less secure. It is suddenly unclear that removing a coveted item from a stranger's shopping cart is against the rules. After all, if you nab it, you get it. A stranger who covets the same item is grinding through the same calculation, thinking, "If I nab it back, I will get it back." This is the recipe for an "I-had-it-first" shoving match, then a fist-fight. (Someone who I know personally admitted to coming to blows over such a dispute. And, given the press coverage of such incidents, it can't be all that uncommon.) I don't know if such fist-fights were common among looters, but surely there were some disputes about who got what loot. And surely these disputes would happen more frequently if we somehow made "tolerate looting" an official policy. (I'll go ahead and state the obvious: stores will cease to exist if looting is officially tolerated by the legal system. No one will bother to refurbish a store and stock its shelves if anyone can just walk in and steal the merchandise whenever they like.)

Try an even more trivial example. Anyone who has young children will understand this one. (For that matter, anyone who has seen young children interact for any amount of time, or anyone who remembers being a young child, will understand.) Which situation will cause more conflict? You hand two siblings a very desirable toy, literally placing both of their hands on it at the same time, and say "Now, share nicely." Or, you simply give the toy to one child and give the other a close substitute. If you are very lucky, if the children are particularly well behaved and harmonious, they might play nicely and share the toy equally in the first case. But any perceived inequity, any hint that "my sibling is hogging the toy", will likely lead to conflict. In the case where you gave both children separate toys, even if it seemed unfair, even if one got a much nicer toy, the play-time is likely to be more harmonious. The child who received the inferior toy might resent his allotment, and he may still try to steal the nicer toy from his sibling. But you've set expectations. You've made conflict less likely. It's less likely still if you make it very clear that stealing toys from siblings will not be tolerated.

Imagine for a moment that property rights aren't secure enough for you to exclude outsiders from your home. Someone "lets himself" inside. How does it feel to suddenly have a stranger in your home or apartment? Does it feel like there's "only stuff" at stake here? Or are you worried for your safety from this unpredictable person? If you're a male, perhaps a burly fellow capable of handling himself in a fight, imagine that you're not. Or imagine you're not home, and this stranger lets himself inside when your wife or children are around. There is a good reason why most states permit you to kill an intruder who breaks into your home. (States vary in whether you can use lethal force against intruders at your business or your vehicle.) An intruder is a threat, an unknown quantity. They may have the intent to harm you, to incapacitate you before taking your stuff. Or they may do god-knows-what to your wife or children. That's not to say you should shoot a scared 20-year-old junkie or mentally ill person if you get the drop on them pilfering in your kitchen drawers. There is room for compassion in some of these encounters. But you can easily imagine a situation where a large, scary burglar, or possibly a team of them, breaks into your home with unknown intent. Many people responded to the killing of Breonna Taylor saying that her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired at the police because he thought they were intruders. I don't think they are merely noting that this is why he fired, but (crucially) that he was justified in doing so. In some sense, this acknowledges the importance of having property rights. We all are entitled to some kind of defensible space, one that we can exclude others from entering and defend with lethal force if necessary. And many people have acknowledged that the police are wrong to violate this right, for example when they execute a no-knock raid. They are at least implicitly acknowledging property rights, even if they wouldn't describe it in those terms. (Even if they wouldn't be caught dead arguing explicitly in favor of 'property rights'.) 

Most people won't quibble too much with the notion that you should have the right to a home, and that you furthermore have a right to defend it. But I have seen attempts to distinguish between residential and commercial property, holding the second as less worthy. Once again, this doesn't really work. For one thing, all the things I said above still apply with respect to conflicts arising from the unclear delineation of property. Say I'm camping out in my store to make sure nothing happens, because the police are preoccupied and property rights are not as secure as they once were. If someone starts breaking down the door to get inside, I'm in the same situation as I am if there's a burglar in my home. I can't be certain about the intent of the intruders. They might just want stuff. It could be the case that "Take what you want and just leave" works here, whereas at home the same line might mean handing your wife or daughter over to some kind of sexual predator. Granting that, this still doesn't work. A store might be the owner's sole source of income. It might be the only thing that enables them to own their home. (Think about someone mortgaging their home to finance a business.) Taking it away might mean taking away someone's livelihood, which ultimately means removing from them the residential property that most would agree he has the right to own. Most small business owners aren't exactly rich. Looting their property hurts them basically as much as looting their homes. I insist that you have the same right to armed defense of your commercial property as you do of your personal property, because they are ultimately inseparable. The one becomes the other. The sale of goods at a private business becomes the owner's personal income and the patron's personal property. We're supposed to imagine that there is this moment before the transaction where the property is hanging in some kind of limbo, living on a lower plane of existence where it is not given the same regard. Obviously this is silly. 

See here for footage of violence actually breaking out. A man is brutally beaten by a mob for defending his commercial property (contra the description, this man survived). You can blame him, or you can blame the mob, as I do. But you can't deny my point that unclear property rights lead to violent conflict. You simply cannot treat property rights as something than can be dispensed with to the benefit of  other "higher" rights, because they aren't separable from those other rights. 

I want to tell some commentators to stop pretending they can read minds. Here is an example of what I'm getting at, an atrociously bad-faith article in Vice about talking to your "unenlightened" relatives. (Try reading it and see if you think most readers will come away looking to have an enlightened conversation or will come away looking to pick a fight.) The title is "How To Talk To Relatives Who Care More About Looting Than Black Lives." Now maybe some people are literally claiming this as their position. Perhaps some Fox News viewer stood up and proclaimed that he is deeply worried about the former but doesn't care at all about the latter. More likely, observers are inferring how much other commentators value certain things based on how much they talk about them, or they are inferring values from sharing patterns on social media. Please don't do this. It looks really foolish. Seeing someone's social media posting behavior tells you nothing about the relative importance they place on various social issues. I probably have more posts on this blog that address drug policy than any other topic. It's certainly something I consider very important. I have far fewer posts on immigration policy, even though as a policy matter fixing immigration would probably do a lot more good than fixing drug policy. It's just that I have more to say, and I have some novel things to say, on drug policy. There is a writer at Reason who covers, broadly speaking, campus politics and cancel culture. That is his beat as a reporter. I doubt if he would say that it's categorically more important than other topics or policy questions, it's just that someone has to cover it and he's really good at it. Someone quite cluelessly criticized him on Twitter for "being outraged about the wrong things," and I thought this just gloriously missed the point.  If you see someone condemn looting and fail to condemn some other injustice, it doesn't mean you can rank order their values based on your sampling of their conversations with you or their social media posts. I think the correct take, certainly the one that I subscribe to, is that looting and random property destruction are wrong, but peacefully (even loudly and forcefully) protesting a perceived injustice is good. If someone condemns something evil, it's not the time to berate them for failing to condemn some other evil. In fact, demanding someone recite your sacred catechisms is likely to push them away. They may harden, deciding they won't give you the satisfaction of a concession. They might resent the implication that they are a horrible person. The correct response is, "Yes, it's wrong to destroy the property of innocent people. I wish they would stop." If you want to open someone's heart, start there. Don't start with "You're a bad person. Really the worst kind of person in today's society. Your values are wrong and your priorities are wrong." 

Of course, there are some people who will not say "looting and destroying property are wrong" because they don't believe it. There are left-anarchists who are re-appropriating the passion and energy of the BLM protests to do things they already wanted to do for other reasons. In protest videos, I see a lot of young white people wearing masks and black hoods, the uniform of left-anarchist agitators, smashing windows and spray-painting graffiti on businesses. I wish there was more careful attention paid to the distinction between these groups. One is an outpouring of righteous anger at an unaccountable system of policing, the other is a group of opportunistic agitators looting businesses and destroying property, because "fuck corporations." I saw a video clip (which I can't seem to find right now) that showed some black women scolding some white "Antifa" women who had just spray-painted some graffiti on a Starbucks. The black women said something to the tune of, "We didn't ask you to do this." They recognized that these white protesters were harming their community or hurting their cause, probably both. I'm sure there are also examples of initially peaceful protests getting too heated and resorting to property destruction, even erupting into violence. I think that should be condemned, too. But keep in mind that there is a faction among the protesters that always had the goal of abolishing private property and smashing corporate businesses. It's sleazy of them to jump on the coat-tails of an un-related protest, and it's equally sleazy to fail to call them on their bullshit. (See around 43:40 in this video. A young man very suddenly realizes the importance of property rights. A masked man, apparently wielding some kind of weapon, knocks the camera out of his hand and runs off with it, while the camera's owner shouts "Thief! Thief! Thief!")

And looting is looting. It's not a righteous act of protest. It's an opportunistic act of predation. Police resources are drawn thin, and there is a crowd that a thief can simply dissolve into. Everyone is wearing masks, anyway. Some are using this opportunity to gain, personally and materially, at the expense of the community. I think it's only a small fringe group who are actively defending the "right" to loot, so I won't waste too much time belaboring the point. But it does sadden me that a lot of seemingly normal people (e.g. people I know on Facebook or follow on Twitter) can't simply condemn this as a crime without contextualizing it. I have had to down-rate my respect for a lot of people on this count. 

(I would, on the other hand, defend the "looting" that happened post Katrina, insofar as desperate people were getting desperately needed food or water. I have zero sympathy for someone who uses the distraction of a massive protest as an opportunity to score a new smartphone.)

There is an argument that goes, "The only way to get serious attention is to cause real damage." We need to make the police fear us, the thinking goes. A few peaceful marches in the street? The police, politicians, and other policy-makers can simply wait it out. Once the outrage passes, people will simply move on to being outraged about the next thing. To get lasting change, we need angry mobs making a show of force. There might be something to this, but the willingness to throw innocent people under the bus is disturbing. I'm not saying this argument is totally wrong, but I do wonder how much the people making this argument really believe it. In what other contexts would you tolerate, say, burning down someone's business or stealing their property "for the greater good?" There's also the question of "blow-back." People who might have been sympathetic to your cause might abandon you if you insist on using unscrupulous methods or engage in "the ends justify the means" thinking. If you're not restrained by principle, after all, then how much can you be trusted to do the right thing in the future? 

The above paragraph treats property destruction and looting as "regrettable but necessary."  There is another sort of argument that goes something like, "The looting is a righteous redistribution from rich to poor." Some see "property rights" as a mere obstacle in the way of this glorious redistribution, which will set right ancient wrong-doings. The business owners who get looted in some sense have it coming. I don't understand how anyone can have confidence in this argument. (It is not a straw-man. I have seen versions of it on Twitter and on Facebook.) I can understand why someone might want the government to flatten incomes or "correct" wealth differences by taxing the population and redistributing income more equally. (I think they are profoundly wrong about the nature of economic reality and in their basic values. But I understand the visceral appeal of such a policy.) In that scenario, at least there is a formal process for redistributing, ratified by public opinion and carried out by official institutions. In the case of looting, people who happen to be near a loot-able store at the right place and time will get the most stuff. It will tend to be the most vicious individuals, with the least concern for breaking and entering, plowing down a store owner, and carrying off the most goods, who will have the most property "redistributed" to them. There is no guarantee that, for example, black people will benefit at the expense of white people, or that poor people will benefit at the expense of rich people. Assuming that most of the activity is in predominantly black communities, there are surely a lot of black-owned businesses being looted. Moreover, the total value of goods looted by any individual is almost never a life-changing sum. I saw news footage of a local clothing store being looted. (It was not my city, but one nearby. I think it was a Macy's. The goods being looted were mostly handfuls of clothing. The looters' faces were quite visible on camera, and I really hope they are all prosecuted for their crimes.) The "redistribution" taking place here is almost totally random and in quantities too small to flatten the rich-poor differential at all. And it entails obnoxious property damage not necessary to accomplish the redistribution, assuming other means were used. It's hard for me to see this as anything other than an ad hoc rationalization for terrible behavior. 

I'm not sure I should even respond to these crack-pot notions of abolishing property rights and officially tolerating looting. I think it's mostly "a few angry people on twitter." (In contrast to the very real and serious issues about unaccountable policing, which most of the country is engaging with in some way.) It doesn't represent the opinions of most of the public or even of most protesters. This "conversation" doesn't even register with most people, because they don't inhabit social media the way intellectuals and young radicals do. Even the people who would scold me for "Talking about property, mere stuff, at a time like this!", mostly are just expressing frustration at an unaccountable justice system. They don't really want to legalize theft or abolish property rights. Most people simply haven't thought very hard about their beliefs. The adopt and discard them all the time when the political winds change, often back-fitting a rationale on the fly. On the other hand, there are the left anarchists who really do want to abolish private property. I mostly think they are not worth responding to. Their ideas are half-baked and totally unserious. It may be a mistake for me to take them seriously, as I am doing now by writing a long blog post about them. I've seen a few people who know better flirt a little too closely with their ideas without recognizing the obvious absurdity. I consider them "temporarily lost but reachable."  I hope this post reaches them, and that they find some value in it.