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The Fallacy of Libertarian Capitalism

The first principle of libertarianism is the claim that no social goal can justify forcing an innocent individual to be a resource for others.' This is thought by some to lead to a defense of unbridled capitalism since it appears to imply that there can be no justification for forcibly depriving someone of the use of property he has accumulated without coercion or plunder and thus no justification for placing any limit on the amount or use of private property so accumulated. This progression of ideas must be at least temporarily embarrassed by the obvious fact that theholders of large amounts of property have great power to dictate the terms upon which others work for them and thus in effect the power to "force" others to be resources for them. I place quotation marks around the word 'force' since much hinges on whether this power should count as force in the sense used above in the first principle of libertarianism. If it should, then libertarian capitalism is a contradiction in terms on the order of "married bachelor." Predictably, the defenders of libertarian capitalism go to considerable lengths to prove that it should not. In this essay I shall try to show that such attempts to stave off the contradiction in libertarian capitalism are fatally flawed. They are plagued by circular reasoning of the following sort. Unlimited accumulation of property is justified by the libertarian first principle, and then this fact is used to deny that the powers of property holders amount to force in the relevant sense. Since unlimited property accumulation can be justified by the first principle only after showing that the powers of property holders are not force in the sense ruled out by the first principle, the argument assumes the truth of its conclusion in advance. Now since this is really a textbook case of circular reasoning, it will repay us to ask why anyone is persuaded by such arguments. The answer, I think, is that the circle is obscured because it rests upon the uncritical acceptance of an oversimplified conception of the moral nature of property rights. This oversimplified conception is an unargued assumption of moral continuity between smalland large-scale property ownership.