Kevin Williamson of National Review Online digs deep into the historical record to find examples that contradict President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line from the last presidential campaign.
There is a line of argument shared by both our so-called liberals and the daft juvenile Marxist revanchists who do most of their thinking for them that goes like this: Traders and entrepreneurs do not thrive on their own — they can go about their business only because of actions taken by the State, and so they trade only at the sufferance of the State, and they keep their profits only to the extent that the State suffers them to do so. Without the State, the argument goes, they are nothing. When vapid poseurs such as Matt Breunig demand that we “repeal property,” that’s the assumption: that property rights themselves are a creation of the State, which may therefore alter or revoke them when the interests of the State demand it.
Not so, Williamson responds.
Trade. Free trade — glorious, unregulated, anarchic, Stone Age free trade enabling the massive division of labor that along with language is the most important thing separating human culture from chimpanzee culture. …
… If you think of a right as a purely legal thing, then of course it is only a creation of the State, and a creature of the State. But states do not create rights — they only codify them. (The American proposition is not a legal doctrine at all, but a theological one: “That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”) There is an ancient tradition, one that runs from magic to mandarinism, holding that the one who names a thing is the master of that thing. This is the reason that in certain ancient societies people had public names for social use while their true names were a closely held family secret. Our magical thinkers and mandarins still believe that: that because the law recognizes property rights, lawmakers own ownership. They write the thing down, they know its true name, and they are therefore its master. A related assumption is that the unnamed, uncodified thing cannot be real. But surely bread in the belly is more real than any theory of law or any other abstraction. You do not need a Lockean theory of property, or even the American belief in divine investiture, to understand that trade, and therefore property, is older than the State and outside the State. That isn’t a question of philosophy, but a question of archaeology.
