THE ROTHBARDIAN CART BEFORE THE HORSE Rothbard got it backwards. You don’t start

THE ROTHBARDIAN CART BEFORE THE HORSE

Rothbard got it backwards. You don’t start with property rights as an assumption. You start in a state of nature with pervasive free riding in any population.

Crusoe’s island is an obscurant argument. We do not start the development of ethics on an island where the ‘government’ is provided by the sea.

Instead, we start in a tribe of consanguineous relations all of whom engage in free riding – and we must use violence, shame or remuneration to stop them from free riding so that we can accumulate capital.

Property is what’s left as you increasingly suppress various forms of involuntary extraction. Property is not the cause. It is the consequence.