Ryan Kasper

In researching for a speech I gave at @Hillsdale - I (re)read “Socialism” by Ludwig von Mises. He dealt with issues from the ground up, and one of his building blocks was a discussion of “The Law” and the ownership of assets. He called ownership “Having.” Before The Law, there were two ways of having things. 1) be the first one there and claim it. 2) take it. Eventually, just about everything in the world was taken from someone else, typically with violence. But we wanted a way to end the violence and attempted many different ways to establish The Law. One of the 10 commandments was “thou shalt not steal,” the “Magna Carta” gave more rights to people, and eventually “The US Constitution” established universal “property rights.” The Law, if looked at in an historical context, was put into place a random times. Accidents of history. And so, from the very beginning there were those who viewed The Law as “legalizing violence” because it locked in what was from before. There is some truth to this, but unless we went back and gave it all back to the dinosaurs, any Law was going to codify ownership into whatever hands held it at the time of The Law. There is no perfect time. The question: did The Law permanently benefit one group over another, or did it make things more fair from that point on? And, how would you fix it without violence? I believe this is what much of our political fighting is about these days. There are many who want to pierce the law because they think it was unfair and return to some previous time (ie those wanting to give everything back to indigenous peoples, reparations, ending the patriarchy, etc.). But piercing The Law is using force (violence) to take from those who own things today and giving them to those who some believe owned them first, or were unfairly treated by The Law. By definition, that force would be arbitrary. If we look at what The Law actually did, sure, there are families that have been wealthy for a very long time (especially in monarchy’s), but a vast majority, if not all, of today’s billionaires created their wealth in the last 40/50 years. They represent all races, religions and sexes. They did not steal it from anyone. Nor, are these people wealthy because of the distribution of resources in 1776 or 1789. They are wealthy because The Law gave them ownership of their inventions and hard work. The world is “Built Back Better” everyday by entrepreneurs. Sure, it’s not perfect…this is not a utopia…but it’s the closest thing to utopia humans have ever created. Using force to pierce The Law would destroy the very thing that lifted so many people out of poverty and made the world a more peaceful place. Using force is what The Law was meant to stop. So, those who want to use the force of government to make things more fair are actually creating unfairness. They would take the world backward…not forward. And when you hear a conservative or libertarian say “they want to take us back,” that is what they mean.