Who decides what is his and what is yours?  Who claims the right to dictate how your life and labor are used?  The answer to both questions reveals the boundary between property and plunder.

Property begins with the self.  You own your body—no other claim is legitimate.  From that flows the right to own what your body produces, acquires, and exchanges peacefully.  Ownership is not granted by law or vote.  It isn’t a courtesy offered by the state.  It’s a fact of human existence—rooted in personhood and action.  Without this foundation, there is no freedom, no responsibility, no civilization.

Property must be exclusive.  If it isn’t, then it isn’t property.  Two people can’t own the same apple.  One must control it, one must defer.  If control is mutual, then no one truly owns it.  What is claimed by “all” is controlled by whoever enforces the claim.  That’s not community—it’s conquest masked as cooperation.

When something is taken without consent, it’s theft.  When it’s taken under threat, it’s violence.  Whether by a thief in the alley or a bureaucrat in a suit, the act is the same.  The justification may change, but the principle does not.  A small theft is still theft.  A “legal” theft is still theft.  Property taken by decree is not property at all.  It’s plunder.

Every economic transaction assumes property.  If there is no property, there is no price.  If there is no price, there is no calculation.  If there is no calculation, there is no coordination—just chaos dressed in political slogans.  Economic order rests on voluntary exchange.  Coercion breaks that order.  The result is not prosperity but poverty, not justice but force.

Statism lives off this plunder.  It doesn’t produce—it redistributes.  It does ’t respect ownership—it overrides it.  It must seize in order to sustain itself.  That seizure may look like taxation, regulation, or conscription.  At the core, it is the same: one group asserting power over the lives and property of others.

This isn’t a call to utopia.  People will steal.  People will lie.  That doesn’t justify institutionalizing theft and calling it policy.  It doesn’t justify building a machine of violence and calling it government.  If violence is wrong for one, it is wrong for all—especially when cloaked in the robes of legitimacy.

Some argue that the state is needed to protect property.  How can an entity that violates property protect it?  A thief can’t be a guardian.  A monopolist on violence cannot ensure peace.  To empower the state is to empower the very force that nullifies property.  It’s a contradiction to defend rights by destroying them.

Statism isn’t a neutral framework.  It is a philosophy of force.  It sees people not as owners, but as resources.  It sees wealth not as earned, but as available.  It sees society not as individuals in cooperation, but as subjects in submission.  It thrives on war, fear, and dependency.  It survives only by growing.  Every new rule, tax, or program is another bite taken out of peace.

If property is peace, then plunder is war.  If statism is built on plunder, it can’t be made peaceful.  No reform will change its nature.  No election will sanctify its aggression.  The only answer is to reject the premise: that someone else has a rightful claim over your life and labor.  The choice is not complex.  It’s not between left and right.  It’s not between policies or parties.  It is between ownership and obedience—between property and plunder.

Choose property.  Choose peace.

References

Ludwig von Mises; Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

Murray Rothbard; War, Peace, and The State