Property is claimed by “society.” A term with no hands, no voice, no will.  A ghost can’t own.  The individual once owned it.  Now it is seized.

The original owner no longer decides what to produce.  That role now belongs to the state.  The idol of public good replaces the judgment of private minds.  The state doesn’t calculate.  It imposes.  It distributes by decree, not by demand.  What suits the planners becomes the new law of production.

Ownership is illusion.  “We” own it, they say.  No crowd ever signs a deed.  No collective makes a purchase.  One man loses what he built.  A thousand claim it through force.  The language is used to confuse.  Society.  Collective.  Public.  These are masks for coercion.

All legitimate property is private.  If it isn’t private, it’s stolen.  Theft wrapped in virtue still remains theft.  The titles may vanish from view, but the truth remains.  The owner is dispossessed.  The thief is sanctified.

The state cannot operate like an individual.  It has no resources of its own.  It only consumes.  It can only redistribute what it has taken.  It directs production not by profit, but by preference.  Not by prices, but by plans.  The result is dysfunction disguised as fairness.

Without private property, there are no prices.  Without prices, there is no calculation.  Without calculation, production becomes chaos.  Civilization collapses in slow motion.

No amount of planning corrects this.  No central committee can simulate a market.  The signals are gone.  The numbers are lies.  Costs are guesses.  Results are disasters.

Planners work blind.  They lack the one thing needed to judge success—profit and loss.  These emerge only from voluntary exchange.  Only from ownership.  Only from freedom.

The state acts without feedback.  It builds what no one wants.  It pays what no one would pay.  It consumes until nothing remains.

All the terms change, but the truth doesn’t.  Whether called social, collective, or communal, it means control without consent.  The new idol is arbitrary.  It takes.  It decides.  It destroys.

Property in the hands of the state is possession without title.  Rule without right.  Use without understanding.  The state manages decay.  It cannot create.  It cannot coordinate.

Molinari was right.  All legitimate property is private.  Every violation of this rule ends the same way—in scarcity, disorder, collapse.

No slogans can change this.  No theory can override reality.  The state cannot replace the market.  The collective cannot replace the individual.  Civilization depends on ownership.  Destroy it, and the rest crumbles with it.

Reference

Ludwig von Mises; Socialism