Libertarian Property and Privatization

Carlton Hobbs recently challenged the tendency of mainstream libertarians, free marketers and anarcho-capitalists to favor the capitalist corporation as the primary model of ownership and economic activity, and to assume that any future free market society will be organized on the pattern of corporate capitalism. As one alternative to such forms of organization, Hobbs proposed "stateless common property," with usufructory right possessed by the inhabitants of a given area, coming about "without any prior formal agreements incorporating a potentially imprecise owning group." He gave, as historical examples of such kinds of ownership, public rights of way, or villagers' rights of commons in a field, well or wood. (1) The questions he raised are applicable on a much broader scale.

Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, in calling for the abolition of state property and services, typically call for a process of "privatization" that relies heavily on the corporate capitalist model of ownership. The property of the State should be auctioned off and its services performed by, say, GiantGlobalCorp LLC. And the picture of the future market economy, so far as business enterprise is concerned, is simply the present corporate economy minus the regulatory and welfare state--an idealized version of Nineteenth Century "robber baron capitalism." The former tendency ignores other alternatives, equally valid from a free market anarchist perspective, such as placing government services like schools and police under the cooperative control of their former clientele at the town or neighborhood level. And the latter tendency ignores the issue of state capitalism, of the extent to which the giant corporations that have received the lion's share of their profits from the State can be regarded either as legitimate private property or the result of theft.

In challenging this aesthetic affinity for the corporation as the dominant form of economic organization, Karl Hess denounced those who simply identified libertarianism "with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings..." Writing in The Libertarian Forum in 1969, Hess argued instead that

Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people, may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncracies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status. (2)

Libertarian Property and Privatization