What if "all property is theft"?

History, and the Quest for Stunde Null

"All property is theft", observed the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65). And — before you get too prickly about how hard you have worked for what you possess — he may well be right. There have been endless thought experiments about human society in the irrecoverable past and how it 'must have' worked — from John Ball to Gerrard Winstanley; from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Paine; and from Marx and Engels to Patricia Crone. All are compelling; all are also speculative and entirely unprovable.

In favour of Proudhon it should be said that — however we envisage human origins — nature (land, animals, fruit) was there first, belonging to nobody. At some point, somebody fenced off a piece of ground, or tied an animal to a tree, or stood in front of a fruit bush with a weapon and — perhaps making an analogy with his personal loin-cloth — said "This is mine; the rest of you can't use it!" (Or perhaps, as per Marx's and Engels' speculations, it was "This is ours! Your lot must leave it alone!")

Your property — your car; your clothes; the laptop on which you are reading this (heck! You're not using a bloomin' phone, are you? I warn you: this is long!) — means the right to sole use, thereby depriving everybody else. At some point, probably quite early, this practice was refined or extended, such that the possessor got to pass it on to whom he or she chose after death. (My daughter and son-in-law, though they insist they wish me well, are even now eyeing up their future library....)

However — and this is the crucial point — it is the secure possession of wealth that motivates and enables us to generate more wealth. It, and it alone, is the reason we live as we do now, rather than in perpetual want and filth. For if the creations of my hand or brain will procure me or my family no benefit, there is no reason for me to bother providing for anything more than the most pressing need of the moment. Anything beyond that will run through my fingers like sand.

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However, leaving Proudhon's profundities (if that is what they are) aside, there is a more mundane level at which most property, once thus possessed, has a habit of being re-stolen by others.

The large majority of Russian oligarchs came by their vast wealth from plundering state assets when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. The 1990s were a time of soaring crime, political and economic chaos, and enormous upheaval in people's lives. (It's one of the reasons why so many have been willing to tolerate — or even welcome — Putin's restoration of tyranny in the years since.) Having accumulated all that loot, however, the new oligarchs' interests changed to security. To keep hold of what they had acquired — to keep it safe from a new wave of predators — what was needed was not continuing anarchy, but order, and something like the rule of law. Or at least, the rule of government.

This is why they, too, have favoured Putin — though they understand that, if they remain safe from hooligans and gangsters, their riches remain predicated upon political loyalty. It is for this reason that they are uneasy about the Ukraine War: they wish to remain loyal — but are worried about the instability that the war portends. For in all places — but perhaps especially in Russia — instability brings with it a major reshuffling of the cards, and a different distribution of wealth.

More than twelve centuries ago, Norse raiders started to attack settlements on the coasts of Britain. Monasteries were plundered and their inhabitants — the hapless monks — butchered. The raids spread over the following decades, until the coastal populations lived in terror of them. Gratifying though the seizure of treasure must have been for the Vikings, by the 860s they had concluded that it was better to enjoy the fruits of their violence in situ rather than to haul them back across the North Sea. They settled in eastern England, where they overran the existing kingdoms and mounted the sternest of military challenges to Alfred the Great's Wessex. But eventually, peace was concluded and the Norse king Guthrum came to an agreement with Alfred to divide England between them. In return, he and his men accepted baptism into the religion of the English: Christianity. The pitiless raiders, having seized what they wanted, found that their interests were now those of peaceful enjoyment of their property — and law and order.

In the decades either side of the American Civil War, the Wild West was, well, wild. A torrent of white people surged into the plains and on toward California, eager to find gold, and to turn land that had belonged to the Native Americans into farms. The wild herds of numberless buffalo, upon which the natives had depended as a source of food but which impeded the plans of the new settlers, were hunted to near-extinction. Having starved, chased out, and often massacred the Native Americans, the settlers were themselves prone to violence from the most lawless of their own kind. The gold-rush areas in particular had male-female sex ratios of 10:1 at some points, with consequences for rape and prostitution that might be expected (an obvious reality that Germans recently relearned in the aftermath of 2015, when their government admitted many hundreds of thousands of fit young male migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but very few women and children).

Once the dust of the gold rushes, the land grabs, and the despoliation of the Native Americans had settled, however, the new proprietors not only needed, but actually wanted, law and order. Only thus could their acquisitions be protected from further chaos.

None of this is to justify these crimes. Exactly the opposite! They are recounted here merely to observe how history works.

Almost all readers of these lines will be sufficiently distant in time from the depredations enacted by their own ancestors to have the luxury of lapsing into the day-by-day assumption that the present peaceful order and its accumulated abundance is somehow natural and — individual infringements and encroachments apart — the normal state of affairs. That is why Proudhon's impudent claim makes you indignant. You have worked hard for what little you have. (Or at least your parents did.)

The depredations of Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders are sufficiently close to the present, however, to provoke frequent qualms on this point. Worse, those of Israelis are well within living memory; as the moral capital of victimhood in the Holocaust recedes into the past, so the land-grab that created their state and the hardships it continues to press upon the descendants of the dispossessed Palestinians becomes more capable of causing outrage.

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For a demon has, in recent decades, taken hold of us. As the frightful experiments with socialism in the twentieth century have caused even the most leftish-inclined of us to abandon our aspirations in that quarter, so a lingering self-loathing remains.

If we cannot have the truly equal society that the Marxists posited, can we not at least make recompense for the sins that have bequeathed this bounty to us? And whom better to give this recompense than the presumed descendants of those (slaves; Native Americans; colonial peoples) who were oppressed to make our present abundance possible? (I say 'presumed' because the nonsense of racism does not cease to be nonsensical when the shoe is on the other foot. The amount of interbreeding — almost always admirable since, say, the 1960s; but usually tantamount to rape before then — means that the direct descendants of the oppressed and of the worst perpetrators are frequently the same people.)

One noticeable effect of this guilt-driven itch has been the wholesale vilification of our past — the good and the unavoidable, along with the bad. A few years ago, for example, we witnessed — mostly in the U.S. — widespread assaults upon statues and monuments; the re-naming of buildings and institutions; the condemnation of erstwhile heroes — including even Lincoln — for their sins against our currently regnant sensibilities.

Still, one has to admit that the 'Social Justice Warriors' have a point: America's past is indeed a veritable catalog of oppressions and injustices. What they do not see, of course (being purblind), is that exactly the same is true of every other state — indeed, of every conceivable state. That being so, the demand to tear up our legacy and commemorate only what satisfies the most unforgiving — and, one should add, most fleeting — of contemporary criteria is to pursue a chimera.

Even the feminist icons of the 1970s are damned as today's 'fascists' and cast into the outer darkness of no-platforming and cancelled lectures, for their failure to say the newest shibboleths. They have become what the Soviets (back in the days before they, in turn, passed into oblivion) would have called 'former persons'. If this hero-to-zero cycle is now just half a lifetime, those who today think themselves to be ushering in a thousand-year reign for their ideology might more realistically find it is overthrown in ... oh, about twelve. Because of over-reach.

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If the quest for Stunde Null — a zero hour from which the world can be made anew — is a chimera, it is because our entire lives are built upon the endless cataract of injustices of which human history (that is to say, the actions of billions of sinners) primarily consists.

That being so, I wish here, not so much to propound certain propositions — for that verb admits of the possibility that the things propounded are in some sense contestable — as to point them out. They are, or should be, the merest axioms. But, in these awoken times, a great deal of effort and ingenuity has to be expended to argue what, to all previous, benighted and endarkened ages, was — and still in truth remains — blindingly obvious.

1)      Everything we have and use is the product of injustice and oppression in the past — and too often in the present also. Only the latter can be rectified.

2)      All states that now exist, or ever have existed, have come into being by violence. There is no other kind of state.

3)      All wars — even those vanishingly few fought for just causes — are fought in an unjust and immoral fashion; even in the act of defeating monstrous evil, the deaths of the weak and the innocent are (almost) always far more numerous than those of the violent and belligerent.

4)      It is unjust that you are prosperous merely by dint of natal accident — being born in a rich country — while those born in, say, Bangladesh are poor for the same reason ... but even they would be worse off if we did not exist, and were our prosperity not maintained in the only way possible, i.e. by staving off its being swamped by all comers.

Let's expatiate on each of those:

1)      Everything we have and use is the product of criminal injustice and oppression — from the alphabet and the language in which you are reading this, to the products of the industrial revolution.

You are reading this in the Roman alphabet — which only gained the wide sway that it has as a result of Roman conquest of the entire Mediterranean basin and of western Europe. The Romans were utterly ruthless in crushing anyone and everyone who stood in their way; they practised slavery — especially in farming the Italian countryside — but also in many other contexts, such as building the Colosseum; they enjoyed seeing gladiators fight and kill one another, or watching Christians or other prisoners being devoured by wild beasts; their use of crucifixion was standard for many classes of criminal; and they attained military pre-eminence by a ruthlessly systematic application of violence and massacre. And that achievement is being celebrated at this precise moment, as we use the Latin alphabet, and even many of the words, that they created and have left to us.

Furthermore, you are reading this in the English language — a tongue you know because the English imposed it on the Celts ... then exported it to an empire covering a quarter of the world's surface and the same proportion of its population (in no small part by the usual means: violence) ... and because one of those erstwhile colonies, America, went on to achieve global hegemony on the back of its military dominance since 1918.

Every page you read in that language, and every word you utter in it, is an assent to the consequences of all that militarism. Are you considering abandoning it?

Further, this and every other language has achieved standardisation only fairly recently, through the suppression and stigmatisation of local variants. As was pointed out in the twentieth century by Max Weinreih, “A language is a dialect with an army”. Which is to say that its very shape is the product of force. The respective armed might of the Netherlands and Germany is all that has prised Dutch apart from Deutsch, and has similarly decreed that the speech of Hanover is 'German' whereas that of Bavaria is a mere dialect. The centuries-long armed might of government in London is the reason you are reading this in Oxford English rather than in Geordie or Lowland Scots. Yet you piggy-back on the fruits of that injustice every day of your life. You're doing it — I'm doing it — right this moment.

As for the technology you are using, whether specifically to read this, or else more generally around the place you live in; as for the manufactured clothes you are wearing; as for the fact that you are not living in a mud hut or a wooden cabin; as for your ability to communicate and travel across much of the globe: all of this you owe to the industrial revolution. And by industrial revolution, we mean the expropriation of countless millions of peasant small-holdings in order to create larger, more efficient farms ... and effectively forcing desperate people to look for wage-labour outside the home, in the new, dangerous factories, along with their children who would no longer be supervised and tended in the kitchen-garden by their parents, but exploited by capitalist manufacturers and their factory overseers amidst whirring engines, or else to go underground into mines, or into steel mills. Your present life has been made possible by the same ghastly process in every country that has industrialised — except in those that, as in the USSR, did so under socialist auspices, where the experience was even more dreadful, and the toll of frightful deaths far higher.

Indeed, the experience continues today in many countries that are only now industrialising, and where your most precious artefacts, such as your cellphone and your fashion accessories, are produced under conditions which, if you knew about them — and perhaps you do — would horrify you.

Even so unequivocally a benefactor of humanity as Léopold Ollier (1830-1900), the pioneer upon whose work modern bone surgery and skin grafts rest — skills you will rely upon in any number of easily foreseeable scenarios — made his advances as a result of vivisection on chickens and rabbits. As in much of medicine, your comfort, safety, and longevity rest entirely upon injustice and cruelty.

We cannot reach back and give justice to the long-dead. But we can seek to extend justice to the living. We live as we do because millions of children in the nineteenth century lived short, filthy, wretched and dangerous lives labouring in industrial plant. (Indeed, in much of America oppressive forms of child labour continued until well into the twentieth century: enter 'Lewis Hine' into a search engine and see for yourself.) It should never have been allowed, and in the end it was indeed stopped. But we remain the beneficiaries of living in the world that their labours created. In much of the developing world, such evil practices continue — and those who seek to stop it are again right to do so. But face reality: you benefit even now. Yet you can make no amends or reparations to the dead — not even that of feeling guilty. For it is too late; you were not there; you didn't do it. The living, however, are another matter entirely.

2)      All states that now exist, or ever have existed, have come into being by violence, and maintained and / or enlarged themselves by the use (actual, or credibly threatened) of force until, overcome by superior violence from within or without, they passed out of existence. There is no other kind of state.

I'm struggling to think of exceptions to this rule, and perhaps there are some — but I can't think of any. Even small, weak states exist — as do babies and sick persons in society at large — on the indulgence or support of those who are stronger. Even Vatican City exists as the sole residue of what was once a much larger Papal State, because the newly emergent Italy of the 1860s did not wish to alienate Catholics around the world, or outrage many of its own citizens, by extinguishing it entirely.

In many cases, the violence that created the state happened a long time ago. America's 'misfortune' is that much of it was perpetrated much closer to living memory. No matter how ardent a Welsh patriot you might be, it is hard to work up too much of a head of steam over the crimes and atrocities carried out by the invading English in the fifth and sixth centuries, and which are described by the Venerable Bede (though somewhat unreliably; even for him, the events were in a past that was receding beyond memory). But we still have the original documents and telegraphs about the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee; we still have photographs of the survivors like White Lance and Joseph Horn Cloud.

Israel is in an even more vulnerable situation. The violence that made the state is even closer to our own time. For goodness' sake, my own father and an uncle were both there in the late 1940s, trying to keep Jews and Palestinians from one another's throats. (Or perpetuating unjust British imperialism, according to your point of view.) The dispossessed are, in many cases, still alive; their children and grandchildren are reduced to living in wretched dustbowls in Gaza, or the searing heat of Jericho. It is all too reminiscent of how the first Israel came into existence, more than a thousand years before Christ.

As the American sociologist Charles Tilly put the matter, “war made the state and the state made war”. That's trite — but it happens to be true. It may puncture the myth of American moral purity and superiority to 'wicked old Europe' — but it simultaneously disarms the leftist nonsense of unique American wickedness.

None of this is to 'justify' any of the appalling crimes and injustices that this process entails. Far from it! What was done to the Native Americans, for example, was atrocious. In the clashes, drawn out over three centuries, that led to their utter expropriation and near-extermination, there can be no doubt that the Europeans were the criminals, and they the victims. Relatively, anyway. For victims are people too — which is to say, sinners. They have agency. They were not opaque blank sheets awaiting their rôle as victims, the better to serve as posthumous cannon fodder in today's culture wars. Like everybody else, they made war upon one another — and sometimes in alliance with the white man. Neither were their territories fixed from time immemorial before the Europeans arrived; the latter were guilty of much — but hardly of interrupting static perfection, or a sort of socio-political Eden. They, too, had their lands by conquest, just as, many centuries before, the British Celts (similarly divided and quarrelsome, and mutually invading) who were unlucky enough to be assailed by the English had, in their turn, taken the land from earlier inhabitants, perhaps around 1,000 B.C..

To repeat this point in respect of every society and culture of which I have some knowledge would be both tedious and over-lengthy. But, I insist, it could be done.

What happened to the Native Americans was — of course! — a tragedy and a gigantic crime. But it was not remotely unique. It is how history works. They were right to defend their land; foolish to allow penetration when they could have stopped it; heroic in their attempts to fend off superior power; tragic in their inevitable defeats.

But none of that means that the United States that has arisen in their place is somehow wrong or hypocritical in seeking to sustain itself by a proper national defence, policing of borders, and a controlled immigration policy. Those are the modern equivalents of the ways in which tribes and states have sustained themselves and hung on to what is theirs. It is those who try incessantly to undermine all of those things who are the unspoken allies of the external forces that threaten us. Conservatism is a rational policy, not because it makes any sense to deny all change, or even the certainty of the final extinction of the state, but because change is better made gradual and ameliorated; calamity is better postponed. This policy neither needs nor admits of any defence — for it is one with the individual's will to stay alive, even though we all know that we will finally die.

3)      All wars — even those very few fought for just causes — are fought in an unjust and immoral fashion; the deaths of the weak and the innocent are (almost) always far more numerous than those of the violent and belligerent.

The terrible truth is that virtually all wars encompass unspeakable acts. Whenever I taught on this subject in theological seminary, I used to ask my class to give me an example of a war which they considered would be justified by Augustine’s ‘just war’ criteria. It was a low and dirty trick on my part. I knew in advance to which example they would point; the combination of national myopia and historical ignorance did the work for me every time. They pointed, of course, to the Second World War. A collection of far-from-perfect, but at least acceptable, democracies had confronted the utter evil of Nazi Germany.

In response, I used to point out that by far the largest portion of the fighting — and the dying — took place on the Eastern front, where horrifying evil (in the form of Nazi Germany) confronted horrifying evil (in the shape of Stalin’s Soviet Union). But, even if we discount that rather large point, and address ourselves exclusively to the conflict which my students had had in mind — that is, between the Anglo-American and other Western allies, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and Japan, on the other — there remained serious difficulties.

I would list for them the serious war crimes perpetrated by the Western Allies, the carpet-bombing of cities, the deliberate creation of firestorms in Hamburg and Dresden (with mortality effects similar to those of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the forcible handing over to Soviet (and to Yugoslav Partisan) custody of hundreds of thousands of prisoners who, their British and American captors — and the prisoners themselves — knew full well, would be shot by the communists. “And this”, I would conclude, “is our best case of a ‘just war’. So what is the theory worth?” And it probably was the best case. That was the point. So what of the rest?

And yet the Augustinian 'just war' protagonist is right about this much: if we abandon a willingness to fight (at a fairly early point, while the putative enemy has not yet collected all the cards into his own hands) and embrace pacifism, then we subject ourselves to whomever has the least in the way of scruples. We do indeed deliver ourselves, and the world at large, into the hands of the devils. And yes, yes: this argument can be — and very frequently has been — used to justify all manner of wars that had been better left unfought. In most conflicts, both sides claim to be vindicated in their war aims by the 'just war' criteria.

Damned if we do; damned if we don't. But only those who do — or have someone else do it for them — get to survive.

4)      It is unjust that you are prosperous merely by dint of accident of birth — being born in a rich country — while those born in, say, Bangladesh are poor for the same reason. Yet even they would be worse off if we did not exist, and our prosperity maintained against being swamped by all comers.

The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was correct: “all property is theft”. Yet we are all, including the propertyless, vastly better off than if there were no such thing as property.

Many, many political and social theories have based themselves upon speculations about how life was before civilisation, among humans in a state of nature — and thence how human institutions (property, for example) arose. Generally, such theorising aims to 'explain', not so much in order to justify existing arrangements as to delegitimise them, and to indicate some kind of return to a postulated Eden.

Ahh, Eden. Is not that also a story about the origins of human institutions? Well, not quite: it is too transparently mythic for that — a point which only modern fundamentalists and Richard Dawkins have failed to see. The story of Adam and Eve tells us less about human origins (beyond the fact of being created by God) than about the human predicament. Certainly, it tells us nothing about the origins of the state or structures of political power, or about property, money, or law. (It must be admitted, of course, that it yields fertile soil for modern feminist discussions about gender relations.)

But for the most part early Genesis concerns our spiritual or psychic state: the nature of humanity; our relation (or broken relation) with God; our sinful rebellion and consequent sense of alienation; the inescapable tensions between our individuality and our interdependence. The strictly historical origins of our socio-economic and political institutions, however, are passed over, unexplained — lost in the clouds of an irretrievably distant past.

And yet it is certainly true that the first human beings, however you conceive them, lived in a world in which no one owned anything. Before there was agriculture, hunter-gatherers hunted, and gathered. The concept of 'owning' land — at least, in our sense — did not exist. As the seventeenth-century pantheist and proto-socialist Gerrard Winstanley put it, “In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury....”

Then somebody, somewhere, seized control of some land, some fruit bushes, some animals; perhaps fenced them about; and said “This is mine”. Others were deprived access to them. All of this is what is implied by Proudhon's famous dictum: that first claim that "This is mine" was an act of theft from everybody else.

Your property — your house or land if you have any ... but at least your money (which is liquid property), and the laptop on which you are reading this — comes to you by inheritance, or else through what you have obtained by working within the structures of property that others have inherited. And the things you call yours: they are the objects of which you have successfully deprived others of the power to use. As Winstanley put it, “earth ... is bought and sold and kept in the hands of a few”.

The question arises, therefore, whether this is a good thing.

Clearly, vast differences in wealth offend our sense of elementary justice, and lead to the satisfaction of inessential wants for the fortunate whilst the essential needs of the poorest are left unattended to. But, much though that cries aloud for amelioration and redress, it is no cause for abolishing wealth, or even differences in its distribution.

It is the security bestowed by ownership of property that has led to the full utilisation of the world's resources — a utilisation which alone can lead to our comfort, health, and safety. (To say nothing of culture, art, literature, music etc..) It is the prospect of potential accumulation of property that drives innovation, enterprise, and risk — as well as giving each of us a powerful motive for seeking to meet the needs of others, who may be willing to pay us for doing so, in the form of sales, or wages. Philanthropy is a wonderful thing, and is to be encouraged by all means possible — but, as the communists found, it is not to be relied upon as a universal engine of productivity. (That is why the communists had to fall back, instead, upon fear.)

It would be possible to give the usual list of abortive collectivisms in history: the abject failure of modern communist states even to approach equitable distribution of wealth, let alone its creation in the first place (countless millions died in man-made famines caused by 'collectivising' agriculture); the decline of Israeli kibbutzim after the initial enthusiasm of the mid-twentieth century; the disintegration of the many American utopian communities of the nineteenth century, almost always following acrimonious rows about distribution of resources (and even about personal abuse).

The only success story to which the proponent of collective property (and even that is a category that would not meet Proudhon's drastic critique, of course!) can point is that of the Hutterites. These Anabaptist Christians began their experiments in communal living in the 1530s and, during that early period, were subject to the all-too-predictable paroxysms of rancour and disputes that universally attend such experiments. Even so, they continued to exist, despite horrifying treatment at the hands of outsiders (as the Hutterite Chronicle — a sort of collective journal — attests all too gruesomely) and, following a twentieth-century renewal movement, are still to be found today in Canada, Germany, and several other places. Yet not even they would agree that they constituted a model for wider society: Anabaptism, whether communal or otherwise, stresses being called out of the world.

The uncomfortable truth is that, even if I am a propertyless vagabond, I am more likely to be able to cling to life amidst a generally prosperous society than if I live in a country populated mostly by people in the same state as me. By extrapolation to the level of countries, Bangladesh is less poor because there exists a prosperous West than if there were none — as its garment manufacturing sector, energy, electronics, and leather goods industries all attest. (Indeed, the early years after the country's independence in 1971 saw government pursuing socialist policies; it was not until those were abandoned, and the economy became geared to exporting to the rich world, that rapid growth ensued.)

This is why prosperous visitors in poor countries often find that the police and local authorities are more solicitous for their welfare and protection than they are for the poor natives. If mine is a poor country, we need rich foreigners to come here and to be happy about doing so. In the first place, they spend money — which is good for us. In the second place, they may encourage outside investment — which we badly need. At a minimum, their murder or disappearance, or just their return home after a bad experience, will damage our relations with their rich and powerful countries — which is a bad idea.

Check out the new podcast series “A Foggy Day on Olympus” here, and the latest episode here.

And this brings us to a yet more uncomfortable truth. Those rich countries will be far more cautious about admitting people from poor countries — unless they are sure that the visitors are either prosperous and self-supporting, or will not be trying to stay for the long term.

A country, after all, is a species of collective real estate. Its level of prosperity is capable of at least some degree of control and stabilisation by its government. If the effect of the arrival of visitors and immigrants is to level up the local average, the arrivals will mostly be welcomed. If the effect is to level down or to act as a drain upon local resources, they will mostly be kept out. We may admit destitute political or religious refugees — but we do so as a matter of conscious charity. And there will be a limit — perhaps not an explicit number, but a psychological limit nonetheless — as to how many we will agree to welcome. To admit the entire population of Bangladesh into Britain would make the British inestimably poorer. And, except in the very shortest of terms, would not make the 160 million new arrivals any richer. Far from it. We may be incessantly wrangling about who and how many may come — but only the ideologically self-deluded will argue for no restrictions at all.

For analogous reasons, it is not mere snobbishness that causes well-off people to live in different parts of town to their poorer fellow citizens — though snobbishness might, of course, be a contributory factor! The desire to live in 'better' neighbourhoods rather than in 'less good' ones is an instinct that almost everyone feels, for a whole host of reasons that have to do with the kinds of shops; the prevalence of parks; the rates of crime; the standard of schools; the absence of industrial or other eyesores, and all the rest of it. Other people are welcome to move in, if they can afford to buy a house or apartment — but you notice that if the net effect, over time, is to cause the 'better' neighbourhood to decline in appearance and amenities as it adopts the ways and tastes of the newcomers, it will progressively be abandoned by its original inhabitants, and property values will fall. Every large town has a history of the same pattern.

There is nothing that can or should be done about this last phenomenon, of course. Prosperity has to be allowed to protect itself at least to some extent (such as fleeing neighbourhoods that are becoming crime-ridden or in other ways distasteful to their inhabitants), or there will simply be no prosperity. And then we will all be worse off.

For prosperity of any degree — even if not well distributed, or enjoyed only at second-hand (the poor person walking through a 'safe' area, free of the stress of the ghetto) — can be maintained only if it is defended from being swamped by all comers. For the same reason, I am better off if you remember to lock your door at night — even if you are richer than I am. I will pay less for insurance premiums, and in taxes to fund the police, courts, and prison service. By you not inviting crime, I will live in a safer environment.

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To reiterate: the fact that there is little justice in this life should not — and must not — deflect us from seeking as much as may be obtained. But none of that can remove the fact that we are beneficiaries of injustice by dint of our very existence.

Violence created our states, and will continue to maintain them until they are overwhelmed by yet more ferocious violence from some quarter — a fate that we are completely justified in seeking to postpone.

Theft and mainforce produced property; and property is the principal thing that keeps us from living like animals. We are well advised to treat it with respect, and to protect it.

You are the beneficiary of past oppression with every word that you utter, every garment you wear, and every possession you own. None of this justifies you in perpetuating that oppression in the present or the future. But the quest to decontaminate ourselves from the past by undoing the safeguards of the present is a fool's errand, and can only turn us over, once more, to the dogs of war and the misery of universal poverty.