The Cross Section - RMB Blog

  The Ethics Of Liberty by Murray Rothbard Chapter 11 takes a deeper look at the subject of feudalism and shows its relevance in the current day.  Rothbard also applies ideas from his chapter on criminality in describing to how to right the wrongs of modern day feudalism.  For reference, feudalism is defined as " continuing aggression by titleholder of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil. "  To that Rothbard adds the concept of "land engrossing" and calls the combined practices land monopoly.  Land engrossing involves keeping potential new owners out of raw land.  Governments act in this role in order to grant privileges to specific individuals or groups.  In other words they decide who gets to mix their labor with land in order to transform it into their legitimate property. The first example of land monopoly in the US that comes to my mind is the settlement of the Unassigned lands of Oklahoma in 1889.  The US federal governme...

  The Ethics Of Liberty  by Murray Rothbard After defining criminality broadly in the previous chapter, Rothbard focuses his attention to land as property and its unique importance.                 "A particularly important application of our theory of property titles is                      the case of landed property.  For one thing, land is a fixed quotal portion                      of the earth, and therefore the ground land endures virtually permanently." Land property is unique because the supply is so inflexible.  Practically none more will be created but neither will it be destroyed.  For these same reasons, George Bernard Shaw started his argumentation for socialism with the ownership of landed.  His argument is not very convincing because it wasn't built upon a so...