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About the book Crisis and Leviathan

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Center on Peace & Liberty Property
Rights

Contents:

Introduction:

When government accumulates power in responding to crises, it commandeers resources. The taxes, regulations, and subsidies imposed allegedly to alleviate military and economic emergencies thus inevitably limit people’s peaceful use of their possessions. Control over more and more resources is transferred from private hands to government bureaus. So even in the United States, whose Constitution affirms the right to property, the government has infringed this basic liberty in the name of military preparedness and ending depressions.

The great irony is that the most fundamental right to individual sovereignty—private property—is the one most highly questioned. Property rights are usually construed narrowly to cover only things that can be exchanged, given away, or abandoned. But since a property right is the right to use and dispose of something, it actually has a far broader meaning. One begins with a right to one’s own person, including one’s body and energies. Indeed, this is that basic right that gives rise to the right to appropriate unowned objects from nature and to exchange peacefully acquired property with willing traders. In fact, without property rights there are no rights at all.

Consider the right to freedom of the press. Publishing a newspaper requires land, printing equipment, paper, ink, and numerous other material objects. Without property rights in those assets, how could anyone exercise freedom of the press? Similar requirements apply to the freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and so on. People who champion these allegedly non-economic civil liberties and call for maximum government protection of them, while downgrading the importance of property rights, are caught in a deadly contradiction. See how civil liberties fared in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and other regimes, especially during war crises, in which property rights are subordinated to collective State control.

A misconception about property is that it protects only the well-off while the opposite is true. Private property is a sanctuary for the disadvantaged from arbitrary government power which is invariably used for the benefit of politically-connected elites. Each person owns oneself and more and requires the right to freely utilize such property to survive, advance oneself, and live in peace and security. In addition, without property rights there can be no personal privacy. Furthermore, under collectivist (meaning government) control of resources, everyone is both an employee and ward of the state. Twentieth-century despotism vividly illustrated the dangers inherent in that situation. In contrast, under private property, even people who have few possessions would have alternatives thanks to the multiple employers, clients and others bidding for their services, association and business.

Individual private property rights are the bedrock of personal liberty, the rule of law, the market economy, prosperity, privacy, and peace. When government takes advantage of emergencies by increasing its power over people and their private resources, it undermines those institutions and values, which are the keys to a civil society.

Also, click here for Bibliography for Crisis and Leviathan.

Erosion of Property Rights:

Bovard, James. Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Higgs, Robert. “The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis,” Explorations in Economic History, July 1994.

—. “Collateral Damage: Two Venues, One Logic,” San Francisco Examiner, April 15, 2002.

—. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

—. “Crisis and Quasi-Corporatist Policy-Making: The U.S. Case in Historical Perspective,” The World & I, November 1988.

—. “Crisis, Bigger Government, and Ideological Change: Two Hypotheses on the Ratchet Phenomenon,” Explorations in Economic History, Vol;. 22 (1985).

—. “How FDR Made the Depression Worse,” The Free Market, March 1995.

—. “How War Amplified Federal Power in the Twentieth Century,” The Freeman, July 1999.

—. “In the Name of Emergency,” Reason, July 1987.

—. “The Myth of ‘Failed’ Policies,” The Free Market, March 1995.

—. “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War,” The Independent Review, Vol. I, No. 4 (Spring 1997), pp. 561-590.

—. “War and Leviathan in Twentieth-Century America: Conscription as the Keystone,” from The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, edited by John V. Denson. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999.

Higgs, Robert and Charlotte Twight. “Economic Warfare and Private Property Rights: Recent Episodes and Their Constitutionality,” Journal of Private Enterprise, Fall 1987.

. “National Emergency and the Erosion of Private Property Rights,” Cato Journal, Winter 1987.

. “National Emergency and Private Property Rights: Historical Relations and Present Conditions,” Journal of Private Enterprise, Fall 1996.

Mitchell, William C. and Randy T. Simmons. Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare and the Failure of Bureaucracy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press for The Independent Institute Book, 1994.

Twight, Charlotte. “Conning Congress: Privacy and the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act,” The Independent Review, Vol. VI, No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 185-216.

—. “Watching You: Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans,” The Independent Review, Vol. IV, No. 2 (Fall 1999), pp. 165-200.

General:

Anderson, Terry L. and Fred S. McChesney, eds. Property Rights: Cooperation, Conflict, and Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Bethell, Tom. The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Buckle, Stephen. Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Epstein, Richard. Takings: Private Property and the Right of Eminent Domain. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Furubotn, Eirik G. and Svetozar Pejovich, ed. The Economics of Property Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1974.

Gamble, Andrew. Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.

Higgs, Robert, ed. Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Holmes & Meier for The Independent Institute, 1990.

—. “Some Other Costs of War,” The Free Market, March 1991.

—. “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 52, No. 1 (March 1992).

—. “World War II and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex,” Freedom Daily, May 1995.

Hodgskin, Thomas. The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1973.

Kelley, David. “Life, Liberty, and Property,” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Jeffrey Paul, and Fred D. Miller, Jr., eds., Human Rights. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Liggio, Leonard P. “Native Americans and Property Rights, Part 1,” The Libertarian Forum (January 1971), pp. 4-6.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government (or An Essay Concerning Civil Government. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Mentzel, Peter. “Review of the book Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes,” The Independent Review, Vol. V, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 309-311.

Pipes, Richard. Property and Freedom. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

Rothbard, Murray N. “The Anatomy of the State,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000, pp. 55-88.

—. The Ethics of Liberty. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

—. “War, Peace and the State,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000, pp. 115-132.

Skousen, Mark. The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.Sharpe, 2001.

Steele, G. R. The Economics of Friedrich Hayek. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.

Sugden, Robert. The Economics of Rights, Co-operation and Welfare. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Introduction to game theory and the spontaneous emergence of cooperation, in which order occurs without coercion.

Wheeler, III, Samuel C. “Natural Property Rights as Body Rights,” Nous, Vol. 14 (1980).

Privatization:

Beito, David, Peter Gordon and Alexander Tabarrok, eds. The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press for The Independent Institute, 2002.

Benson, Bruce L. “Crime Control Through Private Enterprise,” The Independent Review, Vol. II, No. 3 (Winter 1998), pp. 341-371.

—. “Customary Law With Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description of a Modern System of Law and Order Without State Coercion ,”Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2.

—. The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State. San Francisco, Calif.: Pacific Research Institute, 1990.

—. To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice. New York: New York University Press for The Independent Institute, 1998.

de Molinari, Gustave. The Society of Tomorrow: A Forecast of Its Political and Economic Organisation. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904. [Online Book]

Evers, Williamson M. Victim’s Rights, Restitution and Retribution. Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute. 1995.

Friedman, David. The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism. New York: Harper Colophon, 1973.

Higgs, Robert. “Don’t Federalize Airport Security,” San Francisco Business Times, October 22, 2001.

—. “From Central Planning to the Market: The American Transition, 1945-1947,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 59, No. 3 (September 1999).

McElroy, Wendy. “Defending Yourself Against Terror,” Fox News.com, October 10, 2001.

Sechrest, Larry J. “Let Privateers Troll for Bin Laden.” Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, September 30, 2001.

—. “Privateering and National Defense,” Working Paper No. 41. Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute.

Tabarrok, Alexander. “Bring on the Bounty Hunters.” Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute.