Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

The one unifying issue is the only thing that unites divergent ideological factions. In the case of all the socialists from liberals to Marxists, because liberalism as defined by the French revolution is just a watered down theory of socialism, if we consider that the driving idea of socialism is existential egalitarianism, equality of results, in that case the central issue is destruction of property rights. Property rights is the basis of all other individual rights because all individual rights are the result of self-ownership as the root meaning of the concept of individual right. The idea of property rights is impossible without reference to an owner. Socialism represents the destruction of property rights as the collectivization of property, thus delivering control and ownership of individual property to the group, the agents of the state.

This issue of property is inextricably intertwined with the issue of the existence of the state, since the state originated as the claim of one group or class of individuals as dominant over all others at a time in history before the concept of property was clearly elaborated. The state originated in military conquest. The first state was the feudal state. Even before the idea of individual property extended beyond personal possessions to the idea that land could be individually owned, what we call tribal society, the elevation of one person as the ruler, the final authority, over the group territory, the land, established the idea of the ownership of land. The familial chief was the owner of his group’s land in that he had ultimate authority over those who occupied it. As society became more complex, groups of family heads banned together and elevated one as their chief. That process happened because of the necessities of military command, which is the fact that a large group of men at arms is more effective when it acts as one against another group where it is every man for himself. In the first case that group is called an army. In the second case that group is called a mob. A large mob is easily dispersed and dominated by a small army. Thus, tribal feudalism was borne where one well organized group controlled and dominated the rest, the first state. (The idea of asymmetric warfare where individual agents, terrorists, small bands, guerrillas, and mob violence are use by the command structure is another issue.)

The state happened as the result of group competition for control over a scarce resource, land, grazing land and farming land. Primitive hunters only come together for group hunts and to find mates, the second often being the result of the first. Animal husbandry required continuous active control by a group over a large herd. Farming required continuous active control over the land by a group. Hunting on a small scale can be an individual activity for small game and a small group activity for larger game, but necessity requires a larger group on some occasions where large herds of megafauna are the prey. After primitive people learned to domesticate animals ever larger herds were kept in captivity. Primitive people also were gatherers of plants. After they learned to cultivate plants family unites and groups of families had to maintain permanent control over plots of land. The combination of planting and herding intensified the possibility of conflicts over land use resulting in a greater need of authority over the use of the land, thus land lords, then land owners. This is history in a nutshell. Competition with opposing groups leads to the necessity of organized military force, the formation of armies. Armies with a firm command and control structure are more effective, necessitating the formation of the state.

My reason for this drawn out explanation is to show that the idea that private property pre-existed the idea of the collective use of force is not valid. Both came about together. The one justifies the other. The need for group defense justifies the organization of groups for the purpose of wielding physical force against others. Atomized isolated individuals can possess property only so long as others chose not to take it from them. The very existence of individual rights is only possible when collective power exists that protects those rights. Agreement on the limits of collective power is necessary in order to limit taking of property by those charged with defending it. Property, as we have seen, is the claim of exclusive control over the necessities of life.

You might wonder why all this explanation is even necessary. Obviously, the notion of individual rights is deeply ingrained in our minds, but practically from the moment of the founding of our modern system, the Constitution, forces have been at work to undermine and even destroy the whole basis of the system of limited government. The world has been divided into two warring camps, those who understand individual rights and the necessity of political action to protect those rights, and those who oppose and dispute our rights. The above explanation of property and the state was the basis of what was thought of as natural law, law based on the natural necessities of human needs and interactions, ordained by nature and nature’s God. Weather natural law or divine law, the result is the same, the endowment of authority to the law. We all understand that practically there is no law, there are no rights, and this is no system absent the active will of individuals to come together to defend the right, to enforce the law, and to demand that the system be respected as the basis of that coming together. People have to want this thing we call limited government. We have to actively support it. For reasonable people to support a thing each one of us must understand it. A common understanding is necessary for common action, political action.

Our enemy, the socialists and liberals, certainly understand political action. They, that is their leadership, also understand the value of property. Only ridiculously foolish anarchists without any grounding in reality believe the old slogan, property is theft. The very idea itself is a contradiction. The concept of theft is impossible without property to be taken, but unthinking people who base everything on emotion can follow such contradictions. Without such contradictions the socialist and egalitarian liberals cannot exist because their entire reason for existing is to expropriate and transfer your earned and legally possessed property to others as a means to power. All they have to do to gain that power is to present the means as the end itself. That is why they eternally focus of the needs of those who will receive their legalized loot over the rights of those who earned it.

Originally, socialists developed the labor value of property, since all property value is created by labor, or in its broadest meaning productive human activity, and value in this case is merely a form of preference, preferring a finished good to a meaningless object. But the socialist theory was too simplistic and discounted the voluntary transfer of value as being relevant to the process of production of value. In other words, it is not enough to be paid for your work, you own the finished product too, and the means by which you made it. Since this situation is impossible to sort out once a fool discounts the value of planning and thought in the creation of anything, such fools could be lead to believe that physical effort is all that work involves, since thinking had very little to do with their efforts. That was class warfare in a nutshell in the old days when people actually had to work for a living to exist and raise a family. Such rhetoric was harnessed to stir up mob action and organize uneducated workers, taking control of the state and its systems of education, schools and news media.

The weakness of democratic government is that majorities can be mobilized to focus on, confiscate and control the property and actions of targeted groups of more productive individuals. That is why the Federalists created a limited republic and specifically condemned democracy as dangerous. The process of encroachment on rights and expansion of political power for socialist purposes has worked itself out to the point of building up the regulatory, taxing, welfare state, the system of the transfer of wealth and control, to the point that many do not have to work if they chose not to and others can pretend to do productive work by working for the state doing nothing or worse than nothing. One faction, the net tax receivers, are set against the others, the net tax payers, with the middle constantly being in confusion as to which way of life is better in any given situation. The old socialist liberal justification, the labor theory of value, has completely lost its rhetorical value in persuading and motivating the mob because it was made irrelevant.

Socialists understood this problem at some level and over time changed their focus to other classes of the aggrieved to serve as their minions in the unending class warfare against productivity, which they call class struggle. It has reached the point where the hard left has marginalized the labor theory of value in favor of other groups, women as a class, ethnicities as classes, races as classes. These new groups are the proposed beneficiaries of their redistributive system. During the 1960’s this theory of class warfare triumphed under the guise of the ultimate incarnation of the welfare state, The Great Society, under the guise of eliminating race as a form of legal privilege. What began as a labor movement, the championing of the working man, meaning the dumb grunt physical laborer, at least in the minds of the dumb grunts, morphed into the champions of oppressed races, religions, the female sex, and finally any imaginable form of sexual perversion, as we see the seduction and rap of children being elevated to the status of a mere preference. Therefore, they introduced their new political weapon for eliminating, transferring, and confiscating property under the guise of a civil right. That device is known as affirmative action, the ultimate leveler or equalizer, the final way to redress any conceivable collective grievance. The primacy of labor on the left was replaced by the primacy of the coalition of the aggrieved.

The entire crux if this coalition, the one source of their legal authority over the new enemy, the thing that grants them ultimate political power is the affirmative action laws. Who, exactly is the action aimed at? Obviously, the only legitimate aggrieved are racial, religious, and sexual legal classes pretending to be “minorities” (I say pretending because women are actually a demographic majority) are everyone except white males. Why? Obviously, they picked on us white males because as a demographic group we are the most productive. We are the largest group of net tax payers. We are the producers of the surplus wealth that the socialists and the liberals claim hegemony over. Therefore, we must be subjugated to their faction. That is how unlimited democracy works. Democracy creates an unending assault by contending factions for control over all resources, including and especially human beings as the ultimate resource, specifically, the white male.

If you are not really paying attention to present day political rhetoric you might think I am exaggerating, but I am not. It is important to believe it when political activists seek to control you, marginalize you, and even eliminate you as the ultimate source of all the evils of civilization. Look to the Left. Hear their demands. Read their propaganda. The truth of my claims is undeniable. Racialism is being forced on the one group that thought it was above the issue because we invented individualism as a legal theory and political philosophy and made it our own, which is substantially true and only slightly over generalized. See the irony? It is individualism that induces me to add that qualification. The socialists have never cared about such niceties. For the liberal and socialist egalitarian we are groups to be herded and exploited. That is all. From them, our vaunted individualism is a joke, a weakness. They understand how easy it is to just pick us off one at a time. We operate under the delusion of safety, the residue of a legal system based on individual rights. They control the mobs and use the mobs to gain control the state. All they care about is what they call “our democracy”. Have you not heard them say exactly that? Believe them. They really mean it.

Many people imagine that they are above the fray, somehow immune to the demands and irrationality of The Hard Left. Many think of themselves as moderates and others imagine that they are somehow above and beyond Left and Right, libertarians, anarchocapitalists, voluntarist, whatever. The Left have contempt for such people because the Left knows it is real. They believe hard, and emotion is everything for them. Have you noticed lately what Rightwing is now? It is every thing that is not purely in line with the thought processes of the Left. They might have the common sense not to call themselves leftists in public, but they sure do not lack the slightest compunction of hatefully condemning in the most certain terms any opinion and person possessing that opinion who is not in total agreement with their agenda as Far Right. If you agree with anything I have written in this essay and have made it this far, you are (to the hard left) a Nazi or a Fascist. Is that not the height of absurdity? Really? Why do you think that Neocon RINO’s like Mit Romney express sympathy for the Antifa who practice a low level form of political terrorism, mob violence, against anyone to the right of Trotsky? What do you think is happening here? Why do you think that the “establishment” recoiled in horror by the mere suggestion when some people had the temerity to answer Black Lives Matter with “all lives matter”? What do you think is going on here?

Face reality. By your mere fact of existing, by just being here and making a reasonable effort to think rationally and live productively, by being so uncaring and disagreeing with ANYTHING that pass from the lips of a certified member of an Aggrieved Class, by opposing even one of the anointed political and supposedly intellectual leaders of the OPPRESSED, you are a Fascist. You are Far Right. You are scum who must be yelled at and punched in the face. Do you not believe it when they say such things, over and over again on all broadcast media? Do you think that by pretending that Left and Right does not apply to you that you are safe, above it all? Nope, these people are at war. First, they were at war with poverty. Then, they were at war with racism. Now, they are at war with intolerance, which means anything they want that you disagree with. Have you not heard? Words are violence. Your free speech is hate speech. You are not immune. You must either sit down and shut up, forgetting that they will come for you later getting you fired for anything you said or did in the past, or you must finally take notice. Taking notice should include maybe admitting that you were wrong about the possibility of being above it all, unless you want to hide out in the wilderness in your own solitary cell, like a dark ages anchorite. They will not let you be. They will never just leave you alone. It ain’t happening never, not if you is a whitey. The very fact that you object to that bad grammar marks you out as a racist. Leftist academics have pronounced logic to be racist and not been fired, no, lauded. Your very rationality is racist. Your existence as an independent noncolored person who does not feel guilty is a crime against humanity. Just ask any Person Of Color that is politically active on the Left. They will tell you so. Why is that so? Affirmative Action has enshrined your ultimate enslavement and elimination as the Left’s reason for existing. You are the final solution to “race-based preference”.

It is now clear that the one uniting issue, the one thing that should unite everyone who is not part of the coalition of the aggrieved, is getting rid of Affirmative Action. It is the political-legalistic poison that is destroying our society. The surrender by the establishment Republican politicians on this one issue has marked them as traitors and fools who will bow to the ax when the Left wins another national election. Property rights is the basis of all other individual rights. That is the animating principle of the United States’ political existence. Opposing and undermining property as a legal and political institution is the basis of everything that the Left does. Affirmative action is the final nail in the coffin of Liberty. We must push open the lid of final annihilation before they nail it shut. Abolish affirmative action. That is the one unifying issue for the rightwing. As a parting thought, do not think that I have forgotten about mass migration as a political tool for transforming America into a socialist Third World shit hole, like Brazil. In a welfare state, which is what we have, free immigration is affirmative action. That is how it is presented too. The proponents of mass migration link it directly to the welfare state. That is why Trump won. He understood at least that much. We must close the loop and complete the logic of Trump’s understanding. Eliminate the “source code” of the welfare state, Affirmative Action because it is the culmination and final blow of irrational egalitarianism.