Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?

Chapter ǴǷ: Mises and His Critics on Ethics, Rights, and Law ȃȂȀ

for latecomers (ȀȈȆȂ, pp.ȁȇ–ȂȆ; andȀȈȇȁ, pp.ȃȅ–Ȅǿ,ȅȂ–ȅȄ,ȁȃǿ). People
may of course acquire and dispose of ownership rights in goods and land
through honest trading.
Ļese principles of property rights, especially of homesteading, look
detailed or specific enough to raise doubts about whether they are truly
axioms. Don’t they have some utilitarian underpinning after all? Rothbard
does make comments about ownership of land similar to his comments
about ownership of human beings.

[I]f the land is to be used at all as a resource in any sort of efficient man-

ner, it must be owned or controlled bysomeoneor some group, and we

are again faced with our three alternatives: either the land belongs to

the first user, the man who first brings it into production;orit belongs

to a group of others;orit belongs to the world as a whole, with every

individual owning a quotal part of every acre of land.... In practice,

again, it is obviously impossible for every person in the world to exer-

cise effective ownership of his four-billionth portion (if the world popu-

lation is, say, four billion) of every piece of the world’s land surface. (ȀȈȆȂ,

pp.ȂȂ–Ȃȃ)

Notice Rothbard’s references—utilitarian references—to efficiency,
practicality, and effectiveness.
Nevertheless, Rothbard maintains that his “two axioms, the right of
self-ownership and the right to ‘homestead,’ establish the complete set of
principles of the libertarian system. Ļe entire libertarian doctrine then
becomes the spinning out and the application of all the implications of
this central doctrine” (ȀȈȆȂ, p.ȃǿ).

ŜőŏšŘŕōŞŕŠŕőş śŒ ŠŔő ōŤŕśřōŠŕŏ ōŜŜŞśōŏŔ

One peculiarity of this approach appears at the beginning, in the supposed
axiom that each person owns himself, his body. An argument phrased in
such a peculiar way is suspect for that very reason. A utilitarian argument
can readily show the importance of property rights; but to put property
rights at the very beginning, even ahead of considerations of human per-
sonality, seems odd indeed. Someone not intent on a particular chain of
deductive reasoning would describe human nature and the human condi-
tion more straightforwardly. He would probably speak not of each per-
son’sowninghimself but of each person’sbeinghis own self and having
his own consciousness and purposes and capacity to feel pleasure and pain,