By Cake Boy

Property is fundamental, it’s the foundation for liberty, libertarians like Hoppe and Rothbard say.

I agree with them. But it depends on what kind of property. People don’t think enough about these issues. And Rothbard and Hoppe had/have a twisted idea of what property is, or could be.

The leftist anarchists don’t believe in property, and they don’t believe in family, they want us to live in ‘Queer communes’ where we ‘share everything’

There is nothing wrong with the communal/hippie lifestyle thing, as long as you don’t force it on others. But leftist anarchists often do not object to force. They use force to ‘make a better world’ and to ‘silence people with wrong beliefs’.

So, property. The classical liberals had the right idea about property. Later, neoliberals and libertarians distorted this notion of property. Classical liberals believed that property was possible. But this means people need to allow you to homestead new terrain. We called this the “Lockean Proviso”—an essential idea. Take what you want, as long as you don’t push people off the edge.

In neoliberalism/libertarianism, there is no Lockean Proviso. To them, it’s ok when some landlords take all the land in the world. After that, there is no place to homestead anymore for the new generations. You are forced into servitude. They don’t care. To them, freedom is when the 0,1 percent can do what they want.

Neoliberalism was a distortion of classical liberal theory, probably paid for by the corporate class and bankers. A way to derail liberalism into a domain of feudalism. They don’t teach liberalism in schools; they teach a corrupted, vulgar version of it.

The classical liberal idea of property was more or less the same as Proudhon’s idea of property. The only difference between Proudhon and the classical liberals is that Proudhon didn’t believe in a social contract. In a way, Proudhon was a radical version of the classical liberals.

When I look at my own life, I need a bit of property. A roof above my head. A place to clean myself, a small garden. I don’t want to be forced in a hippie commune, and i don’t aspire to be the CEO of blackrock. I’m a private person who wants to be left alone. Im not a ruler, and i refuse to be ruled.

And a lot of people are like me. They don’t want to live in the antifa hippie commune/cult. And they don’t aspire to be BlackRock’s CEO. A lot of Western people are individualists, but not in a capitalist/Epstein kind of way.

The third way —the classical liberal/Proudhonian way —is unknown: the middle path between neoliberalism and Marxism.

When I look at my own life, I’m not someone who needs to get very rich or powerful or anything like that. I never cared about the American dream. People forgot the European dreams.

I don’t need to impress others. But i also always dislked the whole radical leftist/hippie cults. I saw how people disappeared in these kinds of cults. I was raised in such a cult. I want to have a place of my own. Some privacy. That’s all. It’s not about wealth, but about dignity and autonomy.

I would say neoliberalism is masculine control (rule by the neoliberal patriarchs). But leftism is feminine control (rule by a passive-aggressive hippie woman). You need a middle ground—the balance between black and white, between the masculine and the feminine. I would say, in the current era, the balance between the masculine and the feminine is gone.

Some days ago, in the news, a family from the UK homesteaded a piece of land in Italy. The state now wants to take away their children. Here we see that the modern state is nót a liberal institution. Because liberalism allowed the people to homestead (think of the founding fathers). Here we see that the neoliberal state has more in common with communist and totalitarian states. It wants total control over the civilian, the family, the state’s property, and the banks/landlords’ property. You can’t reclaim your life.

In short, classical liberalism, Proudhonian mutualism, and Georgism (theories that share many ideas) are very underrated theoretical systems designed to free the individual from the masses and feudal structures. Its a shame that this third way, this road between commuinsm and neoliberalism is forgotten, because i think it could resonate with a lot of modern people.

It’s a shame that the most nuanced and intellectually honest systems are forgotten, and we now only have the extremes: an extreme status quo and an extreme counterculture.

How Proudhonism/classical liberalism is forgotten, I can write about next time.