Power & Market

“These are men who fight so that the product of their industry should not be the spoils of those who enslaved them; it is an ignoble war. The war waged by Pompey against Caesar charms us; its object is to discover who will be the party who will tyrannize the world; it takes place between men equally incapable of subsisting by their own efforts; it is a noble war. If we trace our opinions to their source, we will find that the majority have been produced by our enemies.”—Charles Comte, De l’organisation sociale, pp. 29–30, as cited in Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School, pp. 200–201

Life, for man, begins not with breath, but with action. To act, he must own himself. He must be free to choose. He must control the means by which his choices take effect in the material world. Without self-ownership, liberty of individual action, and private property, man is stripped not only of the ability to act, but of the moral responsibility that gives action its dignity. What remains is existence without agency, and that is not human life.

To live as man is to pursue ends. That pursuit presupposes control over one’s body, one’s choices, and the means through which those choices become real. Self-ownership is not a political demand, but the foundation of action: if a man does not own himself, he cannot act. Liberty follows as the natural expression of that ownership—the uncoerced exercise of individual will in the material world. But will alone is not enough. To act, man must shape it. Property thus is the material extension of that will—the grasp over scarce means by which life is expressed and sustained.

The state stands in opposition to these requisites of life. It does not produce; it seizes. It does not serve; it commands. It does not operate through voluntary exchange or persuasion, but through the threat and imposition of violence.

Where man seeks to build, to choose, to achieve through ownership, through voluntary exchange, through action, the state seeks to tax, to regulate, to prohibit. Man is not merely hindered; he is extinguished, his plans are overruled, his judgment is nullified, and his life denied.

To treat this as a debate over policy or ideology is to miss the praxeological and existential truth: life is action. The state’s character does not change with the beliefs of its rulers. What matters is not who holds power, but that power exists to deny individual action.

To abstract liberty from the context of life is to commit a grave praxeological and philosophical error. Liberty is not a separate ideal, it is life itself. To speak of liberty apart from life is to speak of a shadow apart from the body.

So long as this is misunderstood, man will continue to live as a tool, not an agent—discussing liberty as though it were an adornment or a privilege, rather than what it is: the minimum condition for man to be.

Image Source: Adobe Stock

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.