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[363]

ON LEGAL PLUNDER

Among the advances that public opinion must make in France to reach a sound appreciation of the public interest, there is one in particular that seems both desirable and urgent to us: that it should be understood, more precisely than it has until now, what constitutes plunder or theft. The confusion that exists on this matter in people’s minds appears to us to be one of the principal causes of the lack of agreement on the nature of the reforms that ought to be made to our institutions, and of the favor too easily granted among us to certain systems which subvert of all regular social order.

In this article, we propose to offer some points that may help dispel the confusion we have mentioned and allow theft to be recognized under the various forms it may assume; and since the notion of theft cannot be complete without a precise idea of the thing upon which it is exercised, we shall begin by recalling the principal characteristics of property.

Property is the objective and the fruit of labor; it consists of all the useful things of human creation, which, whether in the form of the tools of production or the products immediately suitable for satisfying our needs, form the foundation of our existence.

It is labor that is the foundation of all property, even that of land, for the productive power of uncultivated land is so feeble that a square league of land scarcely suffices to provide the most meager subsistence for a single individual, whereas the same area, when well cultivated, can abundantly support more than 1,500 people. One may therefore admit that labor has produced, at the very least, 1,499 parts out of 1,500 of present landed property.

In the savage and pastoral state, property in land is possessed collectively by the tribe or clan, first because no individual in particular has added his labor to it, and secondly because the undivided ownership of land is a necessary consequence of the manner in which hunting or pastoral peoples provide for their subsistence. In the agricultural state and in an advanced civilization, there still remain some properties held in common and intended for certain collective needs of municipalities, provinces, or the State, but this is only a relatively small portion of property in land, the bulk of which, in such a society, is always more or less divided among families.

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In a population that had long been governed according to the rules of justice and sound political economy, the present property of each family would be the exact representation of the value it had saved from the legitimate products of its labor, or of those derived from a similar source and received from its ancestors.

Individual property, thus formed and preserved, is absolutely unassailable from the point of view of justice, since it is entirely due to the labor and savings of the families that enjoy it, and it would exist for no one had they not created it entirely from scratch.

The experience of all people bears witness that property is formed and accumulated all the more rapidly as labor is more enlightened and more free, and as the ability to enjoy and dispose of its products is better guaranteed to each person. This guarantee must be the principal aim of laws and public services.

Theft is the violation of (the right to) property. Its forms are extremely varied, but it can always be recognized by this trait: that it deprives, in whole or in part, of the property of those who created it through labor, or to whom it was freely transmitted by its original creators, in order to give it to others who have no such claim.

The general effects of theft are to weaken or even entirely eliminate, depending on how extensively it is practiced, the motives for labor and saving, and consequently to prevent the formation of property; it discourages habits of activity and foresight by depriving them of their natural reward; on the contrary, it fosters laziness, intemperance, and all the vices that generate poverty; it thus tends toward the progressive degradation of the human species and its total destruction.

Theft is committed by means of force or fraud; it may be practiced directly by isolated individuals, or indirectly, through the intermediary of governments, that is, by persons who wield authority and public power.

In the first case, where thieves act without the complicity of governments, the effects of theft are generally limited, because public authority, individual resistance, and general disapproval combine to stop it.

In the second case, where theft is carried out through the intermediary of the State, its effects are incomparably more disastrous and lasting, not only because it is then backed by public (use of) force, but also because the legal sanction it receives tends to make it regarded, by those who benefit from it, as the exercise of a legitimate right, and over time, it ends up being accepted as such even by those it robs.

Among the thefts committed under the direction or with the consent of governments, some are carried out using sheer physical force alone [365] and are not even disguised; such were those long practiced through war, when it was followed by the plundering of the conquered or their subjection to the status of a slave or a serf.

Other legal thefts—that is, those carried out or permitted by public authority—rely, in addition to physical force, on prejudices that the plunderers strive to maintain as much as possible, or on false notions of common interests.

We shall now cite a few examples of such plunder, indicating the mistaken beliefs that serve to conceal their true nature.

Aristocratic theft

These are thefts committed for the benefit of certain classes of the population who seize for themselves hereditary entitlements to the product of the labor of other classes: such as, in France before 1789, the seigneurial rights; and such as the more or less disguised plunder which, in most European states, is what noble privileges entail. These thefts are remnants of conquest and serfdom. They persist long after the physical force is no longer directly used by the plunderers, because long usage and the ignorance of the masses have consecrated them as rights.

Monarchical theft

These are supported by the notion that monarchs are, by divine right, appointed to govern peoples, and that they may, accordingly, legitimately dispose at will of the persons and property of their subjects. This is what made Louis XIV say, “L'État, c'est moi!" (The State is me!) and what freed him of all scruple when, for the upkeep of his pomp, his courtiers, his mistresses, and his bastards, he pillaged the nation.

In constitutional monarchies, where delegates of a more or less numerous part of the population participate in the exercise of power, monarchical thefts are more limited than under despotic governments, but they remain nonetheless considerable. The sovereign and his family are granted, under the names of the civil list, crown properties, apanages (royal privileges) etc., a share of public property and State revenue generally large enough to provide a comfortable life for twelve or fifteen thousand families, and the exaggerated size of these endowments is justified by the supposed need to maintain the splendor and grandeur of the throne; which then gives rise to another royal propriety (convenance??), which is no less burdensome, that of handsomely paying all the functionaries who surround or approach the monarch. Yet this person is not supposed to provide any service to the country, since it is a principle in representative monarchies that he [366] can be responsible for nothing and must entirely abstain from governing. He is there, then, only to receive and consume the wealth the nation provides him, and to give back, in return, the spectacle—apparently very necessary—of the splendor of the throne.

Regulatory theft

This class of legal theft includes many kinds; we will limit ourselves to pointing out the principal ones.

Regulatory thefts are committed by violating the liberty of working and of engaging in transactions; [1] they are generally justified by the claim of making public authority serve the management and improvement of industry or certain types of work.

The old craft guilds, the masterships and trade corporations, [2] organized regulatory theft on a grand scale. One could exercise very few professions without being a member of these associations and without conforming to their rules; now, the corporations alone decided on the acceptance or rejection of new members; they could thus, at will, restrict competition, raise the prices of their products, and rob their consumers. On the other hand, they deprived non-affiliated workers and those members who wished to depart from established rules, of the free exercise of their industrial abilities, thereby making them lose the often considerable value they could have derived from them. Dissidents were overwhelmed with obstacles and lawsuits, with all the more ferocity the more skill they showed, the more the corporations had to fear their competition, and society frequently lost, due to these hindrances to all progress, the benefit of new inventions or superior services.

This system was abolished in France, for the most part, by the Revolution of 1789; however, traces of it remain in the power claimed by the government to regulate certain professions, to subject their exercise to prior authorization, and to limit the number of people who may engage in them; such as the professions of broker, stockbroker, notary, solicitor, printer, bookseller, etc., etc. The wage or fee rates imposed on some of these professions in no way prevent the holders from charging for their services more than they are actually worth—that is, more than they would receive under a regime of free competition; the proof of this overcharging lies in the market value attached to the title granting the right to exercise the professions in question.

Of all the regulatory thefts that our institutions still impose upon us, the most substantial and the most disastrous are [367] those enshrined in the application of the so-called protectionist system for national industry.

This system consists in closing, as far as possible, the national market to foreign products, by imposing either absolute prohibitions or duties high enough to be prohibitive.

The alleged purpose of the protectionist system is to preserve and develop within the country industries believed incapable of withstanding foreign competition, and thus to secure for these national industries the amount of work that it is supposed they would be deprived of if such competition were allowed.

An increase in work is not, in every case, an increase in wealth. Labor is an advantage only in proportion to what it produces, and the goal should be not so much to multiply the amount of labor as to make it more productive; but assuming otherwise, it is easy to demonstrate that the protectionist regime, far from increasing the quantity of national labor, actually reduces it considerably. It is well known that capital is the essential ingredient for labor, that the more capital a country possesses, the more employment it can provide for its population; now, it is immediately evident that industries protected against foreign competition due to the relative inferiority of their results cannot constitute a favorable use of productive funds for the accumulation of capital: this accumulation occurs all the more rapidly as production is more advantageous, more abundant, and yields, each year, larger surpluses of value in all forms. It is quite obvious, for instance, that if we wished to devote productive services worth one franc to ripening an orange in the north of France—an orange that trade with southern Europe could bring us in exchange for other productive services worth ten centimes—we would be following a very poor strategy for increasing our capital. Yet the protectionist regime does nothing else. It compels us to obtain, at high cost through certain kinds of labor, what the freedom of exchange would let us obtain cheaply through other kinds of labor; it thus limits, as far as it is able, the amount of our savings, and consequently, the amount of labor they can provide.

Here are other results of the protectionist regime:

1. By depriving protected industries of the stimulus of foreign competition, it tends to maintain their relative inferiority in all respects that depend on modifiable causes, such as the inferiority of industrial methods; it thereby delays their progress.
2. By provoking retaliation, or reciprocal customs barriers, it restricts markets and therefore the development of all truly national industries—that is to say, [368] those which enjoy in each country special advantages, better conditions for success than they would find elsewhere; it thus limits the use we could make of the varied natural resources that Providence has unequally distributed among different regions, and it deprives all nations of the ability to apply their productive funds in the way most advantageous for all.
3. By preventing, as much as possible, the intermingling of interests that would result from the free development of commercial relations among peoples, it deprives them of the most powerful means of ensuring general peace and freeing themselves from the enormous sacrifices imposed by standing armies. [3]
4. Finally, the protectionist system allows a part of national producers—especially large landowners and major manufacturing enterprises—to raise the prices of their products far above the levels that would be set by general competition among producers of all nations, thereby burdening the mass of consumers with an annual charge which, according to even the lowest estimates, exceeds in France the total amount of all taxes levied by the State.

We shall stop here with our remarks on regulatory thefts and say nothing about the acts of plunder of the same kind that have been plannd since the February Revolution, such as those that would have been realized through the system of workers’ associations developed at the Luxembourg Palace by M. Louis Blanc; we hope that the good sense of the people has definitively rejected these monstrosities, and that it will protect society from the dreadful abyss into which the utopians of that detestable school would like to drag it.

Industrial theft

We use this term to designate certain acts of plunder which, while not precisely sanctioned by law, nonetheless fall into the category of legal thefts, in the sense that the public authority, charged with protecting property, fails in that duty by tolerating them more or less openly.

Economists have applied the term “speculative commerce” to operations consisting in purchasing products when they are overabundant and reselling them when they become scarcer; such actions are legitimate, and their beneficial effect is to prevent, to some extent, the price of products from deviating too far from their general average; but in ordinary usage, the term “commercial speculation” includes a great number of operations having nothing of that character and which are often nothing more than transfers of wealth carried out through deceit and fraud—in other words, genuine theft.

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The methods employed in these speculations are highly varied; here are a few examples:

Speculators join forces to acquire and then resell an industrial establishment, a factory, a mining concession, etc.; all expenses included, the acquisition costs them one hundred thousand francs, and in reality, it is worth no more. However, they divide this property into shares, publish deceptive notices about the income it can supposedly generate; then, using various persuasive tactics and certain stock market maneuvers well known to those in the trade, they manage to place all these shares at prices that double, triple, or sometimes increase tenfold the market value of the asset they represent, thus realizing in a few days enormous profits at the expense of those who purchase their shares.

The frenzied gambling that takes place in the stock exchanges on the prices of government securities, certain classes of goods or merchandise, or even on titles representing nothing at all—such as promises of shares in an enterprise whose founding is uncertain—constitutes a type of operation no less immoral and no less ruinous than the one just described; it enriches the most unscrupulous speculators while ruining the others; it harms regular commerce by causing artificial fluctuations in the prices of the objects involved, and by tying up large sums of capital in unproductive uses; it tends to divert the population’s energy from useful industry, by opening to greed a path that appears to offer chances of rapid and considerable gain without requiring any labor.

It has been rightly said that bankruptcy, which was once a disgrace, has now become an art—a means of living well, or even enriching oneself at others’ expense. If there are still merchants for whom bankruptcy is a crushing blow, who despair and sometimes commit suicide, they are now rare exceptions. Most, after having offered 10 or 15 percent settlements to their creditors, appear to enjoy complete peace of mind, and they would not readily admit that they have forfeited any claim to public esteem. This profound shift in strictness of their conscience allows many industrial entrepreneurs—who mostly operate with borrowed capital—to live with increasing luxury and to consume each year, in personal expenses, far more than they produce; they continue in this manner, covering their deficits with new loans, until the moment comes when, no longer able to conceal their situation, they present their misfortunes to those they have defrauded.

Others, encouraged by the near-total impunity granted to this kind of theft, arrange their affairs, their marriages, or other family transactions in such a way that they own nothing in their own name, while [370] appearing to enjoy a certain fortune; then, abusing the credit derived from this illusion, they exploit, in various ways, the trust they have deceived: they stockpile merchandise or goods they have not paid for, sell them at a loss to move them more quickly (to the great detriment of honest competitors), then divert the proceeds of these sales, taking care to simulate, as much as possible, in their accounts, fictitious losses or capital expenditures. Arriving thus at bankruptcy after a few years, they go off elsewhere to enjoy what they have extorted.

This is unfortunately no mere hypothetical case; the number of fraudulent bankruptcies, in one form or another, is very considerable; and if few of them give rise to legal proceedings, it is because, on the one hand, creditors—generally preoccupied with other business—almost always prefer the most burdensome immediate settlement to the difficulties and delays of lawsuits, and, on the other hand, because magistrates, finding no strong public condemnation of bankrupts in current social attitudes, fulfill their duty in this regard only very imperfectly.

Among the various forms of industrial theft, one of the most dangerous seems to us to be that which proceeds through the more or less complete monopolization of certain branches of production, by the establishment of artificial monopolies.

Even if institutions placed no obstacle in the way of the freedom of labor, competition would not for that reason be absolutely unlimited; its scope is more or less confined, in each type of production, by the nature of things, by the impossibility of providing everyone with the tools of production, or of dividing them, without loss, beyond certain limits. In agriculture, the extension of competition is limited by the size of the national territory; in the mining industry, it is restricted by the number and size of the deposits found within that territory; in all industries without exception, competition may be more or less reduced by the concentration or reduction in the number of enterprises.

Restrictions on competition brought about by the latter method are legitimate only insofar as concentration results in a reduction of the costs of production from which consumers benefit; when it offers no such advantage and instead aims merely to monopolize labor for the exclusive profit of the entrepreneurs, it becomes a way to extort both consumers and workers; it is then highly detrimental to society, and public authority should place serious obstacles in its path.

We have, in France, a considerable number of examples of the concentration of industrial enterprises of this kind. [371] The glassworks of Saint-Gobain and Saint-Quirin, by ruining or buying out their rival businesses, have succeeded in establishing a monopoly that now allows them to sell their products at 40 percent above the prices that could be set by moderately sized factories; some foundaries, by the same means, have created similar monopolies in various parts of France; the Anzin coal mines, initially divided into several concessions that were to form as many competing enterprises, became the property of a single company which, thanks to this monopoly, has been able—while keeping its workers in extreme poverty—to reap enormous profits; an even more extensive concentration was recently accomplished by the Loire mining company, which brought together in a single enterprise over sixty rival operations, some of which were already considerable; the foundation of this monopoly offered such a promising opportunity for profits—taken from consumers or workers—that it allowed the company to increase almost tenfold, almost overnight, the market value of the merged mines; certain speculators, by selling shares that, before the merger, barely had a recognized value of 100,000 francs, were able to make a profit of 900,000 francs in a matter of months.

The cornering of the means of production with the aim of establishing monopolies is already prohibited by our laws, but these laws have never been applied to powerful monopolists.

Scandalous fortunes have been stolen in France, especially over the past fifteen years, by the methods we have just described; they have rightly provoked the indignation of the honest part of the population, and it would be in vain for the public authorities of the time to try to hide their deplorable weakness—or their complicity—under the pretense that repressing these acts of plunder would have infringed upon the freedom of transactions, or that the culpability of the methods used could not be established without great difficulty; the freedom of transactions can never legitimately include the freedom to steal, in whatever form it appears, and as for the difficulty of repression, greater challenges are overcome every day in the prosecution of far less significant crimes; the impunity of the plunder in question has no other cause than the all-too-real demoralization of the public authorities.

Theft committed in the name of Philanthropy

We could find no less peculiar a term to designate the class of legal thefts we are now going to address.

Despite the many moral imperfections still found in present-day societies, it cannot be denied that [372] sentiments of benevolence, pity, and compassion for suffering are more vivid and more universal today than they have ever been; this is sufficiently proven by many facts, notably by the growing number of free charitable societies and by the abundance of voluntary donations collected whenever it is a matter of aiding populations struck by flood, fire, or other calamities. Legal charity—that is, charity conducted by the government through taxation—is therefore less necessary today than at any previous time, and we believe it could be eliminated without resulting in fewer misfortunes being alleviated.

Coming to the aid of our fellow human beings when we see them in need and suffering is not, in our view, an act that should be imposed or carried out by public authority, because by replacing private benevolence, it makes the latter seem much less necessary, and, without ever being able to replace it completely, it tends to suppress it.

The total amount of public aid distributed each year in France is certainly far less than that freely provided by private benevolence and the multitude of charitable associations independent of the government; now, it is certain that the latter forms of aid would be incomparably more abundant still, were they not limited by the thought that the unfortunate can turn to public institutions. Legal charity, therefore, does not increase the abundance of aid, and on the contrary, it is very likely that it significantly reduces it.

Now, what will happen if we attempt to carry out the reckless declarations made after the February Revolution, concerning the right to public assistance or to a job that the State should guarantee to all? Is it not obvious that the application of such principles, if it were practicable, would tend to utterly eliminate private charity, and in time extinguish all sentiments of benevolence and compassion?

And on the other hand, if public assistance is no longer conditional, if it becomes a right for all who can claim it, if each person is relieved by the State of the responsibility for his own existence and that of his family, what a wide path is opened to the spread of all the vices that generate poverty and to the steady increase in the number of the unfortunate and parasitic classes! As soon as assistance becomes an guaranteed right, there is no longer any reason not to give in to all the impulses of improvidence and idleness: why tire oneself, why seek to acquire or develop useful skills, why restrain one’s needs, why refrain from having large and numerous families, when in any case one has the right to claim from society [373] an adequate means of subsistence? With the full exercise of such a right, it is quite clear that the parasitic population will increase every day at the expense of the productive population, and that the situation of the providers, becoming more and more intolerable, will cause their emigration into the ranks of the assisted, and they will follow a similar course; society as a whole will soon find itself in a position to claim the right to public assistance; then we will have to ask how the State will be able to guarantee this right.

Let us conclude that no one has the right to live at the expense of others, and that the philanthropic views of our modern reformers would have no other result than to replace the embroidered aristocracies from which we have freed ourselves with an indigent aristocracy, which would be no less oppressive to true workers.

Administrative theft

All governmental or administrative functions that do not serve a useful purpose for the nation, and all services that are useful but more complicated than necessary or remunerated beyond their value, constitute an act of plunder to the detriment of the mass of taxpayers and to the benefit of the classes who draw their livelihood from public revenue.

The tendency to live at the expense of others by occupying a government job is not new among us; the historian of Louis XI wrote, three and a half centuries ago, that the French of his time cared for nothing but offices and appointments, which they knew only too well how to exploit; and in 1819, Paul-Louis Courier, recounting this remark, added:

“Things have changed little; only this eagerness for offices and appointments (formerly reserved for noble bloodhounds [4]) has become even keener since everyone can aspire to them. However multiplied the number of positions may seem today—now comparable only to the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea—it still bears no proportion to the number of (job) seekers, and we are far from being able to satisfy everyone.”

Since Courier wrote, this plague has only grown worse; it is estimated that since 1830 alone, the number of public jobs has increased by more than one hundred thousand; France today counts, proportionally to its population, ten times more functionaries than England and thirty times more than the United States, and despite the categorization of this army of parasites, the swarm of unsuccessful applicants grows larger every day; even now it threatens to overrun everything, for it has recruited the working classes, who now press the State in their turn to take over the workshops so that it may distribute, in place of wages, public jobs and salaries. But, for heaven’s sake, when we are all functionaries or government employees, and in that capacity, working little and spending [374] far more than we can contribute—who, then, will make up the deficit? Who will fill the public treasury each year?

It is time to stop going down this slippery slope and to ask whether a revolution directed against the abuse of government power should, logically, result in the expansion of that power and the extension of its functions.

When the founders of the American Union had to determine the functions of the central government, they were far more concerned with the possible abuses of power than with the benefits that might be hoped for by undoing any limits to its actions, and their justified mistrust was not allayed by the thought that this power was, as in our case today, to come from universal suffrage. They knew that men called upon to exercise authority, however little they might share in the common flaws (of mankind) or what source their power might come from, they would not fail to abuse it if it (the power of government) extended beyond what was needed. They also knew the full value of liberty and understood very well that it becomes more limited and more precarious as the sphere of individual activity is reduced in favor of public authority. Accordingly, they proceeded to draw up the tasks of government, so to speak, by a process of elimination, by stripping it of everything that could safely be left to individual initiative, and limiting its functions to what was strictly necessary for maintaining national independence and internal order. Thus they founded the simplest, most economical, and at the same time most effective political organization known! As broad a liberty as possible, complete security, and seventy-three years of extraordinary and continuous prosperity were the fruits of this wise organization.

During the same period, France's political regime has changed eleven times without yet arriving at rational institutions, or anything that can inspire true security for the future.

As long as we see in government anything other than a means of ensuring the free and orderly development of all useful faculties—by protecting, against all violence and interference, the exercise of these faculties and the property they rightfully yield; as long as we want to see it as a power whose mission is to direct everything—industry, education, religious practice, the material interests of municipalities and provinces, etc.—in short, to command the activities of society instead of merely protecting their free development, our successive revolutions will bring no real improvement and will bear only bad fruit; our institutions will become more complex each day, the parasitic classes living at the expense of the true producers will multiply more and more, and the abyss of administrative plunder will constantly widen.

A. CLÉMENT

Endnotes

[1] (Editor's Note.) Clément says "la violation de la liberté des travaux et des transactions".

[2] (Editor's Note.) Clément says "corporations de métiers, les maîtrises et jurandes". Define better??

[3] (Editor's Note.) See Clément's entry on "Armées permanentes" in DEP.

[4] (Editor's Note.) Clément says "curée autrefois réservée à nobles limiers". "la curée" can mean either a "scramble, mad rush, or stampede" or a "daily feeding" of an animal. "Un limier" is a bloodhound. Thus Clément is saying that the "rush to get government jobs" by members of the nobility is like "bloodhounds rushing to get their daily food".