White-Collar Crime
by Joseph Rowlands
Socialists hate private property. They're driven by an unhealthy desire to take what they haven't earned, and property rights always get in their way. They try to hide their thievery behind terms like 'redistribution,' or they speak in terms of collectives and say we spent a trillion dollars on welfare.
They also attack the concept of property rights. They sometimes declare it to be an arbitrary construct of the rich, who use it to exploit the poor. They say that property rights are not necessary conditions of living, and we can and should get rid of them. They argue for collective property rights, meaning people can have anything they want (meaning they can have what they want, even if it belongs to someone else).
They've been somewhat successful with these arguments. Although property rights are necessary for living, violations of property rights are often considered a secondary kind of right. Notice, for instance, that you are typically allowed to use a gun in defense of your life, but not in defense of your property. People aren't allowed to shoot you, but they are allowed to destroy the material wealth you need in order to live. And you are only allowed to sit by and watch, waiting for police to show up at their convenience.
Now you can't argue against property rights in principle without dismissing the notion of theft as a valid concept. If there is no right to your property, then anyone is allowed to use it in any way he wants. That is the point of why they attack property right. But it has an unintended consequence.
One of the biggest forms of theft in terms of stolen goods is white-collar crime. To avoid needless comments about false crimes like tax-evasion, I'm restricting this discussion to fraud and theft. By objective standards, the white collar versions of these crimes are some of the worst. The wealth stolen can be orders of magnitude greater than a common theft or mugging.
So here you have crimes committed by respected members of the community, and often perpetrated against the relatively poor. Considering how much socialists hate businessmen and wealthy people, you'd think they'd be anxious to prosecute these particular criminals. The irony is that they can't argue against it in a principled way. Having dismissed property rights for their own sordid thievery, they can't then go on to argue (consistently) that theft is wrong. Their only recourse is to say that this particular theft is wrong, because it wasn't done in the name of the poor. They can't argue against it in principle. They can only declare that their own greed is somehow more noble than that of the white-collar thief.
Those who attack property rights are opening the door for thievery by obscuring its identity. Only a philosophy consistent with property rights can argue effectively against white-collar crime, since the right to property is the only defense against theft. But it's not enough to proclaim property rights. We have to take them seriously. Dismissing them as some kind of secondary right that we're not allowed to defend puts them in the category of privileges. A right you can't defend with force is not actually recognized as a right.
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