When I was a wee conservative, counting bond revenues at my mother’s knee, it was the dear lady’s practice to frighten me to death with tales of that arch-bandit, Robin Hood. The conservative wisdom was and is that no more dastardly crime lurks in the heart of man than the infamy of taking from the rich to give to the poor. Entire sweeps of political philosophy, in fact, seem to have been motivated by little else than antagonism to poor Robin and his hoods. On the other hand, an entire sweep of political reality, in this nation, was and is motivated by the reverse proposition, that it is okay to rob from the poor to give to the rich.
The Democrats have done it through a welfare system in which the poor are “client” victims who get the crumbs from the bureaucratic table which is the system’s principal purpose. They also characteristically steal the poor blind through construction projects, licenses and franchises, and such other thefts as are most appropriate to men who have risen from precinct politics.
The Republicans have done it through, most lately, the warfare state of corporate liberalism, in which the lives of the poor are daily robbed of meaning or hope so that they may be used solely as cogs in the industrial machine which is the system’s principal purpose. They also steal through the total use of the state and it’s power, its credit, its regulations, to the end of special advantage for the corporate elite, a form of theft most appropriate to men who have gone to the best schools.
![Karl Hess argues that defending individual property and freed markets does not mean apologetics for actually-existing economicarrangements or concentrations of wealth, which are dependent on colonial theft and state privilege. Quite the oppose, principles of individual property actually mean revolutionary redistribution of wealth away from state capitalists and towards workers and farmers, including support for militant reclaim-the-land movements, and the occupation of state-capitalist enterprises by organized workers and community councils.
Libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but … in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which is now called private. Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded throughand exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.
[Genuine respect for property and marks] is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom …. Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement.
This is the article that inspired Murray Rothbard’s Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,which was reprinted as MA01: All Power to the Soviets!
Support C4SS with Karl Hess’s “Property to the People! Expropriate the Expropriators!”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/86ce4dbcea13e1ddca945a4b3a79d578/tumblr_mne71niWjt1qe43a4o1_500.png)
