Collectivism Is the Epitome of Power-Based Thinking, that It Is Appropriate for Some People to Exercise Coercive Authority over the Lives and Property of Others

In his great book Boundaries of Order, Shaffer argues that people can best solve their problems and progress through peaceful social cooperation. To cooperate peacefully, they need to delimit property rights. As Shaffer puts it, “If we are to have the resilience to make life-enhancing responses to the world—to assess risks and other costs, and to settle upon an efficacious course of action—we must enjoy the autonomy to act upon our portion of the world without interference from others, a liberty to be found only in a system of privately owned property.”

Shaffer takes great pains to show how people can resolve whatever problems arise from their mutual interaction through setting the appropriate boundaries of their property rights. In settling their disputes on an individual basis, they manifest their respect for one another:

Private property, as a system of social order, reflects the extent to which we are willing to acknowledge one another’s autonomy and to limit the range of our own activities. Private property is the operating principle that makes real Immanuel Kant’s admonition: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.”

Unfortunately, there is another way that people can choose to act. They can decide to solve their problem collectively, through resort to the State. Shaffer leaves us in no doubt what he thinks of this:

The twentieth century demonstrated to thoughtful men and women the totally inhumane nature of any system premised on political collectivism. A sign on a church in the former East Berlin that read “nothing grows from the top down,” succinctly identified the anti-life nature of all forms of institutionally-directed, collective control over people. Collectivism is the ultimate expression of the pyramidal model of the universe. It is the epitome of power-based thinking (i.e., that it is appropriate for some people to exercise coercive authority over the lives and property of others).

--David Gordon, introduction to A Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property, by Butler Shaffer (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2013), 11-13.