Benjamin Franklin on La Part Maudite (Accursed Share)

Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris, 25 Dec. 1783

The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.

All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

Max Stirner's response to Franklin (and Marx):

"By lesé-society [offending society] we commit a crime against the community; but the community can never commit a crime against us, because it has no rights over us."

from Google AI:

Max Stirner argues that the state and private property are two sides of the same coin. In his view, "private property" is an illusion because you do not truly own your possessions; the state merely allows you to hold them as long as you follow its laws. True property, according to Stirner, is based entirely on individual might and power, not legal rights.

The Illusion of Private Property

Stirner explains that what people call "private property" is actually state property held on a lease.

• "In the state there is no property, no property of the individual, but only state property. Only through the state have I what I have, as I am only through it what I am. My private property is only that which the state leaves to me of its, cutting off others from it (making it private); it is state property."
• "Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction."

The State as a Subjugator

The state's primary purpose is to protect its own monopoly on violence and control, which requires crushing individual autonomy.

• "The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him."
• "The State and society as enemies of competition among individuals... The State establishes and protects property rights so a person without money cannot really compete freely."

Egoistic Property vs. Legal Right

For Stirner, rights do not exist in nature. Ownership is a continuous act of force and personal willpower.

• "My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property."
• "Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property... What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing."
• "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"

Beyond Capitalism and Communism

Stirner rejects capitalism because it reduces workers to slaves of capital. However, he also rejects communism because it replaces the master of the state with the master of "society".

"If it is said socialistically, society gives me what I require,—then the egoist says, I take what I require."

On the Union of Egoists