Property: The Case Against the Human Rental System Based on Private Property Rights

One of Marx’s biggest blunder was to characterize the private property market economy based on human rentals as “capitalism” and as being based on “private ownership of the means of production.” The mischaracterization of the system was enthusiastically received by the supporters of the human rental system so they could pose as the defenders of private property. In fact, the system is based on violating what has always been the only legitimate basis for property appropriation, namely getting the fruits of your labor. By renting the people working in an employment firm, the employer legally appropriates 100% of both the liabilities and assets created by those people employed in the firm. Far from appropriating the positive and negative fruits of their joint labor, the employees are only one of the rented inputs and the employer pays off those wage/salary liabilities and the other input-liabilities to claim 100% of the produced outputs. This chapter explores the misperceptions about property rights in the current system (the “fundamental myth”) and associated economic theories and delves into the intellectual history of the labor theory of property—which is the juridical principle of imputation (assign legal responsibility according to de facto responsibility) applied to questions of property.