Stealing and killing: a property-rights theory of mass murder.

• Author: Carson, Stephen W.
• Position: Viewpoint essay

[H]e who would get me into his power without my consent, would use me as he pleased, when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it.

--John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government

In the study of mass murder by governments, R. J. Rummel stands tall. His theory, which focuses our attention on the role of the state, is a giant step forward from previous theories that focused on "cultural-ethnic differences, outgroup conflict, misperception, frustration-aggression, relative deprivation, ideological imperatives, dehumanization, resource competition, etc." (Rummel [1994] 1997a, 19). Rummel has expressed his theory in a number of different ways over decades of work in this area. Oversimplifying somewhat for now, I characterize his theory as a regime-type theory: at one extreme, totalitarian dictatorships are the most deadly; authoritarian regimes are still deadly but less so; and, at the other extreme, democracies are the least deadly (see figure 1).

Besides presenting a theory that puts the state at center stage, Rummel has also made two other major contributions to this area of study. First, he has attempted to make the first full accounting of twentieth-century mass murder. No earlier investigators, for example, had tried to come up with a number for total Nazi mass-murder victims because they had focused on particular groups--Jews, Gypsies, and so forth. His most recent estimate is that 262 million civilians were killed by governments in the twentieth century. (1) Second, using what he learned about the number of government killings, he has emphasized the importance of understanding democide (his term for mass murder of civilians by government) by pointing out that as horrendous as combat deaths were in the twentieth century, the truth is that many more noncombatants were murdered.

In this article, I present an alternative theoretical approach, a property-rights theory, for understanding how governments came to slaughter unarmed civilians by the millions and tens of millions. The questions that Rummel and I are trying to answer are, first, How does a government gain the capability to murder millions of civilians? and, second, What, if anything can be done to prevent such monstrous crimes? Rummel focuses on the structure of government, pointing to the centralization of power in an authoritarian or dictatorial ruler as the primary problem and to "political freedom" and decentralization of power through democracy as the solutions. The property-rights approach, by contrast, points to systematic invasions of private-property rights as the primary enabling acts and to defense of those rights as the solution. My proposed approach implies that, contra Rummel, democracy is not part of the solution but rather part of the problem because both democratic ideology and democratic practice undermine private-property rights.

Although in broad terms the regime-type theory and the property-rights theory are complementary, they give rise to different conclusions in many respects. So I must proceed to criticize Rummel's work. First, however, I want to honor Rummel and orient the reader to this difficult and painful topic by quoting a powerful passage from his book Death by Government:

A systems approach to politics still dominates the field [of political science]. Through this lens, politics is a matter of inputs and outputs, of citizen inputs, aggregation by political parties, government determining policy, and bureaucracies implementing it. Then there is the common and fundamental justification of government that it exists to protect citizens against the anarchic jungle that would otherwise threaten their lives and property. Such archaic or sterile views show no appreciation of democide's existence and all its related horrors and suffering. They are inconsistent with a regime that stands astride society like a gang of thugs over hikers they have captured in the woods, robbing all, raping some, torturing others for fun, murdering those they don't like, and terrorizing the rest into servile obedience. This exact characterization of many past and present governments, such as Idi Amin's Uganda, hardly squares with conventional political science. ([1994] 1997a, 26) Advantages of a Property-Rights Theory of Democide

Before getting into the theory, let us think about why a property-rights approach is worthy of consideration. What does this theory offer that can supplement or amend Rummel's regime-type theory?

First, focusing on the regime type is not helpful in understanding cycles of mass murder under the same regime type--for example, the peaks and valleys of mass murder by the government of the USSR, a totalitarian dictatorship from beginning to end. A property-rights approach, however, not only suggests that a totalitarian regime would be murderous but also shows where the peaks and valleys of killing will be: the peaks would correspond to determined efforts to collectivize (that is, to massive assaults on private-property rights), and the valleys would correspond to retreats from collectivization (for example, to the New Economic Policy [NEP] period in the USSR). See figure 2.

Similarly, in the case of China, a focus on regime structure would merely indicate that China has been under a Communist dictatorship for more than fifty years.

A property-fights approach, in contrast, calls our attention to the significant changes in property rights in China in recent years and predicts that large-scale democide is unlikely, despite the regime type's being nominally the same as the one during the Great Leap Forward.

A property-rights approach gives us more insight into the dynamic of how a state gains murderous strength and the people become weak, so that the state can kill so many people. If a devil asked Rummel, "How do I murder tens of millions of people?" Rummel would have to answer, "Establish a totalitarian dictatorship." To which the devil would respond, "Fine, but how can I put myself in a position to do so?" The property-rights theory then explains that the path to mass murder and the path to a powerful, centralized state is the same and that the key is to attack private-property rights.

Socialism: From the perspective of the property-rights theory, it seems clear why the greatest mass murderers were avowed socialists instead of, say, right-wing military dictators such as Francisco Franco. Attacks on private-property rights in socialist regimes were not a side effect of another goal, such as defending the country, suppressing a dissident religious group, or attacking a particular race. Such attacks expressed the socialists' explicit and avowed ideological aim. It comes as no surprise then that the revolutionary socialists (socialists who really meant business) attacked private-property rights repeatedly in deadly waves of "collectivization," "de-kulakization," "Great Leaps Forward," and so forth.

Imperialism: The property-rights theory helps us to understand how the same type of regime can behave one way "at home" and another way abroad. At home, the regime may face resistance at every turn from long-established property-rights traditions. Abroad, the regime does not face these constraints in dealing with the "natives." A recent case in point is the gun grabbing by the U.S. forces in Iraq, in contrast to the still relatively well-armed population of the United States itself (Rockwell 2003).

Democracy: Where the regime-type theory holds up democracy as the solution to mass murder, war, and other types of regime violence, the property-rights theory argues that because the principle of democracy (at least in the modern sense) has nothing to do with the protection of private-property rights and in practice undermines such rights (Hoppe 2001, 95-106), it promotes such violence. The relevance to democide is illustrated by events in Germany, where, as F. A. Hayek argued, a period of democracy laid the groundwork for a dictator to emerge: "In Germany, even before Hitler came into power, the movement [toward centralized economic planning] had already...