It’s more than generous of the State to make Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s birthday a national holiday.

“Why, how can you ask such a question? You are a republican.”

“A republican! Yes; but that word specifies nothing. Res publica; that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs — no matter under what form of government — may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans.”

Well! you are a democrat?”

“No.”

“What! you would have a monarchy.”

“No.”

“A constitutionalist?”

“God forbid!”

“You are then an aristocrat?”

“Not at all.”

“You want a mixed government?”

“Still less.”

“What are you, then?”

“I am an anarchist.”

“Oh! I understand you; you speak satirically. This is a hit at the government.”

“By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me….”

What is Property?

And while I’m picking on people born on January 15th, let me cite Bastiat’s reply to Proudhon:

Of course, I know that in practice the ideal principle of property is far from having full sway. Against it are conflicting factors: there are services that are not voluntary, whose remuneration is not arrived at by free bargaining; there are services whose equivalence is impaired by force or fraud; in a word, plunder exists. The legitimacy of the principle of property is not thereby weakened, but confirmed. The principle is violated; therefore, it exists. We must cease believing in anything in this world, in facts, in justice, in universal consent, in human language; or else we must admit that these two words, “property” and “plunder,” express opposite, irreconcilable ideas that can no more be identified than yes and no, light and dark, good and evil, harmony and discord. Taken literally, the famous formula, property is theft, is therefore absurdity raised to the Nth degree. It would be no less outlandish to say that theft is property; that what is legal is illegal; that what is, is not, etc.

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850),
Economic Harmonies,
“Private Property and Common Wealth”