which by law, custom, or their own feelings they are restrained from mutual injury.
Individualism, as ordinarily understood, not only takes the policeman and the law court for granted. It also takes the rights of property for granted. But what is meant by the rights of property? In ordinary use the phrase means just that system to which long usage has accustomed us. This is a system under which a man is free to acquire by any method of production or exchange within the limits of the law whatever he can of land, consumable goods, or capital; to dispose of it at his own will and pleasure for his own purposes, to destroy it if he likes, to give it away or sell it as it suits him, and at death to bequeath it to whomsoever he will. The State, it is admitted, can take a part of a man’s property by taxation. For the State is a necessity, and men must pay a price for security; but in all taxation the State on this view is taking something from a man which is “his,” and in so doing is justified only by necessity. It has no “right” to deprive the individual of anything that is his in order to promote objects of its own which are not necessary to the common order.
