(Mises)—The right to property is considered a fundamental human right, recognized worldwide, as stated in international human rights documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is historically linked to natural rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man regarded property as “an inviolable and sacred right.”
According to Shane Courtland, Gerald Gaus and David Schmidtz, while classical liberals agree on the importance of private property, their views range from nearly anarchist to those advocating for significant state involvement. Nonetheless, property rights are generally seen as first-generation rights, intended to limit state power, and protect individuals from expropriation.
In contrast, the emergence of the social state has led to a relativization of individual rights in favor of alleged collective rights, aiming for the so-called “social justice.” This shift means that, although property rights remain “fundamental,” they are now subject to numerous limitations and conditions, diminishing their absolute nature. Modern constitutions, like the Brazilian Constitution in several articles reflect these restrictions, suggesting that property is now a relative right rather than an absolute one.
Real-world examples, such as Brazil’s low score on the Economic Freedom Index regarding property rights and legal constraints on property ownership—classified as “repressed,” with a score of 49.1 out of 100—illustrate these limitations. Issues like land expropriation without due compensation in Brazil and even the Executive Order 6102 in the US further demonstrate the constraints placed on property rights.
Monetary Assets as an Expression of Property
Precious metals and other commodities played a significant role in the evolution of money, as the use of widely-demanded goods facilitated the emergence of exchange mediums, as Carl Menger explained. The rise of financial intermediaries contributed to the universalization of exchange methods. Over time, states began to control money, establishing regulations and creating currency. The final abandonment of the gold standard in the US in 1971 marked a shift to fiat money, backed solely by political trust.
Fernando Ulrich points out that individuals have long been restricted in their choice of currency, being compelled to use state-issued money that is often devalued. Friedrich von Hayek criticized governments for failing to provide sound money and abusing their powers when not constrained by the gold standard. In any case, given its benefits as a medium of exchange, money remains a primary expression of property rights, granting holders significant power over other market assets, both in the present and across time, as stated by Menger.
Disadvantages of State-Controlled Currency
Friedrich von Hayek argued that monetary policy is a significant cause of economic instability, noting that managing public finances and regulating currency are often conflicting goals. The combination of these tasks under the same authority has led to disastrous consequences, making money a primary driver of economic fluctuations and facilitating uncontrolled public spending. Hayek stresses the urgency of separating fiscal and monetary policies to preserve a functioning market economy and individual freedom.
Another issue with state monopoly over currency is the erosion of individual control over money. State regulation can impose restrictions on currency usage. Hayek warns that government control over international currency and capital movement threatens both the global economy and personal freedom. Historical instances, like the confiscation of individual savings in Brazil or confiscation of gold in the US, exemplify these risks. Saifedean Ammous links fiat currency issues to the relativization of property rights, asserting that individuals never fully control state money; they merely possess it at the government’s discretion.
Bitcoin and Its Impact on Contemporary Legal Order
The shift from gold standard to fiat currency has allowed unchecked state monetary issuance and debt. Friedrich von Hayek argued that while historical government control of money seemed justified, it has led to significant problems, including monopolistic practices that limit consumer choice.
Recent technological advancements, particularly the emergence of Bitcoin and its blockchain system, challenge this monopoly by enabling the creation of “private currencies,” allowing the proposal of Hayek to become true. Bitcoin operates as a digital asset that does not rely on state control or centralized control of any kind and offers individuals a means to manage their financial assets without intermediaries.
Bitcoin is a scarce digital asset, as it exists uniquely within its blockchain, which prevents double-spending. Its supply is regulated by a decentralized network (with thousands of nodes worldwide that are also responsible for the network integrity), ensuring that it cannot be manipulated like fiat currency. Bitcoin can serve as a store of value, and its market acceptance reinforces its utility as money.
Transactions can occur in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner or through exchanges, although the latter introduces intermediaries, slightly undermining one of Bitcoin’s core principles. However, users can transfer their holdings to private wallets to regain that direct control.
In that sense, Bitcoin provides absolute ownership and control over assets, embodying the purest form of property rights. It operates independently of state backing, allowing individuals to use it as money regardless of official currency definitions. True economic freedom requires the ability to negotiate based on mutually-agreed terms without government monopoly on currency issuance.
Conclusion
The decentralized nature of Bitcoin, stored across a global network, enhances its independence from state authority, reaffirming classical property rights. The emergence of Bitcoin and its blockchain structure revitalizes property rights, providing a crucial point of resistance against repeated violations and relativizations of these rights, bringing them closer to their classical concept of being inviolable.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
