On: Displaced Ukrainians risk home seizure under Russian law

Diary Entry

The news today presents a spectacle of such profound moral dislocation that it chills the sympathy in my breast. A state, having seized a territory by force, now constructs a legal apparatus to dispossess the inhabitants. They are told they must come and register their property under new masters, a return that would imperil their very persons. This is not law; it is a ledger entry in a grand theft, dressed in the robes of administration.

The impartial spectator within any reasonable person recoils. The sympathy we feel for those who have fled violence is now met with a calculated, institutionalised cruelty. It is the very opposite of that natural desire for mutual accommodation which forms the basis of society. Here, the institutional channels are designed not to harness self-interest for public benefit, but to pervert it for predatory conquest. The merchant of state power, having monopolised force, now conspires against the public - the public being, in this case, the rightful owners of hearth and home.

One sees the dreadful efficiency of it. The division of labour in tyranny: the soldier clears the field, the bureaucrat draws the form, the judge stamps the paper. Each performs their narrow operation with a dreadful proficiency, and the whole manufactures dispossession. The worker in the pin factory is stupefied by the repetition of his single task; the functionary in this machine is stupefied by the legalism of his, until he can no longer see the human ruin his signature authorises. They see only the procedure, not the property; the registration, not the right.

It confirms my oldest suspicion: that the greatest danger to the common meal arises when power and profit are consolidated in the same hands, and the usual checks of justice and competition are swept away. This is not commerce, which requires a measure of mutual consent. This is confiscation masquerading as contract, leveraging fear instead of fair exchange. The invisible hand does not operate here; it has been amputated by the bayonet. All that remains is the fist, slowly closing around another man’s land.