Is the Property of the 1% Legitimate?

The dominant ideology in our society would have us believe that whatever results from capitalist markets is presumptively just. The idea is that whatever the 1% gets from the market is authoritatively theirs. Thus, pre-tax income appears as something "natural" and taxation appears as something alien, which swoops in from the outside to "intervene" and "interfere" with the "natural" workings of the market.

Some accept this ideology, even as they call for increased taxation on the 1%. While arguing that the present wealth of the 1% is excessive, many continue to assume that pre-tax incomes in capitalist societies are in some sense "natural" and presumptively legitimate. This is expressed in the following thought: "maybe the rich should be taxed more heavily, but at least some of they have is legitimate theirs."

Now, within the horizons of this liberal perspective, I certainly agree that the wealth of the 1% is in some sense "excessive". I also agree that unmet human needs override any ownership claims that might be invoked to argue against re-distributive taxation in a capitalist society. But this concedes far too much to the rich and powerful. We shouldn't just say that the wealth of the 1% is excessive; we should say that it is illegitimate through and through.

To talk of redistribution, after all, is to talk of altering some prior production and distribution of goods. But how does that prior production and distribution come about? And what makes it legitimate in the first place?

It's obvious that the 1% has a vested interest in making sure that the majority of the population think that their wealth is legitimate. It hardly matters whether it's aristocratic privilege, family lineage, racial or sexual supremacy that makes a group dominant. Throughout history dominant groups always try to preserve the basis of their dominance.

Now, dominant groups have at least two (analytically distinct, but in practice interwoven) means of maintaining their dominance. The first is obvious. Dominant groups typically monopolize control of the means of exerting physical repression. If you push too hard against the status quo, dominant groups will always (if possible) push back with physical repression in order to protect their dominant status. This explains the violent force used against the Occupy movement all over the country.

But dominant groups can't maintain their dominance through naked violence alone, at least not for long. Thus all ruling classes are compelled to stabilize their rule by telling stories to the ruled about why their power and privilege is legitimate. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

Think of the "divine right" of Kings, the "positive good" doctrine that purported to justify the dominance of Slave owners, the so-called "civilizing mission" that justified colonial domination, or the supposedly "scientific" expertise that justifies the power of bureaucracies. The stories the rich tell about the supposed legitimacy of their wealth are part of a long tradition of lying to the masses to the protect privilege and power of the few.

What stories do the rich tell in our society? By my count there are at least four. Now, it's worth noting that growing numbers of people don't need to be told that these stories are bogus. Millions of people are coming around to the idea that the wealth of the 1% isn't simply excessive, but fundamentally illegitimate. Still, it's worthwhile from time to time to puncture the self-image and self-justifications of those in power. It's worthwhile to go through and debunk the familiar myths handed down from above that purport to show us that the wealth of the ruling class is legitimate.

One common story is that the members of the 1% deserve what they have because they earned it. More precisely, they deserve what they get from the market because it represents their just reward for productive activity. According to this story, the market rewards productive contributions. Thus, the rich deserve their wealth because it must be their proportional reward for their productive contributions to society. Unfortunately this is nothing but a fairy tale. Set aside the bank bailouts showered upon failing financial elites. Capitalists—even the ideal capitalists of the textbook—earn from owning, not from working. The pure capitalist makes precisely zero productive contributions to society and does no productive labor. They pay others to do it and reap the rewards of what they produce. So it can't be that the profits raked in by capitalists are what they deserve for productive contributions to society, since they need not do anything productive.

The second story, related to the first, is that the wealth of the rich is legitimate because it represent their reward for having taken bold risks. The thought is this: capitalists assume risk when they invest their money, so whatever they get in profits must be legitimate. They could have lost it all, but they didn't, so what they get is legitimately theirs. But though this story is told often enough, it is actually quite obscure, even by its own lights. And then there's the fact that workers are forced to assume all of the risk (and then some) assumed by their employer, even though they are entitled to precisely zero of the benefits if the risk pays off. This story is ultimately unconvincing. Rather than proving that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate, upon reflection it undermines the legitimacy of their riches.

But there's a third story that we've yet to consider. That story is that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate because it arises from nothing except free market exchanges. If a voluntary exchange between two consenting adults is unobjectionable, and the accumulation of wealth by the rich arises from nothing but consensual market transactions, it must follow that their wealth is legitimately theirs. And anyone who disagrees must think that a third party should paternalistically "prohibit capitalist acts between consenting adults". But that can't be right. So the wealth of the 1% is legitimate.

Though this argument is rhetorically powerful at first glance, it falls apart rather quickly on closer inspection. First of all, in order for anything to be transferred or exchanged legitimately, it has to already be legitimate property. The market can't create legitimate titles; it can only circulate existing titles. But how did unowned things come to be legitimate property in the first place? How did, for example, natural resources or large swaths of lame come to be private property? By what historical process did society's means of production come to be the private property at all? A quick glance at history shows that violence, brute force, conquest, war, genocide, colonial expropriation and slavery explain the origins of this property. This is what Marx called "primitive accumulation." Insofar as the wealth of the 1% rests on a history of violence and obvious injustice, it is illegitimate, even if acquired through "voluntary" exchanges.

But there's an even deeper problem with this argument. Even if the historical legacy of "primitive accumulation" didn't undermine the legitimacy of the origins of existing property, the idea that capitalism is nothing but an aggregation of genuinely "free" market transactions is ludicrous. Unequal relations of power are constitutive of market exchanges. The equality of citizens deliberative together in a democratic general assembly is never reproduced in the market place. If I, for example, gouge you for a bottle of water during a drought, and you relent because there's nothing else for you to do but cough up $200 for the water, that is a "free" market exchange. You consent to buy the water and I consent to sell it. There are, to be sure, massive asymmetries of power between us, but the transaction satisfies the criterion of "consensual capitalist act between adults." But it is clearly illegitimate for me to profit from the misery and vulnerability of others. Less extreme cases bear the same problems. Workers, who by definition own and control no significant means of production, are forced to work for a capitalist to earn a living, even if they can choose which capitalist work for. But that mere fact gives capitalists a large degree of social power over workers. The labor contract struck between the individual, atomized worker and the employer, then, is hardly free or fair. But it fits the bill of "consensual capitalist acts between adults", because what other choice does the isolated, individual worker have except to consent to her exploitation so that she can earn a living? So much for the virtues of "free" market exchanges as a way of conferring legitimacy on the wealth of the 1%.

The fourth story is that the wealth of the rich is legitimate because it is necessary to produce the greatest overall amount of beneficial economic consequences for all. That is, massive wealth for the 1% is a necessary precondition for economic growth and prosperity. Without it, they would have no incentive to do all of the allegedly marvelous things that they do which, we're told, tend to produce jobs and prosperity for all.

For my money, this is by far the weakest argument of them all. As we've seen, capitalists don't need to do any work at all. They need not do anything productive to earn their profits. So, this argument doesn't even get off the ground, because it assumes that we actually need capitalists to have prosperity and a functioning system of social production. But the fact is that we don't. We do all the work: the boss needs us, but we don't need the boss.

The most obvious objection to this argument, however, arises out of the fact that we're in the midst of a protracted global economic crisis right now. And, perversely, profits have soared to record levels amidst sky-high unemployment and economic misery for the 99%. What's more, the misery of the 99% is directly tied to the record profits which have been largely reaped through bailouts and austerity. But this argument suggests that the cause of our misery is necessary to produce something the 99% does not presently enjoy, namely prosperity and economic security.

A more specific version of the above argument is that the wealth of capitalists is necessary to incentivize innovation. But this argument rests on nothing. It's not as if we have experimental data that prove that all non-capitalist means of generating innovations are flawed. Open-source software is an obvious counter-example, and there are too many others to name. Moreover, as I've already explained, capitalists don't actually do the innovating. That's what they pay R&D departments for (if, in fact, they pay them... often corporate R&D is public subsidized through universities). So the innovation incentive argument simply doesn't show us that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate.

Things aren't looking so good for the idea that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate. It is being undermined daily. After all, the mere fact that the State has to resort to acts of violence to repress resistance and protest from below shows that it's ideological hegemony is fractured and incomplete.

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Private Property and Freedom

In the previous post, I poked holes in the attempt by many on the Right to ground politics on an allegedly fundamental right to private property. Now, it hardly needs to be said that what moves ordinary people in political argument is not lectures about natural rights. Far more moving is talk of freedom, liberation, emancipation. And for good reason. Liberation is, after all, a far more worthy and valuable goal than the abstract, troubled notion of a "natural right" to property.

Unsurprisingly, Right-wing defenders of private property in the means of production have tended to try to clothe their arguments in the language of freedom. More often than not, it is simply assumed that there is a one-to-one identity between private property rights and freedom. As I've argued elsewhere, once we reflect on this assumption it quickly becomes clear that it is false. But let's spend a moment spelling out why.

What is freedom? Right-wingers can't respond to this question by saying "freedom is not having one's right to property infringed upon", for this is circular. We already know that Right-wingers think there is a fundamental right to private property. What we want to know is why we should believe them that there's an intrinsic link between the institution of private property and freedom. So, the answer to our question can't be that freedom is private property and private property is freedom, for that begs the question.

Suppose, then, that a Right-winger tries the following argument: Private property rights equip an owner of some thing with freedom to do as she pleases with that thing without interference from others. To violate the right, then, is to curtail freedom. That's the connection between property rights and freedom.

So far so good. But this argument is hopelessly incomplete. First of all, the argument lacks the appropriate scope to help us know what a free society would look like. It only focuses on one particular owner of some good and tells us that interference with her ability to dispose of that good as she pleases would limit her freedom. It surely does. But societies are much bigger, much more complex affairs than this example lets on. When one individual owns a thing, that presupposes the non-ownership of all other individuals in the society. Ownership, then, isn't a relation between individual persons and objects. It is a social relation: it relates owners to non-owners in specific ways, detailing what each party may and may not do. So, every claim to ownership entails a claim to non-ownership, a claim to exclusion, on the part of others. But, non-ownership, insofar as it excludes non-owners from the use of certain goods, is freedom-limiting. If I lack food or shelter, private property law will coercively prevent me from camping out on a rich person's land and eating fruit from trees growing on it. If I want to find shelter and food on the land of the wealthy, I am coercively prevented from doing so by the regime of private property. That is a very real limit on my freedom: I am coercively prevented from doing that thing that I'd like to do by external force. Families that are being forcibly removed from their homes during the economic crisis hardly need to be told that this coercive process severely limits their freedom to live without interference.

So what does the Right say about such cases? They say that the restriction on the freedom of the non-owner is right and just. The state should intervene on the behalf of the owner. But why? Because, they'll likely say, the "owner has rights". But why?

Here they can tell a story (like the ones refuted in the previous post) about why we supposedly have such rights. Or they can tell a story about why the owner supposedly deserves her land because she worked for it, etc. But what they can't say is that we have such rights because they promote freedom, since the very case we're considering is one in which the freedom of a non-owner is denied! It's vacuous to say that "freedom is curtailed for the sake of freedom" -for what is it that decides that the freedom of the owner should trump that of the non-owner?

Let's change gears for a moment. Suppose you wanted to create a society with maximum overall freedom in it. Ownership, as we've seen, is a social relationship that regulates owners and non-owners. So there's a question of whether different ways of organizing these social relationships make for more or less freedom. Which of the following arrangements, for example, generate more overall freedom?

1. A society in which 2% of the population owns 98% of the property.
2. A society in which the ownership of property is more or less equally distributed.

To be sure, this is a rather abstract, and problematic, question to ask. But it makes one thing clear. It looks as though the freedom of the propertyless 98% of the population in (1) is going to be much less than it would be in (2). Insofar as the vast majority of the population is propertyless, their freedom to live without facing coercive state interference on behalf the owners (constituting only 2% of the population) of the majority of society's property is severely limited. It is obvious, then, that there is more overall freedom in society (2). So imagine the following scenario. Imagine we're in society (1) and, we ask a Right-winger who, supposedly, believes that freedom is the most fundamental political value the following: "Shouldn't we reorganize our society so that it's more like (2) and less like (1)?". The Right-winger will, of course, say no. That would interfere with the property rights of the 2% who own most of the property. But in saying this, the Right-winger shows her true colors. Freedom-enhancing changes to society are not to be undertaken if they interfere with the "sacred" institution of private property. So private property rights trump freedom for those on the Right who (unjustly) call themselves "liberatarians".

But how is it putatively "natural" property rights are supposedly so fundamental and important that we can't even violate them to promote greater individual freedom? My response would be that they aren't so fundamental or important. In fact I don't even think there's any reason to think that there are such things as "natural" property rights at all. Property is a social institution governing the use of certain things. It can be configured in all kinds of different ways--depending on the kind of society we're talking about. It seems to me insane to claim that human beings by nature come packaged with "rights" to particular, specific institutional arrangements that fit cleanly with the functional demands of a modern capitalist economy. For most of human history such a thing would have made no sense.

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Is there a right to private property?

The idea of a "right to private property" is often lumped in with other allegedly fundamental rights (e.g. right to free speech, due process, etc.). But do human beings, by nature, have such a right? What is the basis of the often-invoked right to property? Everyone knows that in existing capitalist societies (take the US for example) there is an intricate system of property law. Although ownership is often thought of as a relationship between an owner and some owned good, ownership is actually a relationship between owners and non-owners. Ownership specifies what the owner (and everyone who's not the owner) can and can't do with some owned thing (e.g. I can use my pencil for writing but I can't use it to stab you, you may not use my pencil without my consent, etc.) Ownership, then, is about social relations. The concept of ownership would not make sense on a planet inhabited by one lone human being. But if social justice is, in part, about what kind of social relationships we want to stand with respect to each other, shouldn't the basic structure of ownership be up for grabs in a discussion of social justice? Isn't it obvious that political struggles for justice should seek to reconfigure the ownership relations?

Not according to many on the Right. They often claim that the powers of property owners are sacrosanct and should trump all other concerns. At least two different strategies of argument are typically pursued here. I'm separating them out for the sake of clarity, but it should be noted that Right-wingers tend to run them together and confuse the two.

The first may be called "consequentialist" or, if you like, utilitarian. It argues that private property rights must be kept at arms length from the political will of the demos. Why? Because private property rights, in the context of a large-scale capitalist economy, tend to produce the greatest overall output, making everyone better off than they would otherwise be. Reconfiguring private property rights in the means of production, say, would threaten the ability of the system to "deliver the goods" and, consequently, would tend to decrease overall utility. According to this utilitarian-style argument, firm private property rights are not, strictly speaking, natural or sacrosanct (because if an empirical argument showing that they lead to sub-optimal economic consequences came along, it would invalidate them). But, since proponents of this argument do think that emphasizing private property rights tends to produce the greatest overall economic pie, they think such rights are here to stay. This argument is distinctive because it doesn't claim that property rights are self-evident or natural. They are only valuable, this argument implies, insofar as they produce certain good consequences at the marco-level. Far-Right thinkers such as Von Mises and Hayek, as well as big international institutions like the IMF, have made arguments of this kind in defense of "stable" property rights. Say what you like about this argument, at least it is clear and falsifiable.

The second argumentative strategy takes it cue from natural law. It argues that there should be firm private property rights not because of the macroeconomic consequences that such rights produce, but because human beings naturally possess such rights. Traditionally, natural law was based on theology. Such and such rights are supposed to accord with God's law. Of course, religious rationale for legal institutions has tended to lose its authority since the onset of modernity and for good reasons. First, even if there is a God, and even if "he" did build a natural moral law into the furniture of the universe, there's still a difficult question: how do we know the precise, specific content of this law? It's not as if we can simply look at nature and see specific institutional proposals like "a right to private property" written into the landscape. So the question remains: how do we know that the specific content of natural law includes an individual right to appropriate all sorts of things (from natural resources, to personal items, to telecommunications grids, to large-scale means of production) and claim them as our private property? Why isn't there, as Hillel Steiner has argued, a natural right of access to the means of production? And how could a natural law theorist even dispute Steiner's argument without offering reasons in favor of her preferred list of rights, thereby invalidating the whole natural law enterprise? If the natural law theorist begins to respond to critics of her list with reasons in defense of her position, she puts the whole enterprise in jeopardy since the list of natural rights (in traditional versions of the view) is supposed to rest on God's natural law, not reasoned argument.

So, it doesn't take much reflection to see that the "natural right to private property" rests on thin air. Rather than being handed down from God, a more plausible story is that the typical list of allegedly "natural rights" are just institutions preferred by dominant groups at a particular time who then go on to claim that their preferences are the natural, timeless will of God. It's brilliant, really: you get to put whatever you like on the schedule of natural rights, and then no one can really question them because, according to your story, they are simply the dictates of God's natural law. To invoke such natural rights in an argument against the Left is simply to invoke Hocus Pocus. And it won't do to set the theology aside and claim that such a natural right is simply "self evident", for it clearly is not.

Of course, there are secular defenses of the right to private property that aren't based on utilitarian reasoning. One route, taken by Hegel, is to argue that private property rights are crucial to moral development. This is a highly idiosyncratic argument, and it's not often that those on the Right invoke it, so we can set it aside. Another secular route would be to lean on the idea of "self ownership". Self-ownership says that we own our own person in the same way that we own external objects in the world. We may therefore do whatever we like with our own body, and, accordingly with our own labor. When we labor to produce something, we mix what we own (our body) with what we don't own (some external object). Through this mixing we can be said to come to have a legitimate claim to own the external thing we labored to produce. Thus, when someone does something with my property without my consent, they're actually injuring my personal integrity (since my property, on this model, is supposedly an extension of my individual ownership in my own person). In this way, self-ownership could serve as a foundation for the idea of a fundamental right to property.

Self-ownership has a certain appeal at first because it seems to explain the (plausible) thought that we should enjoy a control over our own person that should never be violated by another. In the context of abortion rights, in particular, self-ownership looks like a plausible premise (e.g. I own my body, so the government shouldn't tell me what I can and can't do with it). But, upon reflection, it actually turns out that self-ownership is not the best explanation of this thought, and it actually entails a host of quite implausible consequences as well. For example, self-ownership equates our ownership of our person with our ownership of things. It therefore reifies our person, and equates it with exchangeable objects in a way that is implausible. Human beings enjoy a status distinct from mere objects and commodities, and self-ownership simply doesn't capture this status. Moreover, self-ownership implies that I may justifiably sell myself into slavery. Robert Nozick famously bites the bullet here and accepts that this conclusion follows from his so-called "libertarian" position. Thus, a slave society, in his opinion, could be a just society (even if everyone except one person was a slave). Many think that alone is a reductio ad absurdum. And then there are big problems with the labor-mixing story. How exactly is this supposed to work? If I come upon an unowned clearing in the woods and want to claim it for myself by building a fence around it, what do I thereby come to own? The whole field, or just the area right underneath the fence where I mixed my labor? Or suppose that I dump a can of tomato juice into a lake and it disperses widely... do I then come to own the whole lake or only those parts where the tomato molecules have dispersed? Or suppose I fly a helicopter around spraying water droplets... You get the picture. This notion of labor-mixing is a half-baked idea at best.

But let's grant the idea of self-ownership for a moment and see how well it actually justifies private property rights in capitalist societies. Suppose I'm a capitalist, how is it supposed to turn out that my self-ownership and personal integrity is violated when I am taxed? It's highly unclear. First off, it's not as if I mixed my labor with anything that I own. I'm after all, not a producer. I don't labor to produce the commodities that my company sells on the market. Yet, in capitalist societies, I of course have exclusive ownership rights over all the products my employees produce. In what way does self-ownership help us justify this right of ownership over the surplus value produced by my employees? Again, it's highly unclear. Sure, I own my person (we've granted that). But how is my personal integrity supposed to be violated by paying taxes on the profits my company earns as the result of others labor? If anything, self-ownership suggests that I, qua capitalist, am doing something unsavory by appropriating the surplus value produced by the labor of my employees. If anything, the fuzzy idea of self-ownership provides a quasi-argument not dissimilar to the Marxist charge of exploitation. As many so-called "left-libertarians" have argued, a political theory founded on self-ownership seems to end up being far more critical of capitalism, and far more left-wing, than hard-right "libertarians" like Nozick and Hayek have realized.

But, of course, so-called "libertarian" arguments that rely upon self-ownership don't use such real-world examples. The arguments they use to support their favored policies always begin with some individual who is alone in the universe. They frequently use the example of Robinson Crusoe, which is laughable. This individual, they argue, begins in a world where nothing is owned, mixes her labor with a raw natural substrate, and thereby comes to legitimately own it. How, they then ask, can it be just to intervene violently to force her to give up this thing she owns? Doesn't this violate her person in an intrusive way? Maybe it does. But we have to be clear that we're not talking about reality. We're talking about an almost sci-fi scenario that is contrary to fact. We're also talking about a scenario that is internally contradictory: an isolated individual allegedly in a "state of nature" who, despite her isolation, still brought with her all of the fruits of social life (e.g. language, culture, the concept of "ownership", etc. etc.). Such contrary to fact scenarios prove nothing about complex modern societies in which everything is produced through dense networks of social labor. No individual, completely on her own, could even produce a pencil if she tried. Too much socially produced knowledge, technology, and raw material extraction are required for one individual to accomplish alone. So the so-called "libertarian" argument is a non-starter.

So where does this leave the "right to private property"? I think it makes it look rather implausible indeed. I haven't said anything to impugn the utilitarian, economistic argument, but I think you can see that it is wildly implausible. Natural law is a non-starter, for it rests on spooky metaphysical ideas which, even if they were plausible, hardly justify something so specific and modern as a "right to private property". And the idea of self-ownership, apart from being ill-founded itself, doesn't even do the work of justifying property rights that it purports to do.

So there is no sacrosanct, natural right to private property. It is wrong for me to come into your apartment and fool with your toothbrush. But that would be wrong in a socialist society as well. And we don't need some fancy natural right to property to say why. Moreover, private property in the means of production is a much different affair from possessing certain kinds of personal property (e.g. your toothbrush). And owning credit-default swaps and collarteralized debt obligations is not the same thing as enjoying exclusive control of the sandwich you just spent the last hour making yourself for lunch. Rather than help us make sense of these cases, the idea of a "right to private property" obscures things. I think the Left should be confident in denying that there is such a right at all. It is basically non-sense. What the Left is after is a society free of domination of all forms, an egalitarian social order in which oppression and relations of exploitation are a thing of the past. Subordinating all politics to the protection of allegedly natural property rights stops us from even approximating that goal. Harping on the idea of this right is nothing more than an apologia for a system whose legitimacy is losing ground by the day.

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More on the Origins of Private Property

"The first man [sic] who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his [sic] head to say, "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him [sic], was the true founder of civil society. The human race would have been spared endless crimes, wars, murders, and horrors if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled the ditch and cried out to his fellow men, 'Do not listen to this impostor! You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth to no one!" - (Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality)

A while ago, I posted on the origins of private property and aired out a couple of broad questions raised by the sort of thoughts articulated above by Rousseau: why was the original privatization of parts of the earth not a theft of what rightly should (have continued to) be held in common?

As Cohen puts it, "in the history of anything that is now privately owned there was at least one moment at which something privately unowned was taken into private ownership." Thus, if "someone claims a right so something they legally own, we may ask, apart from how they in particular came to own it, with what right it came to be anyone's private property at all".

Now most of the time this is a topic that the Right does well to avoid. When topics like the nationalization of natural resources are broached, the Right-wing response is to cry 'theft!', since those who own them today supposedly came to own them by just means (i.e. they bought the titles to them). But this obscures the question of why certain natural resources should be thought of as potential objects of private property at all.

Interestingly, those concerned to defend private property under capitalism have tended to focus most all of their energies on circulation, acquisition, trade and transfers. But very little of their energies have been spent explaining how the institution of private property with respect to certain resources, for example, was originally justified. If, as Cohen points out, the "market is merely a redistribution of titles which buying and selling are themselves unable to create", then we have to know how "the titles which necessarily precede market activity acquire legitimacy in the first place".

One historically important account of the creation of private property is given by John Locke. Locke argued that "an agent may appropriate (as private property) what he [sic] mixes his labor with, provided that he [sic] leaves enough and as good for others and does not waste what he takes".

I think the interesting part of this account is the thought about "leaving enough and as good for others". But this is not, in general, the part of Locke's account that you hear most frequently from those on the Right who actually talk about this stuff. They prefer to focus on the "mixing one's labor" part. But a quick glance at this part of Locke's theory reveals that it is the most dubious aspect of his account.

Even Robert Nozick, probably the smartest defender of capitalism to date, ridicules this aspect of Locke's theory. For example, in Anarchy, State and Utopia Nozick notes that:

"Locke views property rights in an unowned object as originating through someone's mixing his [sic] labor with it. But what are the boundaries of what labor is mixed with? If a private astronaut clears a place on Mars, has he mixed his labor with (so that he comes to own) the whole planet, or the whole uninhabited universe, or just a particular plot? Which plot does an act bring under ownership? The minimal area such that an act decreases entropy in that area, and not elsewhere? Can virgin land (for the purposes of ecological investigation by high-flying airplane) come under ownership by a Lockean process? Building a fence around a territory presumably would make one the owner of only the fence (and the land immediately underneath it)."

He continues:

"Why isn't mixing what I own with what I don't a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I dont? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?"

Clearly this isn't so simple and, as Nozick points out, there are a lot of aporias facing the Lockean idea of 'mixing labor' with an unowned object.

*One clarificatory note here: when I speak of private property I am not, in the first instance, referring to someone's private collection of baseball cards, their bedroom, their 'personal belongings' and so forth. I'm interested first of all in the big picture, i.e. the large-scale institutions, natural resources, energy, land, etc. that we all (even under the divisive, competitive pressures of capitalism) rely upon for survival.

Today, just about everything we need to survive is private property, with a few notable exceptions. But the exceptions are extremely instructive. Why, if private property is simply the most just and efficient way of organizing society, isn't everything private property? Surely neoliberalism has made a strong go of trying to succeed in privatizing everything, but what's the story with those notable exceptions that seem off the table even to the most brazen Right-wingers?

What are some of the examples? For starters: roads, water, Fire departments, police, libraries, parks (municipal and otherwise), the majority of the military, a large percentage of schools.

In the U.K., access to health care is not commodified and hospitals are public institutions. To convert from the U.K. system to the disastrous scheme we have in the U.S., would be to relinquish democratic, public authority over a vital social institution and hand it over to private interests. No matter what those unhappy with the NHS in the U.K. may say about their own system, the prospects of this transformation (from public to private) in the U.K. are slim to none. Even under Margaret Thatcher, there was never a moment when the complete privatization of the NHS was even on the radar. When minor changes are made to the NHS that threaten to introduce fees of any kind, public outrage follows.

In U.S., we have the opposite situation, in a way. We have a mostly free-market health care system, with the exception of Medicaid and Medicare. As it stands, Medicare is basically the only part of our system that works right, and has been proven over many years of reliable functioning.

But the majority of the system is dominated by for-profit insurance companies. And uproar ensues whenever any part of it is slated to become public. Instead of complaining about the introduction of fees (which we can think of a form of regressive taxation), in our country the outrage from the political establishment is over the possibility of making any part of health insurance public or democratic.

Republican senators regularly complain that the Public Option would have been unfair, since the private insurance industry would not be able to compete. Obama's bone-headed response to this objection, of course, is to reaffirm the GOP's reverence for the private insurance industry and claim "no, no... its not going to make it so they cannot compete, it will just keep them honest... they're still going to be making money, dont worry for second about that!"

But this business about "not being able to compete" obscures the bigger question, namely why should our health insurance institutions be allowed to be in private hands at all? Why should something we all depend on and need be subject to the profit-driven interests of speculators and capitalists? Why shouldn't these institutions be entirely public, and designed ONLY to best serve those who need insurance, rather than to primarily serve the profit-interests of those who have investments in the insurance industry? In short, why is it legitimate to even think of these institutions as potential objects of private property? How is the acceptance of private ownership in this case not an acceptance of a kind of theft, or usurpation, of what should rightly be held in common by all?

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They're not 'libertarians'

As G.A. Cohen explains:

"Anarchy, State and Utopia is routinely characterized as libertarian, an epithet which suggests that liberty enjoys unrivaled pride of place in Nozick's political philosophy. But that suggestion is at best misleading. For the primary commitment of his philosophy is not to liberty but to self-ownership."

And self-ownership is different from freedom. The former basically boils down to a reverence for private property, not freedom as such.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that most libertarians do hang their hat on an unswerving attachment to the sanctity of private property, they are nonetheless "promiscuous in their use of the rhetoric of freedom."

But Cohen's point is that we should not let them get away with this swindle. Nor should we go along with their desire to be called 'libertarians'.

Why should we assume there is an intrinsic link between private property and freedom? 'Libertarians' often defend their advocacy of private property on the basis of freedom, but then also explain what they mean by freedom by simply rattling off a list of platitudes about the sanctity of private property. In other words, 'libertarians' "present themselves as defenders of unqualified private property and as unswerving opponents of all restrictions on individual freedom", but it's unclear that they can coherently be both.

Here's why. Cohen points out that only anarchists can claims to be "unswerving opponents of all restrictions on individual freedom". This is because "if the state prevents me from doing something that I want to do, then it places a restriction on my freedom". Notice that neither 'libertarians' nor socialists (like Cohen) are anarchists. Notice also that we are assuming, for the sake of argument, a narrow conception of 'negative freedom' friendly to the 'libertarian' position, where freedom is just being able to do what you want without external interference.

Imagine the following scenario. Say I want to "pitch a tent in your large back garden", "and if I try to do the thing that I want to do, the chances are that the state will intervene on your behalf and when it does, I shall suffer a constraint on my freedom. The same goes for all unpermitted uses of a piece of private property by those who do not own it, and there are always those who do not own it, since 'private ownership by one person presupposes non-ownership on the part of other persons'." But since the 'libertarian'-favored 'free market' rests on private property, it therefore rests on a restriction of freedom, in the narrow sense specified above.

Thus they can hardly complain that " a socialist dispensation restricts freedom, by contrast, with the dispensation they themselves favor". The difference between their view and that of socialists is not as easy as "they restrict freedom and we don't".

"Libertarians" want to say that they prescribe a system in which there is maximal freedom to do whatever one wants, consistent with a set of maximal freedoms for everyone else. In other words they'd like to say that "we support unrestricted individual freedom except where that freedom limits someone else's freedom". But this is plainly not their view. Their view is that maximal individual freedom is allowed only as long as it doesn't coerce other people or interfere with the institution of private property. But private property limits the freedom of those people who don't own something, as in the case of pitching a tent above. Private property creates freedom for some at the same time that it limits freedom for others. "Libertarians" want to say here that this limit on others freedom is just or right, and there are arguments worth considering that try to show that this is the case. But if that is what they really think, they ought to say that at the onset instead of giving us disingenuous claims about why they, and not others , are the privileged defenders of 'maximal freedom' (in short, they're not really 'libertarians', they ought to call themselves something else).

I'd like to say a bit more about why private property restricts the freedom of some at the same time that it provides freedom for others, or why the amount of one's holdings of private property in capitalism correlates positively with the extent to which one is free.

Those on the Right, e.g. 'libertarians', will reject this. They will say that 'people are free to do however they please, and if they lack resources of money then they lack not freedom but just that: resources or money'. Or those on the Right might respond that lack of money might mean 'lack of ability', but not therefore 'lack of freedom'. As it is sometimes put: "lack of money puts limits on what people can do with their freedom."

But as Cohen points out, this view rests on a reified account of money.
Money is not an object, but part of a complex network of social relations of constraints. And in capitalism lack of money means lack of freedom full stop. Perhaps, as 'libertarians' would want to say, certain people's freedom is restricted justly in capitalism (e.g. since they didn't work as hard, or they didn't obtain something via market transactions, or whatever). But notice that in saying why it is just that certain people's freedoms are limited by property, 'libertarians' are already admitting that they lied when they said they, above all else, value individual liberty. For these folks, private property trumps unfettered liberty.

The way that Cohen makes the point that money restricts freedom is brilliant:

"To see this, imagine a society without money, in which courses of action available to people, courses they are free to follow without interference, are laid down by the law. The law says what each person may or may not do... and each person is issued with a set of tickets detailing what she is allowed to do. So I may have a ticket saying I am free to plough this piece of land, another saying that I am free to go to the opera, while you have different tickets, with different freedoms inscribed on them.

Imagine, now, that the structure of options written on the tickets is more complex. Each ticket lays out a disjunction of conjunctions of courses of actions that I may perform (I may do A and B and C OR B and C and D OR E and F and A, and so on). If I try to do something not licensed by my tickets or ticket, armed force intervenes....these tickets say what my freedoms (and my unfreedoms) are.

But a sum of money is nothing but a highly generalized form of such a ticket. A sum of money is a license to perform a disjunction of conjunctions of actions -actions, like, for example, visiting one's sister in Bristol, or taking home the sweater on the counter at Selfridge's.

Suppose that someone is too poor to visit her sister in Bristol. She cannot save, from week to week, enough to buy her way there. Then, as far as her freedom is concerned, this is equivalent to a 'trip to Bristol' not being written on someone's ticket in the imagined non-monetary economy. The woman I descirbed has the capacity to go to Bristol (she can board the train, etc.). But she willl be physically prevented from doing so, or physically ejected from the train... the only way that she will not be prevented from getting and using such things is by offering money to them... thus to have money is to have freedom."

The upshot of this is that 'libertarians' cannot simply fall back on an assumed link between private property and freedom. Money restricts freedom. And they will want to say that it restricts freedom justly, perhaps because of some story they will tell about natural rights or self-ownership. I do not claim to have shown in the above that they can't actually accomplish the task of showing why its good, or why we must limit freedom in certain cases in order to protect the institution of private property. I think there good reasons to think they can't, but that's another issue.

But having the discussion about whether or not restricting freedom in order to preserve private property is just, is a much more productive and interesting conversation than merely allowing 'libertarians' to rattle off their own advertisements claiming that they are the #1 dentist-recommended defenders of freedom.

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The legacy of the "Chilean Miracle"

Under the murderous rule of right-wing military dictator Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" setup shop in an attempt to implement their economic and political ideas in a country whose right-wing dictatorship liked what they had to say.

This, apparently, is one of the legacies of the "Chilean Miracle".

If you read the wikipedia entry on "Chilean Miracle" (what the 'Chicago Boys' morons called the outcome of their neoliberal bonanza) it says, totally neutrally and non-tendentiously of course, that Chile has a greater degree of "economic freedom" than other Latin American countries. I suppose that is what commodified water is for mining copanies, more 'economically free'. Meanwhile the villages people live in wither and dry up because they don't have the buying power to purchase the same kind of 'freedom' as big mining companies.

I feel like their are some good anti-capitalist metaphors here, although I'll leave it to others more eloquent than I to explicate and spin them out. There's something to the life-sustaining properties of water, and the image of business elites fighting over resources (while poluting them in the process) all while the majority of people see their lives drying up before their eyes.

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While we're talking about things that should be nationalized...

You know what really pisses me off?

Paying hundreds of dollars for a season pass to ski down mountains. Mountains that are a natural and glorious feature of the earth. Just who the fuck decided they could own slopes? Who decided that could be private property? It's a mountain. With snow on it. Snow that nobody had to buy or produce. Snow that we're lucky enough to have fall straight from the heavens to the earth. Really good powdery snow, just perfect for skiing.

And you know, it's not even that I have to pay to use it that pisses me off. It's that I'm paying a rate that allows for a landowner/developer to earn a profit. Why couldn't the federal government develop the land for the people's use? Maybe our use fees would cover maintenance costs (ever heard of a national park?). How hard would that be? To have the same great skiing but managed by a non-profit government branch? Why does someone get to profit off mountains? I mean, let's say the ski or outdoor recreation industry were nationalized. How does society or the economy hurt? Just as many people will be employed. More people will be able to take advantage of local, natural recreation. Can't we have ANY land use that's by the people, for the people? 

/rant

Check out this awesome book about land use and land ownership in the contemporary American west. It's a little more intelligent and thoughtful than my rant, and I know T, at least, is interested in the political and theoretical implications of land reform/land as private property. In the book, Trimble begins an investigation of dwindling public land in the state of Utah, and a plan by oil mogul Earl Holding to turn some of Utah's last public land into a cash-cow ski resort, using the 2002 Olympics as an excuse to get it done, despite major opposition from the local community. While researching Holding's dirty business dealings and writing a book about the need to preserve public land, Trimble falls in love with a piece of undeveloped land himself, and begins building on it. Bargaining for Eden is a fascinating look at the many facets of land issues, from the sentimental to the political and economic.

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The Anxious Billionaire, and Other Tales

As someone who's pretty recently entered the U.S. economy and workforce, I'm becoming a tiny bit interested in reading advice about how to spend and save my money intelligently. So, like an idiot, today I clicked on the New York Times' Special Section on wealth and personal finance. Whoops. I forgot that the Times is obsessed with the emotional and financial problems being experienced by the super rich.

Although the number of uninsured Americans recently dropped to 47.5 million - hey, that's just 15.3% of our citizens! -- the Times is discussing people forced to sacrifice their Botox treatments. Although most Americans can barely afford to retire, let alone leave their children an estate, the Times has an article about how to tell your kids about their inheritance. And despite the fact that only 1.5% of American households earn more than $250k, the Times is devoting significant space to folks whose annual income has recently decreased from $10 million to $2 million.

Other highlights include emerging trends in tax evasion, how to collect valuable shit that you can sell later, and the sentence, "What's a high-net-worth investor to do?"

P.S. The woman on the left is Elyse Goldstein. She works as -- you guessed it -- a counselor to the wealthy. And her clients are very, very upset.

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The Origins of Private Property

Libertarians, or, to name them more accurately, entitlement theorists, are wont to maintain that the market legitimates the distribution of goods it generates, since the market is a process in which people exercise their legitimately self-owned powers. But every market-generated distribution is only a redistribution of titles which buying and selling are themselves unable to create, and the upshot of market activity is consequently no more legitimate than the titles with which it operates. How, then, do the titles which necessarily precede market activity acquire legitimacy in the first place?

The question of what would constitute a rightful original acquisition of private property enjoys a certain priority over the question of what constitutes a rightful subsequent transfer of it, on any definition of private property, since unless private property can be formed, it cannot, a fortiori, be transferred.

Note that even now not everything around us is privately owned, and most people would agree that what remains privately unowned, such as the air we breathe and the pavements we tread, should not be available for privatization. But the better part of what we need to live is, by now, private property. Why was its original privatization not a theft of what rightly should be held in common?

- G.A. Cohen, on libertarianism (entitlement theory), from an article in New Left Review

Imagine if the next president attempted to take a particular industry into public ownership without compensation (say a resource-extraction sector like coal), s/he would be attacked for being (among myriad other horrendous things) a thief. That is, such an action would be tantamount to stealing the rightful property of the ‘owners’ of the natural resources in question, violating sacrosanct property rights.

But, as Cohen points out in the excerpt above, how did sources of vital natural resources come to be thought of as the rightful property of an individual in the first place? How was this initial seizure not theft? Set aside the difficult questions of how to negotiate (with the aim of social justice) the transfer or redistribution of large holdings of natural resources already deemed private property…How do natural resources become the sort of thing that can be purchased and hoarded by individuals in the first place?

This thought puts an interesting spin on issues like nationalization of energy resources as well as agrarian land reform. Instead of dismissing these measures out of hand because they violate 'property rights', why not instead ask how the titles in question obtained their legitimacy and unassailable legal status? Why not ask, for instance, how the enormous estates of Third World post-colonial oligarchs came to be transfigured into legally sanctioned rock-solid holdings?

Once we throw off the dogma that markets and private property are "natural" institutions, an entire universe of interesting political questions crops up.

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