New York gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan is fond of saying “The rent’s TOO DAMN HIGH.”
Why, yes. Yes it is. A major share of the hours we work every week go to pay rents on artificial scarcity, as a result of the state’s enforcement of artificial property rights. And the kind of rent McMillan talks about — rent on land — is a classic example of the phenomenon.
Franz Oppenheimer, in “The State,” argued almost a century ago that economic exploitation was possible only when the possibilities for self-employment were closed off. He referred, in particular, to the closing off of possibilities for subsistence on vacant land. The economic exploitation of labor, Oppenheimer argued, could only occur when the land had been completely appropriated and employers no longer had to compete against the possibility of self-employment. When access to the means of subsistence and production was cut off, workers had to accept employment on whatever terms the employer offered.
But, Oppenheimer continued, vacant land had never been fully appropriated by peaceful, economic means (i.e., homesteaded by people occupying unowned land and altering it with their labor). Rather, it had been appropriated by political means: In the Old World and much of the colonial world, feudal and quasi-feudal ruling classes had been granted absentee title to collect rent from the rightful owners of the land — the people whose ancestors had been working it from time out of mind. Elsewhere in the Old World and colonial world, the rightful peasant owners were evicted and their land taken over by statist landlords. And in sparsely populated areas of the New World, the state preempted ownership of vacant land, barred access to ordinary homesteaders, and then granted title to favored land barons and speculators. The result is that we see enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land held out of use by state-privileged landlords, so that land is made artificially scarce and expensive for those who desire an opportunity to support themselves.
What McMillan misses is that land is just one application of a much broader principle. Capitalism — as opposed to free markets — is indeed about “private property rights,” as its apologists argue. But it’s not about legitimate private property — the right to possess the fruits of one’s own labor and things acquired by peaceful trade with others.
Rather, “private property rights” under capitalism are about ownership of the right to control access to natural opportunities.
The Marxist Maurice Dobb once gave the example of government granting to its favored clients a monopoly right to erect toll gates across the roads, and to enrich themselves by pocketing the tolls. Standard marginalist economics, Dobb argued, would treat opening the gates as a “productive activity,” and claim that the tolls contributed to production by the amount they added to price. Forbearing to interfere with production would be a productive activity, and the tribute collected for this forbearance would be the reward for productive services.
This is what Thorstein Veblen called “capitalized disservicability”: the assignment of an economic value to the magnanimous act of allowing production to occur without interference. Among the less academically inclined, I believe it’s called “protection money.”
Such artificial property rights include many things other than land. Every state grant of power to control the conditions under which other people may undertake productive activity is a source of illegitimate rent. Both tariffs and “intellectual property,” for example, are forms of protectionism in that they restrict the right to produce a given good for a particular market area to a privileged class of firms.
In every case, the person who would apply his labor, energy and skills to the earth and its natural resources is forced to pay tribute for the right to produce and work to feed a useless parasite in addition to himself. And in every case, the privileged classes of landlords, usurers and other extortionists seek to close off opportunities for self-employment because such opportunities make it too hard to get people to work for them on profitable terms.
Much or most of the price of most of the goods you buy consists of embedded rents on artificial property rights. Much of the product of your labor goes as rent to your employer, because the artificial dearth of natural opportunities to produce creates a buyer’s market for labor in which workers compete for jobs instead of jobs competing for workers.
The rent is, indeed, too damn high.
Henry George might have something to say about this.
Since Oppenheimer was basically a Georgist, that would hardly be surprising. One needn't agree with George's proposed solution to the problem to recognize that the theft and engrossment of land has had profoundly destructive effects on all contemporary societies.
speaking of rent and george, it is interesting that in most areas, tax [rent] is collected at an extremely high rate from the land under single family dwellings, where the average folk live and is 'exempted' on large tracts of farm and forest and often even industrial.
it is said to be done to allow farming and foresting to be more "economical", but since tax is a cost and land is valued in relation to its output minus costs, it simply causes value to rise, actually making farm and forest land relatively less affordable. since land has been monopolized for quite some time, the present owners of large tracts enjoy the relative tax advantage and past pricing advantage [most large scale forest tract owners can be traced to the railroad land giveaways]. farming and foresting thus become less economical but more "profitable", since competition has gone away.
on the other hand, since the home owner enjoys a higher relative land tax burden, he has to work longer to pay off his dwelling, which means he will be a better employee and ask for less pay, again increasing profit on land [rent].
Kevin,
This is a superb piece of writing. I've understood this for years, but didn't know it until you put it into this particular pattern of words. Thank you.
- NonE
Thanks, NonEntity, and thanks to everyone else. EmbraceUnity: Actually, I think I got the phrase "controlling access to natural opportunities" from Henry George, Jr.
Protection money, awesome. Two words, nutshell.
"actually making farm and forest land relatively less affordable."
No, I think the affordability (higher initial outlay versus lower outlay plus higher taxes) is essentially the same.
"Elsewhere in the Old World and colonial world, the rightful peasant owners were evicted and their land taken over by statist landlords."
Why do you call them "statist." Yes, they often happened to use the State — it was what was around to be used. But, absent the State, why not just get your own enforcement agents, like the Mafia does, and get your rent that way? I.e., with or without the State, people seem to be able to work out ways to collect rent just fine, so why is the practice "statist"?
Oops, forgot to subscribe.
@Gene: I think people here have a conception of statism and crime that is broad enough to include 'private' organizations like the mafia. Beyond that, I'm wondering what's the point of your remark, because obviously the reason we diss the state is because it is a violent institution, and cannot not be one. Sure there are other violent people. So what?
"I think people here have a conception of statism and crime that is broad enough to include ‘private’ organizations like the mafia."
Ah, so statism means "people who do bad stuff," and when you are against the state, you are against people who do bad stuff?
"Beyond that, I’m wondering what’s the point of your remark, because obviously the reason we diss the state is because it is a violent institution, and cannot not be one. Sure there are other violent people. So what?"
Then it doesn't actually matter if there is any analytical rigour to your attacks on the state: you already know it must be bad, and so any attack will do?
Well, I wouldn't put it in those terms, but yes. Clearly I don't oppose the state for its bad aesthetics. If you are not an anarchist, then you should say so, because here most people will presume otherwise, and discuss on assumptions that you find childish. This debate is a really large one, so I'd rather not start it here, where we are supposed to talk about rent.
To address your point regarding the fact that I'm attacking the State for a seemingly innocent activity, I'll just say that I don't remember signing any paper regarding private property being the convention here. But that is how things work, against my will. Thus, a landlord is also statist in the broader criminal sense, because his unvalidated – and void – rules of transfer and abandonment require force to be applied, as all tyrannical endeavors do.
As for analytical rigour, I get that the State is very happy to do some defending of actual rights, when the perpetrator is outside the State, and when the right at hand is not destructive of the current balance of power. I'm pretty sure them coppers feel self-righteous and imbued at this.
But it is also very happy to enforce fake rights, when the perpetrator is part of the State-friendly elite that stands to benefit from it.
The State uses more than brute force to work its exploitation and thus differs from the Mafia. The State uses ideology to sanctify its activities: divine right of kings, consent of the governed, etc. That gives it an advantage over private usurpers, and merits special attention. When people victimized by a protection racket, they know they are being screwed. But when they are victimized by the state, almost all accept their situation as legitimate in some sense.
"on the other hand, since the home owner enjoys a higher relative land tax burden, he has to work longer to pay off his dwelling, which means he will be a better employee and ask for less pay, again increasing profit on land [rent]."
Have you ever wondered why people live in suburban cookie cutter McMansions in the first place. It is a terribly inefficient use of land, and it only is possible with lots of subsidization. Higher land value taxes, without taxes on improvements, would likely encourage density living (condominiums etc).
However, those who want to live in rural areas would pay less taxes since rural land values are cheap. As a replacement for other taxes, surely it is the optimal choice… at minimum. Though I would argue it is ideal.
good point, embraceunity.
i think people get sidetracked about henry george. his land fee plan was a "remedy". i think he saw it as a compromise and as a way to dismantle inequities and establish a freer market. i don't think he ever saw it as ideal.
but, that is the very reason i think it will never be introduced on any widespread scale. in terms of taxation in would definately be revolutionary. it would basically turn the system on its head.
to other gene,
'enforcement agents' cost money. without the state, those that desired to enforce that which wasn't generally accepted as just would see their resources depleted. at the very least, their "exploitation" would be limited economically.
on the other hand, the state is funded by the same people you are exploiting. it is a win/win situation for the oppressor.
Gene C.: I think Gene D. hit it on the head. The fancy terminology is "endogenous" vs. "exogenous" enforcement. The whole Blackwater/Pinkerton model is a lot more profitable when you're able to externalize all the enforcement costs on third parties like the taxpayers. In the specific case of land, if the landlord had to pay the full cost of excluding squatters from land held out of use, its present discounted value from potential future use wouldn't be enough to compensate for the expense.
I don't think Mordecai deserves your accusation of lack of logical rigor. It's standard for market anarchists to define the state largely in terms of the initiation of force against nonaggressors. The state is unique in being the sole organization to claim a police power (the right to initiate force and define the legitimate exercise of force by all others) over a given geographical area. But it's of a kind with other organizations that profit by the initiation of force. We hate the state because of what it does, albeit in a higher degree than its "unofficial" competitors — we don't hate it because of the word "state."
P.S. Definitions are a part of analytical rigor, are they not? Can you suggest any definition of "state" that captures its essential features, that doesn't include the unique right to initiate force against nonaggressors? And keep in mind, "initiation of force" includes the force required to preempt the field and exclude competing providers of protection services.
It scares me when the only alternative to capitalism that is on offer is self-employment. The idea seems to be 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.' Rightly or wrongly, I think of self-employment (at anything) as requiring a certain minimal set of competencies, starting with salesmanship, negotiation and collection. Maybe I only think that because I've internalized the brainwashing, or maybe it's true, but only because of 'rent seeking.' Still, if we're going to be optimistic enough about human nature to believe that statecraft is unnecessary, why not go whole hog and try for the obsolescence also of entrepreneurship, i.e. having to hustle and grub in the world of commerce?
I think you're missing the point, Lori. Self-employment isn't just a matter of exit. It's a matter of voice. The greater the shift from wage labor to self-employment, the greater the effect on bargaining power and working conditions for those who remain in wage labor. And self-employment isn't an all-or-nothing alternative; it can be a way to reduce the *amount* of dependency on wage labor, so your employer doesn't have you over a barrel.
Of course. Earning one's whole livelihood at one place is like being an economic entity with only one customer, essentially monopsony. I still say self employment is in no sense an exit from capitalism itself. If anything it turns a person into a practicing capitalist, although perhaps I'm using the wrong definition of capitalism when I say that. I would call it an exit from monopsony, which of course is a good thing. It is of course an evolutionary strategy rather than a revolutionary strategy, since you seem to be envisioning an economy in which self employeds co-exist with perhaps smaller numbers of employers and employees. I'm also concerned that self employeds and employeds are separate de facto classes with separate interests. In theory the former enjoy more autonomy. Perhaps it is right that they do, given that they supposedly take more risks, but that is a capitalist argument. But if it's true that some people just don't have the temperament for self-employment. I don't doubt that the There is also the matter of self employeds becoming employers, i.e. bosses. It's quite inevitable under the grow-or-die logic of capitalism. Even without a payroll, being one's own boss is in some sense being a boss. I suppose we could go to iww.com and get a hair-splitting discussion about the ambiguous cases who aren't clearly bosses or non-bosses. I don't see more widespread self-employment as a recipe for a boss-free society. Perhaps for a rent-free society. If that is the extent of your ambition for social change, I can respect that. Believe it or not, I'm not above pragmatism, and I appreciate that one in the hand is worth a lot more than two in the bush.
"on the other hand, the state is funded by the same people you are exploiting."
I believe the Mafia often is as well.
Can you suggest any definition of “state” that captures its essential features, that doesn’t include the unique right to initiate force against nonaggressors?
"'The state' for Hegel means any ethical community which is politically organised and sovereign, subject to a supreme public authority and independent from other such communities."
And, of course, saying that the state initiates force against nonaggressors is entirely question begging. Most people consider someone, say, not paying their taxes to be a criminal act, and therefore penalizing them for that violation to be entirely legitimate. It is only if you are already an anarchist (or already inclined towards anarchism and looking for a nifty way to (apparently) justify the position) that you would look at it the way you do.
Lori: I think you're still talking past the "voice" side of it. The point is that self-employment increases the bargaining power of those who are still IN wage labor, by reducing the ratio of the number of hours people are seeking to work to the number employers are seeking to employ someone.
And you've got a preconception of self-employment as necessarily entailing production for the cash nexus. My idea of self-employment includes subsistence production in the household for one's own private consumption. The more of your subsistence needs that can be met cheaply with cheap household tools, with fewer hours of labor than it would take to earn the money to buy them on the cash nexus, the lower the total number of hours of wage labor you require to live. Hence, the less your boss has you over a barrel.
I don't see rents and bossism as mutually exclusive. Bossism — i.e., authoritarian workplace culture and the expanding share of labor remuneration going to managerial and supervisory employees — is one of the most important rents resulting from the present structure of corporate capitalism. Competition from self-employment will reduce rents within the workplace, in the form of authoritarian bossism and bloated management salaries.
As for the possibility of self-employment evolving into the employment of other wage labor, I think this runs up against the natural barrier presented by cheapening of the means of production. Even if the self-employed worker wants to hire help and expand, he will be competing against the technological possibilities of self-employment, which will drive down the "boss rents" he can demand if he wants someone to work for him. In simple terms, how bad you can treat the people working for you depends on how bad they need to work for you.
At the same time, technological changes that make means of production cheap simultaneously reduce ideal firm size from the standpoint of economy of scale. The whole point of microenterprise, from the standpoint of comparative efficiency against the conventional enterprise, is the fact that its functioning in the household sector using cheap capital goods reduces its overhead costs. Having multiple employees, and operating on a scale that requires renting a separate location, etc., will increase overhead. So when tools are cheap and the ideal firm is household-based, expansion by fission or replication will be more efficient than expansion by growth of existing enterprises.
So I don't see the "grow or die logic of capitalism" as inevitable at all in a decentralized economy with cheap means of production and no rents. The "grow or die logic" presupposes a lot of structural factors in "actually existing capitalism" that would be eliminated in a decentralized economy without privilege.
Gene: I think "supreme political authority" implies the sole right to define the legitimate use of force.
I don't think saying the state initiates force against nonaggressors is question begging at all. Your counter-argument is oranges vs. apples. Whether something is a legitimate or criminal act is a value judgment completely different from the factual question of whether force is being initiated. The difference between "most people" and the anarchists is over whether the initiation of force against someone who didn't pay their taxes is legitimate, not over whether it's an initiation of force. I define the state as the institution that claims the sole legitimate right to initiate force against nonaggressors. Whether the state or the nonaggressor is legitimate is an entirely separate question, not assumed in the definition.
"I think “supreme political authority” implies the sole right to define the legitimate use of force."
Yes. That has nothing to do with my objection to your defintion. It is the "against nonaggressors" that I am saying is question begging.
"The difference between “most people” and the anarchists is over whether the initiation of force against someone who didn’t pay their taxes is legitimate, not over whether it’s an initiation of force."
Right. And most people view it as legitimate BECAUSE they view the non-taxpayer as an aggressor. If, as most people believe, we owe the government financial support, then, indeed, not paying taxes would be an act of aggression.
Just like I assume you initiating force against someone taking an apple from your shop a legitimate. So, as I mentioned, your formulation is question begging.
That seems like a really broad reading of "aggression." It's one thing to say most people would view failure to pay taxes as illegitiimate or criminal behavior. But regardless of your view on its legitimacy, not all illegitimate behavior is aggression. For "aggression" to have any meaning at all, it should be tied to some objective standards of behavior, like the actual use of physical force.
'For “aggression” to have any meaning at all, it should be tied to some objective standards of behavior, like the actual use of physical force.'
Well, then, the shop owner who grabs me by the shoulder to stop me from walking out the door with his goods, by this criterion, is initiating violence against a nonaggressor. If you are OK with that result, then I can't complain about your defining things this way.
Well, yeah, but stealing the apple requires actually taking the positive action of entering someone else's store and grabbing an apple that belongs to him. I suppose you could argue that the "community" in some sense has an ownership right over my home and right of command, resulting from my "consent" by remaining there, so that remaining there without obeying orders constitutes "aggression." But again, I think it's stretching things to treat the difference between a positive action of invasion and snatching something and the passive action of staying in place and refusing to do something as entirely relative, or to consider it equally valid to describe either as aggression. There's an element of actually grabbing something and carrying it off that's more forceful than simply sitting there and refusing to do something.
As usual, it comes down to definitions. At least part of what Kevin calls ‘self employment’ is what I call ‘DIY.’ I think of the former as something one does to earn money, while the latter is something one does to save money. I think that is a big difference, as I don’t buy the claim that ‘a penny saved is a penny earned.’ If I have a stack of coupons, each of which will save me $0.07 on a box of cereal, buying 100,000 boxes won’t save me enough money to make up for $7,000 in lost income. Earning money ALWAYS involves selling (being the winning candidate for a job, or making the sale to a customer as a freelancer), and may or may not involve productive work, given the amount of ‘work’ that consists of administrivia, such as keeping score (i.e. accountancy), gaming the system (i.e. consultancy), catapulting the propaganda (PR), or being a gatekeeper and excluder of introverts (HR). The whole laccer treatise. In Plain English market is also a verb. Perhaps in the proverbial stateless society the distinction between self employment and DIY breaks down, but for me it is a leap of faith, as the theories on which this conclusion rests seem like some kind of contrivance intended to graft the labor theory of value onto the market theory of allocation. I have more confidence in a simultaneous attack against both business and government than an assumption that dealing with the latter will automagically deal with the former.
Kevin, I fear that your view of what constitutes a “positive action” is too entwined with your political view to do the work you want it to do. Perhaps my view is that, “God made apples, not shopkeepers. I was just minding my own business eating one of God’s apples when this shopkeeper assaulted me.” Meanwhil, if you live in a tribe where everyone habitually shares half of all game hunted and caught with the tribe, your hiding the carcass and trying to eat it yourself would seem a fairly positive act of betrayal to your fellow tribesmen.
‘I suppose you could argue that the “community” in some sense has an ownership right over my home and right of command…’
Nah, we just have to recognize that the institution of property ownership only ever has been and only ever could be created by a community to see that the community might have some claimon some of the benefits I get from the social institution. This idea that if I owe the community something the community must “own” me or my property is a canard.
I've been tending to agree with Gene C's position re: defining the state lately, but I still think I agree mostly with anarchist side of the line. I think the "the community might have some claim[ ]on some of the benefits I get from the social institution" is perfectly true in a moral sense. The problem with enforcing it as a norm comes in with the inherent ambiguity of the statement. Who is the "community"? Who gets to decide what the community gets to claim from me? Do I get a choice of saying "no" to the deal "the community" offers me?
This is why I'm more of a decentralist than an anarchist now. These issues have to be grappled with, and I think the only valid answers come in the form of extremely small "communities," where the answers are, respectively, "people who have a personal relationship with me and probably care about me at some level," "a majority of those people who care about me," and "yes, I can leave without any coercively enforceable claims on my body or its future use."
Gene: What you seem to be hinting at is that the existence of a majority consensus in a particular area defining legitimate property rights, and hence what constitutes aggression vs. legitimate defensive force, is tantamount to some sort of state. But I don't see them as equivalent at all. Certainly some consensus on property rules ("libertarian law code") will emerge through the interaction of voluntary enforcement efforts, by the same process that a single market-clearing price emerges in each market. That's not the same as giving an institution the right to initiate force.
"What you seem to be hinting at is that the existence of a majority consensus in a particular area defining legitimate property rights, and hence what constitutes aggression vs. legitimate defensive force, is tantamount to some sort of state."
No, I didn't mean to hint at that. What I am indicating is that, since the existence of property rights dependds on a community that recognizes such rights, it is not prima facie outrageous for someone to claim that the community has some claim to support from the individual. And that is just the way many people see taxes, and therefore, they view non-payment as a positive act of taking, just like the shopkeeper views my eating his apple.
I'm not asking you to agree with their analysis; I'm just trying to get you to see why they don't view tax "cheats" (yes, that is a question begging word itself, thus the scare quotes!) as nonaggressors. It's as if a statist talks to you and keeps saying, "So your position is that tax cheats who steal from the community should get away with it?"
Well, no, the very way he phrased it already assumes he has won the argument: precisely what you dispute is that these people are cheats who are stealing.
quasibill, that is the same direction my own thoughts have been tending — Aristotle was correct, a true polis cannot be larger than a community in which there is a fair chance that most of the people personally know anyone who might hold office.
"In the specific case of land, if the landlord had to pay the full cost of excluding squatters from land held out of use, its present discounted value from potential future use wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the expense."
Not sure why that would be. If you've put up a fence around your property with a sign indicating that it's owned, and then you find that squatters have trespassed, perhaps even damaged your fence/sign, why would you have to pay the cost of their crime? Seems like they would have to, and it's not clear why you'd be so hard pressed financially.
Kevin: Could you please describe some ways in which ways the state keep rents artificially high?
This omits two quite common cases, possibly more common than the others in terms of the aggregate numbers of people affected:-
- In the Old World, landlords were very often not absentees, even though they did gain at the expense of locals; in fact, hardly ever, when they were first set up (since the quid pro quo they offered, even in Ireland, was assistance in controlling the areas concerned and/or being bought off from power they only enjoyed by being there).
- In the colonial world, they were often granted their position in return for helping get the areas settled in the first place, i.e. in most cases the actual settlers were only there because of the proprietors’ actions, and the land grants were conditional on bringing in settlers (Prince Edward Island was set up on this basis, but the proprietors enjoyed a windfall gain from settlers driven out by the revolting Americans).
In many cases, colonial proprietors were in fact unjustly expropriated by settlers who welched on freely agreed arrangements and changed the rules on them by force.
gene wrote:-
Actually, it’s more complicated than that. There are a lot of other parameters than housing costs, between them giving rise to a range of scenarios. The scenario that actually promotes that is the one with low individual needs for such cash income but many people affected (and little work on offer, compared to the number of people affected). Raising the cash needs by themselves only drives more people from their homes, leaving only those who can negotiate high pay.
Gene Callahan wrote:-
Actually, unless and until they become statist, at least in embryo, they don’t have the means to do that, e.g. no rent means no paid enforcement agents, a vicious circle. William Penn couldn’t enforce his agreed on rights in the face of the state organisation set up by the settlers he had brought in. Also, as others have commented, using outside state resources for enforcement allows the costs to be spread on others (in many cases; not if Penn had himself been the “state”).
Gene Callahan wrote:-
No, it’s just that the tactics used for this particular bad stuff are intrinsically so connected with statism that even if there wasn’t a formal state, one emerges. You can track the tactics or the institutions, whichever is most convenient, but the perpetrators you track are essentially equivalent either way (“essentially equivalent” is a technical term, by the way).
Sheldon Richman wrote:-
No, that is merely typical of modern, secular approaches; there are others. For instance, the Divine Right of Kings was not a matter of (secular) ideology at all, it was a matter of theology.
Kevin Carson wrote:-
That’s where things like quit rent come in (disclosure: I myself clarified that article, which formerly asserted incorrectly that a quit rent was simply a kind of tax). It’s not necessary to pay for exclusion as a full cost, it’s only necessary to find a use that will cover its operating costs and deny use to other people, e.g. running cattle or sheep on it.
Kevin Carson wrote:-
Yes, and I could probably even do so in a way that would not imply that it necessarily initiated force against nonaggressors. However, I don’t think it could be defined in a way that would prevent it initiating force against nonaggressors if it chose to do so. I would probably start by trying to formalise and then generalise a description of the Papal States and similar in the Middle Ages, under the Feudal System. In general, you achieve non-aggressive exclusion through property rights, evicting non-co-operators as trespassers.
Lori wrote:-
What you’ve wrongly internalised, there and in your later comment, is the idea that self-employment means immersion in an economy where sole proprietors need to interact with others on that basis, using such skills. (As Kevin Carson wrote, “… you’ve got a preconception of self-employment as necessarily entailing production for the cash nexus”.) At an extreme, though, a subsistence farmer doesn’t need to interact at all, and in intermediately other-dependent cases people can go to occasional markets to sell (or buy) things and just walk away if the price isn’t right rather than submit to selling to (or buying from) craftier people.
Lori wrote:-
What “… theories on which this conclusion rests [emphasis added]“? This isn’t a matter of resting on theory, the theory draws on empirical evidence that itself supports the conclusion. We know things can work like that because we know things have worked like that. It’s historical rather than current, so your own empirical stance probably just reflects your own knowledge, and you have been misled into thinking that that’s the norm. But (say) read Trollope’s 19th century work North America, and see his description of boys in the western states offering to barter eggs and being quite willing to walk away when needs didn’t coincide (from memory, it went something like “mister, we can’t do business”).
Gene Callahan wrote:-
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! That’s begging the question, i.e. building in the conclusion.
The concept of property can only ever start within individuals. It does not require community agreement; that merely reduces the shared costs of enforcement (if people agree on joint enforcement) and reduces the likelihood of conflicts arising from misunderstandings. But property no more requires community than its more primitive and more general variant, animal territoriality, does. All it takes is a sense of ownership and a willingness to defend that; properly signalled, that reduces the number of serious attempts to take it by force, since most will recognise how seriously it will be defended – and that in turn makes it more cost effective. All that community has to do with property is merely incidental and emergent – not essential and inherent.
Gene Callahan wrote:-
It is prima facie outrageous, precisely because the existence of property rights does not depend on a community that recognises such rights; all that does is cut down on the number and size of threats to the property. It’s the obverse of claiming that if there are bandits around raiding property, there is no property. All that would mean would be that defending property took more effort, not that there was no property since a lot of people weren’t recognising it. It’s “jump so you don’t get pushed”.
Nathan Byrd wrote:-
You would have to pay in the first place, regardless of whether you could recover those costs that way.
Gene: I still think it's really stretching it to call an act "aggressive" that doesn't involve using physical force against a human being, taking away an object in their possession, or invading a space in their possession. And in ascertaining whether aggression takes place, I would consider it natural — even in a Lockean system — to start from the assumption that possession is nine-tenths of the law and the burden of proof is on the non-possessor.
As for the idea that, because the viable enforcement of property claims depends on some community consensus, the property owner somehow owes the rest of the community for agreeing with him on the proper way to ascertain rightful ownership — well, I don't know how that follows at all. The property rights system in any community will reflect what a majority of people believe is right and wrong. To argue that when more than one person agree on what's right and wrong, and act on it, each individual owes the others some compensation for doing what they believe is right, seems downright perverse. Especially when nobody else in the community has any more obligation than anyone else to actively intervene if they don't want to, and the individual is just as capable of volunteering to intervene — or not — as anyone else in the community. If people agree to cooperate to actively enforce each other's property claims, and that the cooperative service is worth a certain contribution from the membership, that's an entirely different matter. Agreeing to receive those services and then failing to pay is a matter of contract. But that's not a government, and it's not the community as such (in the sense of some official body possessing some police power on behalf of the entire society, whether they choose to participate or not).
Nathan: There's a lot of vacant land out there, a lot of it's not fenced, and the costs of surveillance to ascertain that it's not being squatted are in a lot of cases non-trivial. And when it is squatted, evicting them carries a cost that must be borned by the evictor. And the process of seizing their chattels for compensation runs up against the whole "possession nine-tenths of the law" thing and the possibility that the possessor will forcibly resist eviction and appeal to third parties. Not to mention that a lot of squatters' chattels might be pretty poor compensation for the cost of keeping a tract of wilderness land under surveillance and evicting squatters. And remember, this is land that's not currently being developed because the owner doesn't see it as economical, and the worth of the land is determined only by the possibility it might be developed someday.
quasibill: Exactly. But also, and especially, what deal? If someone buys you bread, are you obliged to reimburse him for the trouble? You've never asked anything, but now you have to pay? If someone buys you bread and does a patrol round your house every day, do you still not have to pay?
nathan: What is the cost of the trespass itself? Also, who cares about a fence or a sign that says 'Owned' ?! Not that they should be destroyed. I simply fail to see that anyone would particularly want them down, squatters included. What's more likely is, as a matter of self-interest, squatters would probably make sure those are staying up. From personal experience, I know that what they're interested in is a safe place to be, even if that is only for a few weeks. You don't want any criminal damage charges pending on you that would see you evicted and jailed. That's what was the most unsettling when I was squatting: the fact that we wanted to merely be left alone, have a place for a bit of time, breathe, etc. and were ready to talk and negotiate, and all we ever had was silence and betrayals, as if we were evil scumbags who couldn't be reasoned with. PP does make you expect others to take things for good and keep them, and from that perspective, it's much more taboo to leave anything in anyone else's hands but your own, even for just a bit. We were different from that, but that didn't seem to be taken into account.
Kevin:
As for the idea that, because the viable enforcement of property claims depends on some community consensus, the property owner somehow owes the rest of the community for agreeing with him on the proper way to ascertain rightful ownership — well, I don't know how that follows at all.
You are correct that, if I was claiming this owing followed some separate acting of recognizing rightful ownership, I would stand corrected. But here is what I actually see:
Property at first is largely communal. When a hunter takes down a antelope, he gets a choice piece, and the rest is divided amongst the tribe. It is from this context, in which property is almost all communal, that private property gradually differentiates itself, but against a constant background of an ongoing communal claim — after all, the individual would not exist without the community.
Now, I think private property is a fine idea, within limits. And those limits include the right of the community to assert its always superior and prior claim over the disposition of property. And I don't sugest that a system that loots ordinary people to pay for military adventures and Wall Street bailouts is anything like a just system of balancing these claims. I just suggest that there is nothing inherently aggressive about the government of a private-property-based claiming that citizens have a duty to support it.
If I may interject, I don't think anyone says that each individual is self-sufficient and owes the 'community' nothing. I'd repeat quasibill's point that the community is too vague a word to attach legal rights and duties to it. Suppose the huntsman does his work of his, is that the whole of it? The huntsman may also be dependent on others for other tasks that he is not so good at. And so, rather than looking at the community as an entity that's superior, I feel it makes more sense to look at it as a set of people who are inter-dependent, and their association, the community, is how each fills another's gaps, so to say, without anyone ever being the sole possible provider, to the point that most people are pretty much fine with most things. And this is where government differs too much from communalism, because it is a thing apart imposing itself, rather than an organic being that comes out of people's voluntary associations, and that can only exist if people come together of their own.
Kevin,
My own take on this issue is best exemplified by the issue of "nuisance" or pollution. There tends to be a very subjective line that delineates unjust pollution from unjust imposition of community rights on the use of land. To the extent that an individual believes that the externalities of his use are just normal "deal with it" variety complaints, there certainly is a form of prior claim by the community. This is especially true with respect to your "eggshell plaintiff" types, who happen to have a heightened sensitivity to certain externalities. Just by breathing, eating, and excreting, we all create externalities. The important question in tort law comes down to "what does the community recognize as reasonable externalities to create?" It would be an endless game of chasing one's own tail if we attempted to internalize *every* cost we create – you'd have to have a computer tasked with constantly adjusting the micro-balances of every person in the area.
And that's just what I see when you've got a community that agrees on the essentials of a property regime. If you migrate to mutualist v. Lockean (np), the conflict is even more fundamental. But I can see, for example, a Lockean agreeing to make nice with his mutualist neighbors because at least he gets the core of his private property protected. But that wouldn't change the reality that he is in fact surrendering something (for example, right to long term rent) to a prior claim by the community (what's going to happen if he tries to coercively enforce his claim for rent or eviction against a neighborhood squatter or tenant?). If he wants to maintain peace with his neighbors (which, I think most anarchists will agree will be the motivation, on average), he must surrender what he believes to be his property rights to a superior claim enforced by the community, even if there is no official, semi-permanent body of the community involved; even if it is just an ad hoc jury that hears the claim and then renders a decision, the Lockean is literally coerced into accepting a mutualist result. To me, that's enough to call the jury with consequent ad hoc (or even more organized) enforcement a micro-state. It's the best type of state, being that it is ad hoc and largely voluntary, but in the end, it is forcing its view of morality onto the individual, on an issue where it is not objectively clear that the individual is morally wrong.
Gene: As you may be aware, I'm pretty sympathetic to your views on land. I've always had a soft spot for radical views on land like those of the Georgists and J.K. Ingalls.
I also think the historical evidence is overwhelming that land was originally communally owned in the first agrarian villages before the rise of the state. It's preserved in historical memory by the Russian mir, the English open field system, Marx's "Asiatic mode," and the Israelite jubilee system. And I think there's a good case to be made for the idea that the fee simple system has been introduced mainly by the coercive state "privatizing" the common (e.g. Livy's account of the Roman common lands being alienated to the patricians).
So I'm open to the possibility, at least on a case-by-case basis, that there is some moral residual right of common ownership of land in a given locality.
But I still think it's important not to obscure certain distinctions. Most importantly the community, acting as common owners of the land, is a logically distinct concept from the state as some body possessing a general police power to initiate force for the "general welfare." And second, whatever rights are recognized by the community, recognizing them does not itself carry any obligation on the part of those whose rights are recognized. Either you recognize someone's claim as legitimate, or you do not — agreeing with someone does not confer obligation.
Quasibill: I agree with you that any property regime, and any definition of actionable negative externalities, can only exist on a stable basis if it's recognized by majority consensus. But I don't see the recognition of this minimal necessary condition — a set of accepted mores or common law principles that people act on — as equivalent to empowering an entity to initiate force.
As Gene has pointed out, the very definition of "initiate force" depends on some consensus on property rights to define who's the aggressor and who's the defender. But the acceptance of that consensus — whatever it is — is not a broader grant of power to a state, and not of the same kind as such a grant.
"And second, whatever rights are recognized by the community, recognizing them does not itself carry any obligation on the part of those whose rights are recognized. Either you recognize someone's claim as legitimate, or you do not — agreeing with someone does not confer obligation."
But Kevin, what if the right recognized was, "You have the right to 80% of the produce of this land?" If the person in question then tries to hold on to 100%, isn't that an act of aggression?
Kevin,
I don't think the existence of the mores is such a grant. But the existence of any sort of organized (even if it is ad hoc) enforcement of the mores is. Again, to the extent the Lockean's self-enforcement efforts on rent are met with any sort of organized resistance by the community, a micro-state of some sort is involved. And as much as I am starting to disfavor the concept of "the rule of law" in general, I do believe that some sort of ritual or procedure is a useful predecessor to any sort of organized community enforcement. Some sort of opportunity for the sides of the conflict to present factual and moral arguments to the community at large or to those the community empowers (even if only temporarily, such as a small jury) is probably a very good idea. In which case, you have a micro-state (even if it is a temporary one) because it encompasses the power to harness the community to enforce a factual or moral decision that may or may not be objectively correct. Even if the harnessing is through voluntary cooperation, the community is acting as a state when it coercively enforces its conception of "right" onto a possibly innocent, non-consenting member.
All of which should not be construed as an argument against anarchism or for statism. I'm just merely trying to get beyond defining the state as "everything evil" and moving to a simple definition that allows for evaluation on its own terms. Instead of loading the term as a rhetorical weapon, I want to use it as an analytical tool to discuss what is evil, and to see if perhaps "perfect" isn't often the mortal enemy of "really good."
Gene: It might or might not be, according to the property rights template favored by majority consensus in the community. But if so, it wouldn't be a case of initiating force against NONAGGRESSORS, would it? The community's act of remedying it would be defensive force based on their status of joint owners of the common, not a general police power to initiate force, wouldn't it? Again, i think you're blurring separate logical categories. What constitutes aggression, and whether the community has the right to initiate force against non-aggressors (HOWEVER aggression is defined), are two separate questions.
As for whether it would be "aggression," as I said I tend to favor a "possession nine-tenths of the law" assumption with the burden of proof on non-possessors to prove the possessor is in illegitimate possession. Failing to pay their 20% LVT might be a contractual non-performance, but that's not the same as "aggression" unless they dispossessed someone else by force. I prefer to equate aggression literally to the use of force or the invasion of physical space already possessed by someone else.
quasibill: I don't think organized enforcement is tantamount to a microstate. In a community where a majority of people agree with a particular property rights regime, the voluntary cooperation of some number in enforcing each other's defense of their property claims — ritualized or not — is just a bunch of people doing stuff. Until they not only claim to act on behalf of the entire community as such, but claim the right to initiate force on its behalf, they're not a government.
Not to break in on your (from my perspective) hair-splitting discussion on the narrowness or otherwise of the definition of property, I thought you might find this interesting. In the spirit of your blog entry on Michael Moore, we again have an apparent lefty-progressive writer saying things like "…which makes US people scream 'Don’t screw with the free market (as if we have one)'…" In short, a recognition that the free market is not a feature of the status quo. The comment stream on the blog entry linked above is also getting long, in an interesting way, and is also about the rent (in the common usage sense) being too high, and about principles of real estate law in general. I hope it provides food for thought.
Gene Callahan wrote:-
That is wrong. We know this both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, because by definition property is the extension of the (individual) self, and only gets generalised to other entities as, when and if they emerge. Empirically, because we know what actually happens, from studies. "[H]e gets a choice piece, and the rest is divided amongst the tribe" only ever happens when it is convenient for him – that is, it is his exercise of discretion over his own property, and not a fulfilment of anyone else's claim on it at all. What actually usually happens is, he shares the faster rotting and more easily prepared pieces right there, with anyone else in at the kill (these do have property rights – but, often, only to particular pieces assigned in advance by custom, and not in any sense communally; read Tristan and Isolde for a mention of mediaeval hunting customs). Then they carry the more durable (and often higher quality) parts back to the camp, where they each give some to their own women and children to prepare, and then share the feast with those and yet others to build reciprocal hospitality for other times when they are on the receiving end; but it is not anyone else's property claim, as we can see by how things stopped being shared by Bushmen as soon as they got ways to store them, e.g. according to the New Scientist durables stopped being handed out as soon as traders supplied chests and padlocks.
The only thing the individual's dependence on the community generates is custom held together by convenience, not communal property. If anyone tried to claim and enforce that on a hunter, as an adult male he'd simply move out and start his own group with others who followed him for what he chose to give.
Gene Callahan then wrote:-
Questions like that come down to whether the recognition went back through a series of just stages to a just origin. They cannot be answered simply by reading off what is currently recognised, though that both provides a presumption that would need to be refuted, and by enduring without being justly challenged it would tend to wash out any prior problems. For example, the Jackson Purchase is less dubious now than when it was made, even though the Indians who sold it may not have owned it justly themselves, but Zionist land purchases in the 1920s that were not according to local custom (i.e., evicting rather than keeping sitting tenants) do not confer more justice now from the passage of time, since they have never been unchallenged.
P.M. Lawrence, you pretty much just made up what you wrote here. Society does not "emerge" later from atomic individuals — the individual would not exist without society. Consider the anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
"Most bluntly, it suggests that there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not be the clever savages of Golding's Lord of the Flies thrown back upon the cruel wisdom of their animal instincts; nor would they be the nature's noblemen of Enlightenment primitivism or even, as classical anthropological theory would imply, intrinsically talented apes who had somehow failed to find themselves. They would be unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognizable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases. As our central nervous system — and most particularly its crowning curse and glory, the neocortex — grew up in great part in interaction with culture, it is incapable of directing our behavior or organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of significant symbols. What happened to us in the Ice Age is that we were obliged to abandon the regularity and precision of detailed genetic control over our conduct for the flexibility and adaptability of a more generalized, though of course no less real, genetic control over it. To supply the additional information necessary to be able to act, we were forced, in turn, to rely more and more heavily on cultural sources–the accumulated fund of significant symbols. Such symbols are thus not mere expressions, instrumentalities, or correlates of our biological, psychological, and social existence; they are prerequisites of it. Without men, no culture, certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without culture, no men."
And such customary divisions of property are certainly NOT done only at the convenience of the hunter. Again, try studying the anthropological literature instead of just inventing "facts" from your head.
"Theoretically, because by definition property is the extension of the (individual) self…"
And this is a cute move. It sounds like this is a definition from Rand, and implies that, because she (or whoever) chose this highly ideological definition of property, well, that's that. Why can't a communist declare that property is by definition communally owned, and private ownership is a mere perversion of communal ownership?
Gene Callahan, you shouldn’t make it up that I made it up. For instance, I drew on actual practice among bushmen and other hunter/gatherer groups.
The only “place” society can exist is in people’s ideas, given expression in their actions and interactions. For that, individuals have to exist, and that process is what is called “emergent”. The fact that individuals are enabled by society no more refutes that than the fact that chickens come from eggs refutes the fact that chicken eggs need chickens.
The theoretical definition of “property” can be traced to the meaning of the word in the languages it came from to reach ours. It is not an arbitrary definition on my part with (say) that of Marxists having equal validity; and Rand doesn’t come into it.