For many libertarians, the most important argument for private property is what Garret Hardin has labeled “the tragedy of the commons” (though the basic idea goes back to Aristotle). Most resources are rivalrous—that is to say, the use of the resource by one person diminishes the amount, or the value, of that resource for others. If a rivalrous resource is also public property, meaning that no member of the public may be excluded from its use, there will be no incentive to conserve or improve the resource (why bother to sow what others may freely reap?); on the contrary, the resource will be overused and swiftly exhausted, since the inability to exclude other users makes it risky to defer consumption (why bother to save what others may freely spend?). Hence private property is needed in order to prevent depletion of resources.

…

It might be argued that this the-more-the-merrier effect occurs only with goods that are wholly or largely nonphysical, but could never apply to more concrete resources like land. As Carol Rose and David Schmidtz have shown, [4] however, although any physical resource is finite and so inevitably has some tragedy-of-the-commons aspects, many resources have “comedy-of-the-commons” aspects as well, and in some cases the latter may outweigh the former, thus making public property more efficient than private property.

For instance (to adapt one of Carol Rose’s examples), suppose that a public fair is a comedy-of-the-commons good; the more people who participate, the better (within certain limits, at any rate). Imagine two such fairs, one held on private property and the other on public. The private owner has an incentive to exclude all participants who do not pay him a certain fee; thus the fair is deprived of all the participants who cannot afford the fee. (I am assuming that the purpose of the fair is primarily social rather than commercial, so that impecunious participants would bring as much value to the fair as wealthy ones.) The fair held on public property will thus be more successful than the one held on private property.

Yet, it may be objected, so long as a comedy-of-the-commons good still has some rivalrous, tragedy-of-the-commons aspects, it will be depleted, and thus the comedy-of-the-commons benefits will be lost anyway. But this assumes that privatization is the only way to prevent overuse. In fact, however, most societies throughout history have had common areas whose users were successfully restrained by social mores, peer pressure, and the like.

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O “grupo comercial” supracitado, a Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (Associação da Indústria de Títulos e de Mercados Financeiros), já contratou o ex-diretor da National Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander e uma firma capitaneada pelo ex-chefe do Departamento de Segurança Interna dos EUA Michael Chertoff para “facilitar” o projeto.

A turma está toda aqui! O governo, ex-funcionários do governo, banqueiros… espere, falta alguém. Quem poderia ser? Ah, sim! Você! Mas não se preocupe, vocë tem um papel a desempenhar aqui. Para começar, você pode pagar a conta.

Quando Alexander descobriu que seus serviços de sergurança (vendidos por sua firma de “consultoria” IronNet Cybersecurity) não vendiam muito a US$ 1 milhão por mês, ele tirou da cartola a velha fraude das “parcerias público-privadas”: arranjar clientes que não estão dispostos a pagar e colocar o estado na jogada para enfiar a conta goela abaixo nos pagadores de impostos.

Mesmo as “parcerias público-privadas” melhorzinhas são péssimas ideias. Suas partes “públicas” são relacionadas ao pagamento de custos (você). A parte privada” tem a ver com a alocação dos benefícios (eles). O estado e seus parceiros “privados” dividem a culpa pelo fracasso — sem comparilhá-la, mas passando de um para outro até que todo mundo esqueça o que aconteceu e possa voltar a bater sua carteira.

É claro, “público” e “privado” não significam aquilo que parecem. O lado “privado” são pessoas como Alexander, Chertoff e seus colegas banqueiros sem rosto — que não estão mais (ou ainda não foram colocados) na folha de pagamentos do governo, mas que estão com seus dentes firmes no erário. O lado “público” são burocratas governamentais salivando por futuros profissionais parecidos. Uma porta giratória conecta os dois lados. Se é difícil percebê-la, é porque ela gira muito rápido. Você paga o frete, mas não tem mais nenhum utro envolvimento.

Esta parceria, porém, não é das melhores. Como é que eu sei? Fácil: ela tem “guerra” no título.

Guerras têm lados. Guerras têm inimigos.

Não acredita em mim? Pergunte a Bounkham Phonesavanh, o bebê que está de volta em casa após internação no hospital depois de ser atingido dentro de seu berçário por uma granada de flash jogada por policiais guerra (“pública”) às drogas. Você pode já ter visto esta história no noticiário no meio de anúncios que dão apoio a um país “sem drogas”. Esse é o seu cérebro na guerra contra as drogas.

O objetivo dessa guerra “público-privada” é consertar a cerca que foi levantada há muito tempo (pelos mesmos indivíduos que agora a defendem) em volta dos bancos e serviços de pagamento e financiamento.

O inimigo é o mercado desregulado e seus clientes (inclusive você). Pense no Bitcoin. Pense nos serviços de carona compartilhada como o Uber e o Lyft.

Esses mercados operam — às vezes na prática, às vezes potencialmente — fora da teia de regulamentações do estado, que são estabelecidas para monopolizá-los e entregar seu controle aos bem conectados. São mercados que sempre existiram (na forma de escambo, moedas locais, vans e caronas compartilhadas), mas hoje em dia crescem em ritmo frenético. Com a ajuda da internet e de fortes tecnologias criptográficas, representam os maiores riscos não só aos monopolistas mas ao sistema de controle estatal que garante seus monopólios.

A campanha de propaganda que eventualmente culminará em “padrões de segurança” e “ações prévias e posteriores” já está em andamento. Provavelmente não se trata de coincidência o fato de que a cobertura da mídia dessa proposta se segue à cobertura de um texto de um blog com supostas conexões à ISIS sobre o uso de Bitcoin para “permitir uma jihad em larga escala”. De fato, eu não me surpreenderia se soubesse que os autores do tal texto e do release do “conselho de guerra cibernetica” tivessem dividido um cubículo no Pentágono — ou pelo menos que tivessem os contatos uns dos outros na discagem rápida.

A má notícia é que provavelmente não há nada que você possa fazer para parar esse “conselho de guerra” e seu planejamento de combate.

A boa notícia é que você pode ganhar essa guerra. Tudo o que você tem que fazer é perceber que precisa de mercados novos, melhores e desregulados mais do que precisa de mercados controlados pelo estado — ou mais do que precisa do próprio estado.

Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

If anything I am even more strongly in favour of the preservation of public space, as a precondition to the privacy of private space, than Roderick Long is. As an architect I ever lament the desire of the rich to be architecturally faceless. My impulse is to endow a dwelling with an entrance, a face to the outside world, which for whatever excess of ostentation I might care to pile on cannot fail by its mere existence to affirm the existence of an outside world, that is, a public realm. There is in the attitude of the wealthy client a shadow of that disrelational insular irrelevance which is to me the failure of Randian Objectivism: not only arrogance but consequent utter pointlessness.

Thus the public sphere is an idea constantly present in the discourse on architecture and urban design as much as in political economy, but in none of these have I encountered a satisfactory understanding of publicness as a quality. Prof. Long’s distinction between the organized public and the unorganized public may be roughly restated in other terms, i.e. publicness in origin v. publicness in orientation. We may call a thing public because it belongs to the public and thus in a sense proceeds from the public; or we call a thing public because it is intended for the public. It is generally in the latter class – imperfectly analogous to the “unorganized public” – that I am here interested.

But what, or who, is the public? Are we concerned here with the thing Søren Kierkegaard called, “a monstrous nothing”; “a host, more numerous than all the peoples together, but […] a body which can never be reviewed; it cannot even be represented, because it is an abstraction”? It might be surprising that Kierkegaard’s analysis in The Present Age might be quite useful in defining what we do not mean by “public” for our present purpose. The idea of the public as a fictitious personification of bourgeois values does not help us in understanding the qualities that make for good public space, or good public facilities. I like to think that Kierkegaard might have approved of the alternative conception that would help us in this, as it echoes his Christian embrace of the outcast. For to understand publicness as a quality we must understand the public not as a class, nor even as a specific concrete group of people; nor yet as the universal group, “everyone”. The public, for our present purpose, is not everyone. The public is anyone.

The idea of the public as this undefined but emphatically individual “next person who comes around the corner” is the key to understanding the qualities that are common to all the public spaces and facilities that we have all personally experienced as both good and definitely public. From this conception we can proceed to derive a faintly Ruskinian catalogue of qualities:

1. Robustness. It is difficult for something flimsy to be successfully public. Flimsy things need to be policed lest they be broken; and once this relation is allowed the essential indefiniteness of the public is lost. Public things have to be proof against “anyone”. This is most graphic in the case of public statuary, which should never be erected for the people’s adulation but rather placed at the mercy of “anyone”. J.G. Strijdom’s eerie floating head should have kept a place in public Pretoria, the better to throw eggs at it.

2. Blindness. This rather underlines the quality of robustness with the addition of a certain blunt stupidity. Properly public things tend not to be “smart”: the “smart highway” is possibly the perfect antithesis of publicness. The public is fundamentally anonymous and, for that reason, dynamically equal. It has to include the limitations not of everyone but of anyone: in anticipating the tall it must allow for the short; anticipating the thin it must remain suitable for the fat. One size has to fit all – but it really has to fit and fit well. And this is no limitation but the mark of a public facility at its best: affordable to the poorest (ideally free) and simultaneously delightful to the wealthiest. As soon as a facility seeks to identify its custom and conform uniquely to it, it ceases to be public.

3. Passivity. Properly public things do not seek one’s custom; in so far as they do anything they do it with a pig-headed disregard for anything else, all in the interest of being available to anyone at any time. There are obvious inefficiencies implicit in this, e.g. buses stubbornly sticking to routes and time-tables whether full or empty, which ought to delineate the scope of what might appropriately be endeavoured as a public facility. It also limits the degree of publicness that can be achieved in certain types of facility: it should be obvious that a public street is fundamentally more public than a public library. In the same way a more thoroughgoing publicness can be achieved where facilities are capable of simple, inherent self-correction than where they need external management.

4. Constancy. To be properly public, a thing must always be public. The indefiniteness of the public has a temporal aspect: it is anyone, at any time. Hence a street, like the pedestrianized part of Parliament Street in Cape Town which is closed with an iron gate at 6pm, is not properly public even when it is open. Likewise the chain-link gate that closes off the V&A Waterfront at Ebenezer Road at night sees early-morning pedestrians clambering underneath: in being inappropriate to the capabilities of the infirm and the dignity of the elderly it is inappropriate to both the capabilities and the dignity of “anyone”, and therefore fails as public space. So, too, Victoria Road outside my garage is 1/365 less public all the time for being closed to me on the day of the Argus Tour. Above all, sporadic publicness implies a power to suspend publicness which is at odds with the notion of it being either “owned” by the “unorganized” public or unowned.

I think most anarchists like the street, for its very unownedness, that is, its publicness. There are regions near the borders to vulgar libertarianism and Objectivism where dourer eremitic aspirations are entertained, but to most the street’s flavour of stigmergy carries appeal. Where the public realm is disliked it is usually not for a surfeit of publicness but because the public realm has deteriorated to the private domain of the state and its beneficiaries. Where the public realm offends it is where publicness, as above understood, is lacking.

Libertarians often assume that a free society will be one in which all (or nearly all) property is private. I have previously expressed my dissent from this consensus, arguing that libertarian principles instead support a substantial role for public property. (“In Defense of Public Space,” Formulations, Vol. III, No. 3 (Spring 1996).) In this article I develop this heretical position further.

Let me specify once again what sort of public property I am defending. To most people, “public property” means “government property,” on the (dubious) theory that governments hold their property in trust for the public, and administer such property with an eye to the public interest. As an anarchist, I do not regard government as a legitimate institution, and so do not advocate government property of any sort. But this is not the only kind of public property. As I wrote in my earlier article:

“Throughout history, legal doctrine has recognized, alongside property owned by the organized public (that is, the public as organized into a state and represented by government officials), an additional category of property owned by the unorganized public. This was property that the public at large was deemed to have a right of access to, but without any presumption that government would be involved in the matter at all.”

It is public property in this sense that I am defending.

I want to stress, however, that in defending public property I do not mean to be criticizing private property. I am a strong proponent of private property. But what I am maintaining is that the very features that make private property valuable are also possessed, in certain contexts, by public property, and so public property can be valuable for the same reasons.

First I shall consider three common libertarian arguments for private property, and I shall try to show that each of these arguments also supports a role for public property. Second, I shall consider several objections I have encountered to my position, and I shall attempt to meet them.

The Natural-Rights Argument for Private Property

The standard libertarian natural-rights argument for private property goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, and rests on two basic claims: a normative claim about how we should treat other people, and a descriptive claim about the boundaries of the person.

The normative claim we may call the Respect Principle. This principle says that it is morally wrong to subject other people to one’s own ends without their consent, except as a response to aggression by those others. (There is disagreement as to what deeper moral truths, if any, provide the grounding for this principle, but that question lies beyond my present topic.)

The descriptive claim we may call the Incorporation Principle. This principle says that once I “mix my labor” with an external object—i.e., alter it so as to make it an instrument of my ongoing projects—that object becomes part of me. The case for this principle is that it explains why the matter I’m made of is part of me. After all, I wasn’t born with it; living organisms survive through constant replacement of material. The difference between an apple I eat (whose matter becomes part of my cellular composition) and a wooden branch that I carve into a spear (a detachable extension of my hand) is only one of degree. [1]

When we put the Respect Principle and the Incorporation Principle together, the result is that it is wrong to appropriate the products of other people’s labor; for if your spear is a part of you, then I cannot subject your spear to my ends without thereby subjecting you to my ends. In the words of the 19th-century French libertarians Leon Wolowski and Émile Levasseur:

“The producer has left a fragment of his own person in the thing which has thus become valuable, and may hence be regarded as a prolongation of the faculties of man acting upon external nature. As a free being he belongs to himself; now the cause, that is to say, the productive force, is himself; the effect, that is to say, the wealth produced, is still himself. … Property, made manifest by labor, participates in the rights of the person whose emanation it is; like him, it is inviolable so long as it does not extend so far as to come into collision with another right….” [2]

The Incorporation Principle transforms the Respect Principle from a simple right to personal security into a general right to private property.

How Natural Rights Support Public Property Too

But this Lockean argument for private property rights can be adapted to support public property rights as well. Lockeans hold that individuals have a property right to the products of their labor (so long as they trespass on no one else’s rights in producing them); they also typically hold that individuals have a property right to any goods that they receive by voluntary transfer from their legitimate owners (since to deny such a right would be to interfere with the right of the givers to dispose of their property as they choose). But the public at large can acquire property rights in both these ways. To quote once more from “In Defense of Public Space“:

“Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms—not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day.

The cleared path is the product of labor—not any individual’s labor, but of all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.

Public property can also be the product of gift. In 19th-century England, it was common for roads to be built privately and then donated to the public for free use. This was done not out of altruism but because the roadbuilders owned land and businesses alongside the site of the new road, and they knew that having a road there would increase the value of their land and attract more customers to their businesses.”

Since collectives, like individuals, can mix their labor with unowned resources to make those resources more useful to their purposes, collectives, too can claim property rights by homestead. And since collectives, like individuals, can be the beneficiaries of free voluntary transfer, collectives too can claim property rights by bequest.

I should note one important difference between the homesteading case and the bequest case. In the homesteading case, it is presumably not the human race at large, but only the inhabitants of the village, that acquire a collective property right in the cleared path; since it would be difficult for humankind as a whole, or even a substantial portion thereof, to mix its labor with a single resource, and so the homesteading argument places an upper limit on the size of property-owning collectives. But there seems to be no analogous limit to the size of the collective to which one can freely give one’s property, so here the recipient might well be the human race as a whole.

I have argued that the Lockean argument does not specify private property as the only justifiable option, but makes a place for public property as well. It should also be noted that in at least one case, the Lockean argument positively forbids private property: namely, the case of intellectual property.

This fact is not always recognized by Lockeans. But consider: suppose Proprius, a defender of protectionist legislation, were to invoke Lockean principles, saying, “Well, surely private property is a good thing, right? So the market for widgets should be my private property; no one else should be allowed to enter that market without my permission. I demand a government-granted monopoly in widget production.” No Lockean would take this argument seriously, for a market consists in the freely chosen interactions of individuals—so Proprius cannot own a market without owning people, and ownership of other people is forbidden by the Respect Principle.

Suppose, however, that Proprius, our would-be monopolist, is also the inventor of the widget. Is his plea for exclusive control of the widget market now justified? Many Lockeans would think so, because we have a right to control the products of our labor, and if the product of Proprius’ labor is the idea of the widget, then no one should be able to use or implement that idea without Proprius’ permission.

But the Lockean view is not that we come to own whatever we mix our labor with; rather, we come to own whatever previously unowned item we mix our labor with. My plowing a field does not make it mine, if the field was yours to begin with. Likewise, the fact that my labor is the causal origin of the widget-idea in your mind may mean that in some sense I have mixed my labor with your mind; but it was your mind to begin with, so you, not I, am the legitimate owner of any improvements I make in it. (For a fuller discussion, see my “The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights,” Formulations, Vol. III, No. 1 (Autumn 1995).)

The Autonomy Argument for Private Property

A somewhat different libertarian argument for private property focuses on the human need for autonomy: the ability to control one’s own life without interference from others. Without private property, I have no place to stand that I can call my own; I have no protected sphere within which I can make decisions unhampered by the will of others. If autonomy (in this sense) is valuable, then we need private property for its realization and protection.

How Autonomy Supports Public Property Too

It is true that private property provides a protected sphere of free decision-making—for the property’s owners. But what is the position of those who are not property owners (specifically, those who do not own land)? A system of exclusively private property certainly does not guarantee them a “place to stand.” If I am evicted from private plot A, where can I go, except adjoining private plot B, if there is no public highway or parkland connecting the various private spaces? If everywhere I can stand is a place where I have no right to stand without permission, then, it seems, I exist only by the sufferance of the “Lords of the Earth” (in Herbert Spencer’s memorable phrase).

Far from providing a sphere of independence, a society in which all property is private thus renders the propertyless completely dependent on those who own property. This strikes me as a dangerous situation, given the human propensity to abuse power when power is available. [3]

It may be argued in response that a libertarian society will be so economically prosperous that those who own no land will easily acquire sufficient resources either to purchase land or to guarantee favorable treatment from existing land owners. This is true enough in the long run, if the society remains a genuinely libertarian one. But in the short run, while the landless are struggling to better their condition, the land owners might be able to exploit them in such a way as to turn the society into something other than a free nation.

The Rivalry Argument for Private Property

For many libertarians, the most important argument for private property is what Garret Hardin has labeled “the tragedy of the commons” (though the basic idea goes back to Aristotle). Most resources are rivalrous—that is to say, the use of the resource by one person diminishes the amount, or the value, of that resource for others. If a rivalrous resource is also public property, meaning that no member of the public may be excluded from its use, there will be no incentive to conserve or improve the resource (why bother to sow what others may freely reap?); on the contrary, the resource will be overused and swiftly exhausted, since the inability to exclude other users makes it risky to defer consumption (why bother to save what others may freely spend?). Hence private property is needed in order to prevent depletion of resources.

How Rivalry Supports Public Property Too

The rivalry argument is quite correct as far as it goes. But how far is that?

First, let’s notice that the argument only applies to goods that are in fact rivalrous. So once again it doesn’t apply to intellectual property; my use of the idea of the widget doesn’t make less available for others. Nor does it make others’ widgets less valuable; on the contrary, the more widgets there are, the more uses for widgets are likely to be discovered or developed, and so the value of each widget increases. Ideas are public property, in that no one may be legitimately excluded from their use.

Another example of a largely nonrivalrous good is the Internet. I say largely nonrivalrous, because the Internet does have a physical basis, which, though constantly expanding, is finite at any given time, and an increase in users can cause delays for everyone. But this rivalrous aspect is offset by the reverse effect: the value of the Internet to any one user increases as the volume of available information, potential correspondents, etc., increases; so additional users on balance increase the value of the good as a whole.

It might be argued that this the-more-the-merrier effect occurs only with goods that are wholly or largely nonphysical, but could never apply to more concrete resources like land. As Carol Rose and David Schmidtz have shown, [4] however, although any physical resource is finite and so inevitably has some tragedy-of-the-commons aspects, many resources have “comedy-of-the-commons” aspects as well, and in some cases the latter may outweigh the former, thus making public property more efficient than private property.

For instance (to adapt one of Carol Rose’s examples), suppose that a public fair is a comedy-of-the-commons good; the more people who participate, the better (within certain limits, at any rate). Imagine two such fairs, one held on private property and the other on public. The private owner has an incentive to exclude all participants who do not pay him a certain fee; thus the fair is deprived of all the participants who cannot afford the fee. (I am assuming that the purpose of the fair is primarily social rather than commercial, so that impecunious participants would bring as much value to the fair as wealthy ones.) The fair held on public property will thus be more successful than the one held on private property.

Yet, it may be objected, so long as a comedy-of-the-commons good still has some rivalrous, tragedy-of-the-commons aspects, it will be depleted, and thus the comedy-of-the-commons benefits will be lost anyway. But this assumes that privatization is the only way to prevent overuse. In fact, however, most societies throughout history have had common areas whose users were successfully restrained by social mores, peer pressure, and the like.

Objection One: The Coherence of Public Property

One common libertarian objection to public property—and particularly, public ownership of land—is that the whole idea makes no sense: a resource cannot be collectively owned unless every part of the resource admits of simultaneous use by all members of the collective. This objection has been forcefully stated by Isabel Paterson:

“Two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. … Ten men may be legally equal owners of one field, but none of them can get any good of it unless its occupancy and use is allotted among them by measures of time and space. … If all ten wished to do exactly the same thing at the same time in the same spot, it would be physically impossible …. [G]roup ownership necessarily resolves into management by one person ….” [5]

Paterson does, however, offer the following qualification to her claim that public property is inherently impossible:

“[I]t is practicable—whether or not it is necessary or advisable—to make roads public property, because the use of a road is to traverse it. Though the user does in fact occupy a given space at a given moment, the duration is negligible, so that there is no need to take time and space into account except by negation, a prohibition: the passenger is not allowed to remain as of right indefinitely on any one spot in the road. The same rule applies to parks and public buildings. The arrangement is sufficiently practicable in those conditions to admit the fiction of ‘public ownership.’ To be sure, even in the use of a road, if too many members of the public try to move along it at once, the rule reverts to first come, first served (allotment in time and space), or the authorities may close the road. The public has not the essential property right of continuous and final occupancy. … Public property then admits of use by the public only in transit, not for production, exchange, consumption, or for security as standing ground.” [6]

Note that here Paterson actually points out three ways in which public property can be feasible. First, it may be the case that not enough people are competing for use of the same portion of the property to cause a conflict. Paterson assumes this will only happen in cases where any one user’s occupancy of a given area is of minimal duration; but clearly the same result could be achieved when the total volume of users is low enough, and the resource itself is homogeneous enough, that a lengthier occupancy of any particular portion of the resource is no inconvenience to anyone else.

Second and third, in cases where use is becoming rivalrous, Paterson offers two different possible solutions. One solution is to require frequent turnover, so that no one member of the public is allowed to monopolize any portion of the resource for longer than a certain time period; the other solution is to adopt “first come, first served,” meaning that those who currently occupy portions of the property may stay there and exclude newcomers. Paterson thinks that both of these options take away from the genuinely “public” nature of the property. But do they?

According to Paterson, the turnover requirement takes away from the publicness of the property because the public then lacks “the essential property right of continuous and final occupancy.” But is this true? If no individual member of the public has “the essential property right of continuous and final occupancy,” it hardly follows that the public as such lacks this right; in fact, the turnover requirement is precisely a means of implementing that right.

What about the first-come-first-served rule? Paterson may think that this ends the publicness of the property because it gives individuals the right to exclude others from the particular portions they have claimed. But this falls short of a full private property right. If I have private ownership of a portion of land, then that land remains mine, off limits to others, even when I am away from the land. But if I leave the particular area of a public park that I’ve been squatting in, I lose all rights to it; in that respect, what I have a “right” to is more like a place in line than it is like freehold property.

Which is preferable, the turnover rule or the first-come-first-served rule? Presumably it depends on the function of the resource in question. In the case of a road, it is in the interest of the owners—the public—that the turnover rule be applied, because a road loses its usefulness if it cannot be traversed. However, the autonomy argument suggests that not all public property should be subject to the turnover rule, so in some cases the first-come-first-served rule is appropriate.

Suppose a conflict arises between two users of the property, one who thinks it should be governed by the turnover rule, and another who thinks it should be governed by the first-come-first-served rule. What happens?

Well, ideally the decision should be made by the owner: the public. But only a unanimous decision could count as the will of the public, and unanimous decisions are hard to come by. (Putting the matter to a vote would reveal only the will of a majority faction of the public.) In that case, the public is in the same situation as an infant, a lunatic, a missing person, or a person in a coma: the public has the right to decide the matter, but is currently incapable of making a coherent decision, and so the decision must be made for them by a court which attempts (presumably in response to a class-action suit) to determine what is in the best interest of the rights-holder.

Objection Two: Policing Public Property

As Rich Hammer is fond of pointing out, shopping malls are generally safer than city streets. As Rich notes, this is so for two reasons. First, the owners of the malls have a financial incentive to police their premises so as to avoid losing customers, while government police face much weaker incentives. Second, mall owners can set higher standards for what is permissible behavior on their premises, and can exclude undesirable persons more or less at will, while the police have less power to kick people off the city streets. Does this mean that public property in a libertarian society will be under-policed?

Not necessarily. Consider the incentive issue first. Since the property is public, everyone has an equal right to police it. But some will have stronger motives for policing than others. Consider the case mentioned earlier, of the road built for and donated to the public by those who owned property alongside the road and hoped the road’s proximity would raise their property values and bring increased traffic to their businesses. The same incentives that led the owners to build this road would also lead them to police it, since property values will be higher and customers will be more plentiful if the road is safe.

Moreover, the unsafeness of city streets results not only from the fact that they are public but from the fact that the police enjoy a monopoly on protection services. A competitive market in security would probably find some way to offer its customers protection while on public property. For example, public parks might be patrolled by a consortium of insurance companies, if a substantial number of their customers enjoy visiting public parks.

As for the higher-standards issue, it is true that users of public property face a somewhat greater risk from their fellow users than users of private property do. A private mall (particularly in a libertarian society where the right to control access to one’s private property is legally protected) can exclude users who simply appear to pose a threat to other users, even if they have committed no overt act (or can admit them only if they post a bond, disarm themselves, show proof of insurance or a letter from their pastor, etc.). Public property, by contrast, must be open to anyone whose conduct so far is peaceful. By the same token, however, public property allows more freedom. That is why the best option is a society that makes room for both public and private property. Those who place a high value on security, and are willing to put up with some burdensome restrictions in order to get it (call them the Little Old Ladies), will be free to patronize private property, while those who seek self-expression, are averse to restrictions, and are willing to put up with more risk from others (call them the Gun-Toting Pot-Smoking Nudist Bikers), will likewise be free to patronize public property.

Objection Three: Liability and Public Property

In a free society, people are liable for harm that they cause. Now suppose I own the road that runs past your house, and I decide to donate that road to the general public. Now it is no longer possible to exclude undesirables from the road. There used to be guards at the toll gate who checked drivers’ IDs, but now they are gone, and one day some loony who in the old days would have been excluded takes the public road to your house and massacres your family. Since the loss to your security was caused by my decision, it has been suggested to me (by Rich Hammer) that I should be legally liable for the result. And if this is so, then public property would not be tolerated in a free nation, because the liability costs would simply be too high.

But surely a libertarian legal system will not hold people liable for every harm to which they merely made a causal contribution. The current statist trend of holding gun manufacturers liable for the use of guns by criminals, and so forth, flies in the face of the libertarian principle of personal responsibility. An owner is not obligated to check out the background of everyone he gives or sells property to.

Objection Four: Reversion of Public Property

Once property becomes public, how can it ever become private again? In a free-market economy, property tends to be assigned to its highest-valued use, because those who value the property more will purchase it from those who value it less. But if I value Central Park more than the public at large does, how do I go about purchasing it from the public? The dispersed, disorganized, and divided public lacks the ability to consent to the sale.

This is a difficult problem, to which I do not have a full solution. But let me try out a few possibilities.

There are two ways I can lose my claim to property. I can give or sell it, or I can abandon it. The public is not in a position to give or sell its property, [7] but perhaps it is capable of abandoning it.

What counts as the public’s having abandoned a piece of property? Well, the easiest case would be if no one has used it for a very long time. (How long? Well, the length of time should presumably be the same as whatever is accepted in the case of abandoning private property.) But what if only a few people have used it? Does that count as the public’s using it (given that the property has never been used by the entire public)?

Or suppose I privatize some portion of the property, claiming it for my own use, fencing it in and so forth. Perhaps it then counts as mine so long as no one protests. (How widely do I have to advertise the fact that I’ve done this?) But again, what if just a few people protest—does that count?

Ultimately these problems will have to be resolved by a libertarian legal system, through evolving common-law precedents. That’s fine with me. What I would want to insist on, though, is that some role for public property is important for a libertarian society. An all-private system can be oppressive, just as an all-public one can be; but a system that allows networks of private spaces and public spaces to compete against each other offers the greatest scope for individual freedom.

Notes:

[1] For a fuller defense of this claim, see Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Natural Property Rights as Body Rights,” in Tibor R. Machan, ed., The Main Debate:  Communism versus Capitalism (New York:  Random House, 1987), pp. 272–289.

[2] Cited in Murray N. Rothbard, For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Revised Edition (San Francisco:  Fox & Wilkes, 1994), pp. 36–37.

[3] This is a reason for my reservations about the proprietary-community model for a free nation, in which all land in the nation is held by a central agency and leased to its inhabitants.  See my “The Return of Leviathan:  Can We Prevent It?,” Formulations, Vol. III, No. 3 (Spring 1996).

[4] Carol Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons:  Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Summer 1986), pp. 711–781; David Schmidtz, “The Institution of Property,” Social Philosophy & Policy, Vol. 11 (1994), pp. 42–62.

[5] Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993), pp. 180–181.

[6] Paterson, pp. 181–182.

[7] At least I don’t think so.  Someone could argue that the court could act on behalf of the people’s interests, authorizing the transfer of ownership from the collective to me, in exchange for the “price” of my doing something judged to be of general benefit to the public.  But I am wary of heading too far down that path.  For one thing, if the court acquires too much power to administer the property of the “disorganized public,” we start to move back toward the “organized public” model of government property, and the whole idea of free access is replaced by access-in-the-interests-of-the-public-as-determined-by-some-official.  For another, the value of public property is severely undermined if it can be unpredictably privatized on some judge’s say-so.

In an important series of articles [1], [2], [3], [4] Rich Hammer has recently invited us to rethink some of our assumptions about what a libertarian society would be like. We ordinarily think of a libertarian society as one of maximum freedom and maximum privacy: a society where you can do whatever you like (so long as it’s peaceful) and no one else can pry into your personal affairs.

Rich suggests otherwise. A libertarian society, he argues, is one in which public space — both physical space and decision space — has been privatized as far as possible. This is desirable, he says, because it is easier to police irresponsible behavior in private space than in public space. Since no one can be excluded from public space, no one has any incentive to maintain it properly, and so a “tragedy of the commons” is generated. By contrast, in a world where everything is privately owned, we must abide, wherever we go, by the rules laid down by the owners. Rich envisions a society in which no one is allowed access to the means of cooperation with others unless he submits to a multitude of restrictions: bonding, disarmament, full disclosure of finances, and so forth. Those who do not comply with these rules will find themselves cut off from food, drink, communication, transportation, even the use of restroom facilities.

Rich’s arguments are a useful corrective to the popular notion that a libertarian society would be a hopeless chaos. But we may feel some discomfort at how far Rich’s vision goes in the direction of the opposite extreme. In a famous quote, the 19th-century anarchist Proudhon wrote:

“To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, …noted, registered, … taxed, stamped, measured, … assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.”[5]

But if to be free is also to be inspected, licensed, numbered, stamped, authorized, and so forth, we might wonder whether building a Free Nation is worth the effort.

But is this world of hyper-regulated anarchy the only possible model for a libertarian society? I don’t think so. But to see why it is not, I suggest we need to rethink our assumption that a libertarian society must be a society without public space.

Public Property Without Government

When we think of public property, we think of government property. But this has not traditionally been the case. Throughout history, legal doctrine has recognized, alongside property owned by the organized public (that is, the public as organized into a state and represented by government officials), an additional category of property owned by the unorganized public. This was property that the public at large was deemed to have a right of access to, but without any presumption that government would be involved in the matter at all. I have learned much about this idea from excellent recent articles by Carol Rose and David Schmidtz:

“Implicit in these older doctrines is the notion that, even if a property should be open to the public, it does not follow that public rights should necessarily vest in an active governmental manager. … the nineteenth-century common law … recognized … property collectively ‘owned’ and ‘managed’ by society at large ….”[6]

“Public property is not always a product of rapacious governments or mad ideologues. Sometimes it evolves spontaneously as a way of solving real problems.” [7]

I have no interest in defending public property in the sense of property belonging to the organized public (i.e., the state). In fact, I do not think government property is public property at all; it is really the private property of an agency calling itself the government. (This agency may claim to be holding the property in trust for the public, but its activities generally belie this.) What I wish to defend is the idea of property rights inhering in the unorganized public.

The Economic Argument

Since the days of Aristotle, the traditional argument against collective ownership of any kind has been the tragedy of the commons: if each additional use depletes or degrades a resource, and yet there is no way of restricting access to the resource, then no one will be motivated to use the resource sparingly, since what one person refrains from, another may take, and so the first person is no better off for having refrained. Hence the need to restrict access by privatizing the commons. What Rose and Schmidtz point out is that this argument works only to the extent that additional use diminishes the value of the resource. But this is not always the case; sometimes, adding more users enhances the value of the resource: the more the merrier. When that is so, there is no point in restricting access; we then have what Rose calls a comedy of the commons (i.e., happy ending rather than sad).

Rose’s point is clearest when we consider decision space. Think of the libertarian movement as filling a decision space: which libertarian books and articles will be written, which libertarian projects and causes will be promoted, and how, etc. The libertarian movement is a public space; anyone can participate, at any time. And this is all to the good. It would be foolish to restrict access, to make it more difficult for people to participate in the movement, because the movement is not a scarce resource that can be used up; on the contrary, the more additional people start participating, the closer the aims of the movement as a whole will come to being achieved. (Consider how Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff have weakened the effectiveness of their own Objectivist movement by trying to make it into their own private property, purging potentially valuable contributors to the cause whenever they resisted the authority of the “owners.”)

Intellectual property is another comedy of the commons, I would argue, since one person’s use of an idea does not deplete the idea for others, and ordinarily even enhances it. How else, after all, does civilization advance except via some people grabbing other people’s ideas and improving on them, to the benefit of society as a whole?

But the clearest case of a comedy of the commons, as Rose and Schmidtz point out, is the market itself. The more people participate in the market, the more everyone benefits. The market is a paradigm of public space. Protectionist laws attempt to turn the market, or portions of it, into private property by erecting coercive barriers to access; this sort of “privatization,” though, is destructive, and anathema to libertarian ideals.

Of course, these are easy cases of comedies of the commons, because things like markets, ideas, and political movements are not physical, and so are not subject to scarcity. Physical space, though, is always subject to scarcity; so how could there be comedies of the commons here? Mustn’t any scarce resource inevitably succumb to the tragedy of the commons unless access is restricted?

Not necessarily. There are some cases in which, at least within certain parameters, a physical resource’s value is enhanced by increased use. As Rose and Schmidtz point out, this is particularly true when the resource is tied in some way to a non-physical comedy-of-the-commons resource, like a market or a town festival; since “the more, the merrier” applies to these non-physical resources, it also applies, to some extent, to the physical land on which the market or festival is held, and to the physical roadways leading there. Since everyone benefits from having more people come to the fair, everyone also benefits from making physical access to the fairgrounds free as well.

Of course there are limits. If too many people come, the fair will be too crowded to be enjoyable. But this simply shows that some goods have both tragedy-of-the-commons and comedy-of-the-commons aspects, and which one predominates will depend on the circumstances. Public property may be the efficient solution in some cases, and private property in others. (Or a bundle of property rights may be split up, with some public, some private.) Most societies have had some common areas, policed by custom only, without overgrazing problems.

The Ethical Argument

On the libertarian view, we have a right to the fruit of our labor, and we also have a right to what people freely give us. Public property can arise in both these ways.

Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms — not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day.

The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual’s labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.

Public property can also be the product of gift. In 19th-century England, it was common for roads to be built privately and then donated to the public for free use. This was done not out of altruism but because the roadbuilders owned land and businesses alongside the site of the new road, and they knew that having a road there would increase the value of their land and attract more customers to their businesses. Thus, the unorganized public can legitimately come to own land, both through original acquisition (the mixing of labor) and through voluntary transfer.

Public and Private: Allies, Not Enemies

Public space has both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, unrestricted access means you can do as you please there, without asking permission, so long as you don’t violate others’ rights. On the minus side, the difficulty of policing public space means there may well be more irresponsible behavior there. A society that permits both public and private spaces — that has public and private roads competing with each other, for example — allows individuals to make the trade-off for themselves. If you want the freedom to drive your motorcycle in the nude, with a howitzer strapped to your back, and you’re willing to put up with a greater risk of irresponsible behavior from others, take the public road. If you prefer greater security, and are willing to obey a few more rules and suffer some invasion of privacy to get it, take the private road. If one option becomes too onerous, the other is still available. Private space can become oppressive if there is no public space to compete with it — and vice versa.

I envision a world of many individual private spaces, linked by a framework of public spaces. The existence of such a framework may even be a prerequisite for complete control over one’s own private space. Suppose a trespasser comes on my land and I want to push him off. If all the land around me is private as well, where can I push him, without violating the rights of my neighbors? But if there is a public walkway nearby, I have somewhere to push him. Thus, the availability of public space may be a moral precondition for the right to freedom from trespassers.

References

[1] Richard Hammer, “The Power of Ostracism,” in Formulations, Vol. II, No. 2 (Winter 1994-95).

[2] Richard Hammer, “Protection from Mass Murderers: Communication of Danger,” in Formulations, Vol. II, No. 3 (Spring 1995).

[3] Richard Hammer, “‘Liberty’ is a Bad Name,” in Formulations, Vol. II, No. 4 (Summer 1995).

[4] Richard Hammer, “Toward Voluntary Courts and Enforcement,” in Formulations, Vol. III, No. 2 (Winter 1995-96).

[5] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 1851; trans. John B. Robinson (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 294. (This quotation is the inspiration for the heading “To be governed …” on Cato Policy Report’s back-page horror file.)

[6] Carol Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” p. 720; in University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Summer 1986), pp. 711-781.

[7] David Schmidtz, “The Institution of Property,” p. 51; in Social Philosophy & Policy, Vol. 11 (1994), pp. 42-62.

A distinção entre o estado, ou setor “público,” e a economia do setor “privado” é universal em comentário e análise de políticas. No caso da economia corporativa, porém, quase não faz sentido. Em primeiro lugar, a grande corporação não pode ser chamada de “propriedade privada” em nenhum sentido significativo. E, segundo, o relacionamento entre a economia corporativa e o estado se assemelha, mais que tudo, a diretorias diferentes formadas pelos mesmos integrantes.

1. A ideia da grande corporação como “propriedade privada” de seus acionistas é, na maior parte dos casos, completo disparate.

Berle e Means, em A Corporação Moderna e a Propriedade Privada, apontaram isso já em 1932. Até libertários de direita defensores da corporação são forçados, contra seus instintos, a minimizar os reais vínculos de propriedade real dos acionistas com a corporação.

O ensinamento ortodoxo entre os seguidores de Mises é o da “corporação empresarial”: a corporação não é uma burocracia gerencial, e sim simples extensão da vontade do empresário, sujeita a seu absoluto controle por meio da mágica das partidas dobradas da escrituração contábil/mercantil. Por exemplo, em “O Pensamento de Sean Gabb acerca de Limitação de Imputabilidade,” Stephan Kinsella começou por citar a defesa de Hessen da corporação como simples dispositivo contratual por meio do qual os donos do capital gerem sua propriedade conjunta, não diferente, em princípio, de uma parceria.

No mesmo artigo, porém, Kinsella, para justificar a imputabilidade limitada do acionista, sugeriu que a diferença entre acionista e emprestador era apenas de grau, e que o acionista era simplesmente outra classe de requerente contratual (por oposição a requerente residual, ou dono). Ele foi forçado, de fato, a refugiar-se numa argumentação muito parecida com a de Berle e Means: a de que a “propriedade” da corporação pelo acionista é em grande parte fictícia, e a real propriedade está relacionada com o controle.

Quais são os direitos básicos de um acionista? O que “compra” ele quando compra a “ação”? Bem, ele tem direito de votar–de eleger diretores, basicamente. Ele tem o direito de participar de reuniões de acionistas. Ele tem direito a certa parcela dos ativos líquidos remanescentes da empresa na eventualidade de esta encerrar suas atividades ou se dissolver, depois de pagar seus credores etc. Ele tem o direito de receber certa parcela de dividendos pagos SE a empresa decidir pagar dividendos–isto é, ele tem direito a ser tratado em algum tipo de pé de igualdade com outros acionistas–ele não tem direito absoluto de ganhar dividendos (mesmo se a empresa tiver lucro), e sim apenas direito condicional, relativo. Ele tem (usualmente) o direito de vender sua ações a outrem. Por que assumir que esse punhado de direitos é equivalente a “propriedade natural”–do quê? Dos ativos da empresa? Mas ele não tem direito de controlar (diretamente) os ativos. Ele não tem direito de usar o jato da empresa e nem mesmo de entrar nas dependências da empresa sem permissão da gerência. Seguramente o direito de participar de reuniões não é tão relevante. Nem o direito de receber parte dos ativos da empresa ao esta encerrar suas atividades ou quando do pagamento de dividendos–isso poderia ser caracterizado como o direito que uma espécie de emprestador ou credor possui.

Nos comentários, ele acrescentou:

Acredito que o gerente é mais análogo ao proprietário único. Ele tem controle similar na elaboração de políticas, no contratar e gerir empregados. Já você [quasibill] acha que o acionista e o proprietário têm mais em comum–porque os dois são “donos”.

E num comentário em meu blog, ele escreveu:

É grotesco existir a noção de que os donos de propriedade são automaticamente imputáveis por crimes cometidos mediante uso de sua propriedade… Ademais, propriedade significa tão somente o direito de controlar. Esse direito de controlar pode ser dividido de maneiras variadas e complexas. Se você achar que os acionistas são “donos” de propriedade corporativa do mesmo modo que são donos de suas casas ou carros–bem, apenas compre uma ação do capital da Exxon e tente entrar na sala da diretoria sem permissão.

Na verdade até o direito de eleger a Diretoria, o único direito real de controle possuído pelos acionistas, é, em grande parte, simbólico. As corporações em geral são controladas por diretores de dentro que trocam favores com o Dirigente Executivo Principal – CEO, e uma tentativa de derrubada/troca da diretoria pelos acionistas está geralmente fadada a acontecer desde o começo.

A ameaça de aquisição hostil, à qual os defensores da corporação dedicam tanta atenção em sua argumentação favorável a “um mercado de controle corporativo,” foi na verdade ameaça signicativa apenas durante tempo limitado em início e meado anos 80, imediatamente depois da inovação dos títulos podres na finança corporativa. Mesmo então, defensavelmente, a aquisição hostil era ação não de investidores, mas da gerência da corporação adquirente atuando em seu próprio interesse. De qualquer forma, a gerência corporativa rapidamente alterou as regras internas de governança corporativa para tornar a aquisição hostil extremamente difícil, por meio de dispositivos tais como “pílulas envenenadas,” “greenmail,” e “repelente de tubarão.” Em decorrência, a partir do final dos anos 80, a maior parte das aquisições foram ações amigáveis, levadas a efeito em conluio com a gerência da firma adquirida.

O modelo dominante de comportamento do Mestre em Administração de Empresas – MBA desde os anos 1980, defensavelmente, equivale a a gerência promover seus próprios interesses a expensas do acionista: matar de inanição, isto é, levar a empresa à lona, ordenhar, isto é, lançar mão do que pertence à empresa em proveito próprio, alienar partes isoladas do patrimônio sem preocupação para com o futuro da empresa e, de maneira geral, eviscerar a produtividade de longo prazo da empresa, para inflar artificialmente para cima números de curto prazo, e manipular inescrupulosamente suas próprias bonificações e opções de ações.

Eis porque as grandes varejistas essencialmente descartaram seu capital humano. Há trinta anos, se você entrasse numa loja, provavelmente seria atendido por empregados de carreira que conheciam as linhas de produtos e as preferências do consumidor de fio a pavio. Hoje, se você entrar na Lowe’s e precisar de ajuda, a reação provável da pessoa de curso secundário que ganha o salário mínimo será “Não sei. Acho que, se você não está vendo, é porque não tem.” É por isso que, quando você é internado num hospital, sua enfermeira provavelmente terá oito pacientes (e seu assistente hospitalar dez, quinze ou até trinta pacientes), e você pode esperar passar cinco dias sem banho ou troca da roupa de cama, e sujar a cama enquanto espera 45 minutos por um urinol. E é bom ter como certo apanhar uma infecção de staphylococcus aureus resistente à meticilina antes de sair de lá. Um Mestre em Administração de Empresas – MBA é alguém que quebraria toda a mobília da casa dele e a queimaria na lareira, para depois vangloriar-se do quanto economizou na conta de aquecimento este mês.

Falando de modo geral, a Lei Férrea da Oligarquiade Michel funciona na corporação: a gerência corporativa sempre terá vantagem sobre aqueles de fora que ela pretensamente “representa,” na manipulação das regras internas para inviabilizar o controle externo.

Para resumir esta parte, a corporação, na prática, é simplesmente um agregado neutro de capital sem dono, controlado por uma oligarquia gerencial autoperpetuadora que exerce todos os direitos importantes de controle sem nunca ter adquirido direito de “propriedade” por quaisquer meios legítimos (isto é, mediante efetivamente comprar as ações que controla e usa para forrar o próprio ninho).

A comparação óbvia é com os milhares de empresas industriais na economia de estado soviética. Elas eram teoricamente “propriedade” do povo ou dos trabalhadores, que não exerciam controle real sobre elas. Na prática, elas eram controladas pelos níveis mais altos do Partido e do aparato do estado, uma oligarquia gerencial autoperpetuadora que ordenhava a economia do estado para sustentar seus privilégios de estilo pródigo de dachas, carros sofisticados e loja de departamentos GUM.

A moderna empresa corporativa não é propriedade legítima de ninguém. Não é “propriedade” dos acionistas em absoluto, em qualquer sentido identificável. E embora seja propriedade de factodos gerentes que a pilham em benefício próprio, não pertence a eles em nenhum sentido legítimo.

2.  A divisa entre a economia corporativa e o estado centralizado, analogamente, é em grande parte fictícia.

Se recuássemos no tempo setecentos anos, não faria sentido perguntar se algum grande senhor feudal era dono “privado” de terras, ou se era parte do estado. Naquela sociedade, as classes donas de terras eram o estado, e o estado era o órgão de coleta de renda para as classes donas de terras. Os grandes donos de terras, no Antigo Regime, controlavam os altos escalões de comando do aparato do estado; o rei e seus nobres, na teoria legal feudal, eram donos da terra do reino inteiro, e usavam o poder coercitivo do estado para extrair renda das pessoas que de fato viviam na, e trabalhavam a, terra.

No moderno capitalismo de estado, analogamente, a gerência da economia corporativa e a gerência do aparato do estado consistem em grande parte o mesmo grupo de pessoas em rodízio.

Padrão típico é o mesmo indivíduo ir de diretor ou vice-presidente de grande corporação a subsecretário ou secretário-assistente ou chefe adjunto de órgão do governo, nomeado por alguma administração, e depois de novo a diretor ou gerente sênior de uma grande corporação. O sistema de diretorias com os mesmos membros, que vincula uns aos outros os grandes bancos e as corporações industriais, também inclui o estado. É difícil não lembrar da atraente curta expressão de Marx:  “comissão executiva da classe dominante.”

Ao mesmo tempo, as diversas centenas de firmas dominantes na economia corporativa, e a estrutura de poder que elas formam, dependem, para continuação de sua existência, de permanente intervenção do estado. O estado subsidia seus custos operacionais, até o ponto de para muitas das 500 da Fortune a soma total de assistencialismo corporativo direto e indireto exceder sua margem de lucro; se subsídios do estado e vantagens diferenciais tributárias fossem eliminados, elas começariam imediatamente a sangrar tinta vermelha e a vender suas empresas subsidiárias a preços de queima total até termos 50.000 da Fortune. E com o colapso da lucratividade e do valor acionário que resultaria da extirpação da teta do governo, é provável que muitas dessas empresas fossem compradas por centavos por dólar por seus próprios trabalhadores, ou simplesmente entregues aos trabalhadores (como as empresas recuperadas da Argentina).

A estabilidade dos mercados oligopolistas corporativos, e os preços administrados (ou “cost-plus markup” [cálculo do custo e, em seguida, acréscimo, a ele, de um percentual fixo para chegar ao preço de venda]) que estes tornam possível, dependem do efeito cartelizador das regulamentações do estado na proteção das grandes corporações contra competição plena de mercado.

Isso é verdade, especialmente, da assim chamada “propriedade intelectual,” que, isoladamente, é o maior instrumento de cartelização da indústria. A ATeT foi construída sobre os alicerces da Associação Bell de Patentes. Numerosas indústrias criaram cartéis por meio de troca ou agrupamento [pooling] de patentes (por exemplo, a Westinghouse e a GE cartelizaram a indústria de eletrodomésticos nos anos 1920 mediante agrupamento de suas patentes). A indústria química estadunidense foi criada quase do zero durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial, quando o Departamento de Justiça confiscou patentes químicas alemãs e as distribuiu entre as incipientes firmas químicas estadunidenses. A descrição de Alfred Chandler das firmas dominantes na primeira indústria de produtos de consumo eletrônicos consiste quase inteiramente de que patentes eram detidas por que firma.

Os setores dominantes da economia corporativa global dependem quase inteiramente de um modelo de negócios baseado não apenas em copyright e propriedade de patentes, mas na draconiana catraca ascendente da lei da Propriedade Intelectual – IP na Rodada do Uruguai do GATT e na Lei de Copyright do Milênio Digital: entretenimento, software, eletrônica, biotecnologia e produtos farmacêuticos. Eles não existiriam em qualquer forma remotamente identificável sem esses monopólios de observância compelida pelo estado.

A lei internacional de propriedade intelectual – IP, especificamente os longos prazos das patentes, estabiliza as corporações transnacionais no controle da mais recente geração de tecnologia de produção, e na prática relega os países do Terceiro Mundo ao fornecimento de trabalho em condições de escravatura para o capital de propriedade do Ocidente.

A propriedade intelectual desempenha o mesmo papel central protecionista na economia global corporativa de nossos dias que as tarifas desempenhavam nas antigas economias corporativas nacionais.

A maioria das regulamentações de segurança e qualidade serve, na prática, para limitar a competição em termos dos atributos/aspectos cobertos por essas regulamentações. Os padrões mínimos de observância compelida pela regulamentação usualmente tornam-se num máximo. O efeito é exatamente o mesmo que se todas as firmas de um ramo se juntassem para formular um código de qualidade e segurança daquele ramo visante a reduzir a competição em qualidade e segurança a nível administrável, exceto que, agindo por meio do estado, é eliminada a possibilidade desestabilizadora de defecção de firmas individuais. E, na prática, regulamentações de segurança e qualidade isentam a corporação de obedecer a qualquer padrão de imputabilidade civil superior ao do padrão regulatório nivelado por baixo, de menor denominador comum, do estado. Segundo a lei consuetudinária do incômodo, como existia no início do século dezenove antes de os tribunais eviscerarem-na para torná-la mais “camarada para com as empresas,” uma empresa era imputável por qualquer dano causado–ponto final. Hoje, se uma firma poluir ar ou água de maneira que cause dano objetivo, mas dentro dos limites estabelecidos pela Agência de Proteção Ambiental – EPA, ela pode usar esses limites como expediente para escapar de imputabilidade por delito civil pelo dano que causou. A Monsanto já tentou usar padrões da Administração de Alimentos e Medicamentos – FDA como arma para reprimir liberdade de expressão comercial, argumentando que deveria ser ilegal anunciar leite como livre de Hormônio do Crescimento Bovino recombinante; é calunioso, disse aquela empresa com desfaçatez, sugerir haver algo deficiente em práticas que atendem plenamente aos padrões da FDA.

Em escala a mais geral, Gabriel Kolko argumentou ter sido a Lei Antitruste Clayton que primeiro tornou possível mercados oligopolistas estáveis. Sua proibição de “competição iníqua” tornou pela primeira vez ilegais desestabilizantes guerras de preços e, para todos os intentos e propósitos, colocou cada ramo da indústria sob uma associação comercial patrocinada pelo governo.

A melhor analogia que já vi para entendermos os estreitos vínculos entre o estado e a economia corporativa, e sua conjunção numa única classe dominante capitalista de estado, foi concebida por Brad Spangler, em “Reconhecimento de Falsos Interesses Privados que são Em Realidade Parte do Estado“:

Postulemos dois tipos de cenários de roubo.

Num, um assaltante solitário aponta arma de fogo para você e toma seu dinheiro. Todos os libertários reconhecerão isso como microexemplo de algum tipo de governo em funcionamento, assemelhando-se, mais de perto, ao Socialismo de Estado.

No segundo, retratando o Capitalismo de Estado, um assaltante (o literal aparato do governo) mantém você imóvel diante de uma pistola enquanto o segundo (representando as corporações aliadas do Estado) apenas seguram a sacola dentro da qual você terá de colocar seu relógio de pulso, sua carteira e as chaves do seu carro. Dizer que sua interação com o homem que segura a sacola foi uma “transação voluntária” é um absurdo. Tal disparate deveria ser condenado por todos os libertários. Tanto o homem que segura a arma de fogo quanto o que segura a bolsa, juntos, constituem o verdadeiro Estado.

A implicação disso, prosseguiu ele em outro lugar, é que “o verdadeiro estado é a classe política inteira, os beneficiários finais do aparato coercitivo do governo.” E, mais especificamente, “esquemas de ‘privatização’ de governo corrupto que beneficiam grandes corporações são, assim, entendidos como mera transferência de ativos para ala diferente da classe política…” Na verdade ele citou o argumento de Murray Rothbard, que planejo tratar mais plenamente em postagem futura, de que as corporações que obtêm a maioria de seus lucros da intervenção do estado deveriam simplesmente ser vistas como empresas do estado e expropriadas por seus próprios trabalhadores, transformadas em genuína propriedade privadana forma de cooperativas de trabalhadores.

Atualização:  TGGP, num comentário de outra sequência, afixou um link para excelente artigo em 2Blowhards do qual me havia esquecido:  ”A Nova Classe e Seu Nexo de Governo, Parte I.” O qual descreveu a Nova Classe Média como uma coleção de

financistas, burocratas de alto nível corporativos e do governo, e profissionais (médicos, advogados, contabilistas etc.) todos os quais coletam alta renda sem que deles se requeira colocarem em risco o próprio dinheiro. Representam a maioria das pessoas nos 10% superiores da distribuição de renda, e percentagem com efeito muito alta das pessoas no 1% mais alto da distribuição de renda. (Outra parcela, muito menor, das pessoas nos 10% e no 1% superiores são empresários, os quais seguramente não são membros da Nova Classe; são experimentadores econômicos e tomadores de risco, como sua taxa de falência deixa claro.)

Isso se liga com o que eu disse acima. A gerência corporativa, por meio de seu controle das organizações, coleta todos os benefícios da propriedade real. Pelo fato, porém, de o que ela exerce ser mero controle da propriedade que realmente não é de propriedade de ninguém, ela não assume nada do risco de prejuízo pessoal que advém de investir os próprios recursos mediante comprar a propriedade (mantendo, no máximo, opções de ações que são fração mínima da totalidade acionária que controla).

Acredito seja esta uma das críticas de Mises ao modelo de Lange de socialismo de mercado: o gerente de uma empresa de propriedade do estado não era genuíno empresário, nem mesmo quanto tinha incentivos administrativos para maximizar os lucros da empresa, porque tudo o que arriscava era a perda de receita futura; ele não arriscava o valor da empresa ele próprio, porque não havia investido seus recursos pessoais na empresa.

Este item foi afixado na quinta-feira, 27 de março de 2008, às 14:21 horas.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 21 de setembro de  2012.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

1. The idea of the large corporation as the “private property” of its shareholders is, in most cases, utter nonsense. Berle and Means, in The Modern Corporation and Private Property, pointed this out as long ago as 1932. Even right-leaning libertarian defenders of the corporation are forced, against their instincts, to minimize the shareholder’s real ownership ties to the corporation.

The orthodox teaching among Mises’ followers is that of the “entrepreneurial corporation”: the corporation is not a managerial bureaucracy, but a simple extension of the entrepreneur’s will, subject to his absolute control through the magic of double-entry bookkeeping. For instance, in “Sean Gabb’s Thoughts on Limited Liability,” Stephan Kinsella started out by citing Hessen’s defense of the corporation as a simple contractual device by which the owners of capital manage their joint property, no different in principle from a partnership.

But in the same article Kinsella, in order to justify shareholder limited liability, suggested that the difference between shareholder and lender was only one of degree, and that the shareholder was simply another class of contractual claimant (as opposed to residual claimant, or owner). He was forced, in fact, to retreat to an argument very like that of Berle and Means: that the shareholder’s “property” in the corporation is largely fictitious, and that real ownership is associated with control.

What are the basic rights of a shareholder? What is he “buying” when he buys the “share”? Well, he has the right to vote–to elect directors, basically. He has the right to attend shareholder meetings. He has the right to a certain share of the net remaining assets of the company in the event it winds up or dissolves, after it pays off creditors etc. He has the right to receive a certain share of dividends paid IF the company decides to pay dividends–that is, he has a right to be treated on some kind of equal footing with other shareholders–he has no absolute right to get a dividend (even if the company has profits), but only a conditional, relative one. He has (usually) the right to sell his shares to someone else. Why assume this bundle of rights is tantamount to “natural ownership”–of what? Of the company’s assets? But he has no right to (directly) control the assets. He has no right to use the corporate jet or even enter the company’s facilities, without permission of the management. Surely the right to attend meetings is not all that relevant. Nor the right to receive part of the company’s assets upon winding up or upon payment of dividends–this could be characterized as the right a type of lender or creditor has.

In the comments below, he added:

I think the manager is more analogous to a sole proprietor. They have similar control in making policy, hiring and directing employees. You [quasibill] think the shareholder and proprietor have more in common–becuase they are both “owners”.

And in a comment at my blog, he wrote:

It is bizarre that there is this notion that owners of property are automatically liable for crimes done with their property… Moreover, property just means the right to control. This right to control can be divided in varied and complex ways. If you think shareholders are “owners” of corporate property just like they own their homes or cars–well, just buy a share of Exxon stock and try to walk into the boardroom without permission.

In fact even the right to elect the Board of Directors, the only real right of control possessed by shareholders, is largely symbolic. Corporations are generally controlled by inside directors who engage in mutual logrolling with the CEO, and a proxy fight by shareholders is usually doomed from the outset.

The threat of hostile takeover, of which corporate defenders have made so much in their arguments for “a market in corporate control,” was in fact a significant threat only for a limited time in the early- and mid-80s, immediately following the junk bond innovation in corporate finance. Even then, arguably, the hostile takeover was the action, not of investors, but of the management of the acquiring corporation acting in their own interests. In any case, corporate management quickly altered the internal rules of corporate governance to make hostile takeover extremely difficult through such devices as “poison pills,” “greenmail,” and “shark repellent.” As a result, from the late ’80s on, most takeovers were friendly actions, made in collusion with the management of the acquired firm.

The dominant model of MBA behavior since the 1980s, arguably, amounts to management promoting its own interests at the expense of the shareholder: starving, milking, and asset-stripping, and generally gutting the long-term productivity of the enterprise, in order to inflate artificially high short-term numbers, and game their own bonuses and stock options.

That’s why the big retailers have essentially stripped themselves of human capital. Thirty years ago if you walked into a store, you were likely to be served by career employees who knew the product lines and customer tastes inside and out. Today if you go into Lowe’s and need help, the likely response from the minimum-wage high school kid is “I dunno. I guess if you don’t see it, we ain’t got it.” That’s why, when you go into a hospital, your nurse is likely to have eight patients (and your orderly ten, fifteen, or even thirty patients), and you can expect to go five days without a bath or linen change, and shit the bed waiting 45 minutes for a bedpan. And you’d better count on getting an MRSA infection before you get out. An MBA is someone who would break up all the furniture in his house and burn it in the fireplace, and then brag about how much he’d saved on the heating bill this month.

Generally speaking, Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy operates in the corporation: corporate management will always have an advantage over those on the outside it allegedly “represents,” in gaming the internal rules to thwart outside control.

To summarize this portion, the corporation in practice is simply a free-floating aggregation of unowned capital, controlled by a self-perpetuating managerial oligarchy which exercises all the material rights of control without ever having acquired an “ownership” right by any legitimate means (i.e., by actually buying into the equity it controls and uses to feather its own nest).

The obvious comparison is to the thousands of industrial enterprises in the Soviet state economy. They were theoretically the “property” of the people or the workers, who exercised no actual control over them. In practice, they were controlled by the upper levels of the Party and state apparatus, a self-perpetuating managerial oligarchy which milked the state economy to support their lavish lifestyle of dachas, fancy cars and GUM department store privileges.

The modern corporate enterprise is not the legitimate property of anyone. It isn’t the “property” of the shareholders at all, in any meaningful sense. And although it’s the de facto property of the managers who loot it for their own benefit, it doesn’t belong to them in any legitimate sense.

2. The boundary between the corporate economy and the centralized state, likewise, is largely fictitious.

If we went back in time seven hundred years, it would be meaningless to ask whether some great feudal lord was a “private” landowner, or part of the state. In that society, the landowning classes were the state, and the state was the landowning classes’ rent collection agency. The great landlords, under the Old Regime, controlled the commanding heights of the state apparatus; the king and his nobles owned the land of the entire realm in feudal legal theory, and used the state’s coercive power to extract rents from the people actually living on and working the land.

Under modern state capitalism, likewise, the management of the corporate economy and the management of the state apparatus consist largely of the same rotating pool of personnel.

A typical pattern is for the same individual to go from being a director or vice president in some large corporation, to being an under-sectetary or assistant secretary or deputy agency chief appointed under some administration, and then back to being a director or senior manager in a large corporation. The interlocking directorate system, that ties together the large banks and industrial corporations, also includes the state. It’s hard not to think of Marx’s catchy little phrase: “executive committee of the ruling class.”

At the same time, the several hundred dominant firms in the corporate economy, and the structure of power they constitute, depend on ongoing state intervention for their continued existence. The state subsidizes their operating costs, to the extent that for many of the Fortune 500 the total sum of direct and indirect corporate welfare exceeds their profit margin; if state subsidies and differential tax advantages were eliminated, they would immediately start bleeding red ink and sell off subsidiary enterprises at fire sale prices until we had a Fortune 50,000. And with the collapse of profitability and share value that would result from the extraction of the government teat, it’s likely that many of those enterprises would be bought up at pennies on the dollar by their own workers, or simply abandoned to workers (like the recuperated enterprises of Argentina).

The stability of corporate oligopoly markets, and the administered (or “cost-plus markup”) pricing that they makes possible, depend on the cartelizing effect of state regulations in protecting the large corporations from full-blown market competition.

This is true, especially, of so-called “intellectual property,” which is the biggest single tool for cartelizing industry. AT&T was built on the foundation of the Bell Patent Association. Numerous industries have created cartels by the exchange or pooling of patents (for example, Westinghouse and GE cartelized the home appliance industry in the 1920s by pooling their patents). The American chemical industry was created almost from scratch during WWI, when the Justice Department seized German chemical patents and distributed them among the fledgling American chemical firms. Alfred Chandler’s account of the dominant firms in the early consumer electronics industry consists almost entirely of which patents were owned by which firm.

The dominant sectors in the global corporate economy depend almost entirely on a business model based not just on copyright and patent ownership, but on the draconian upward ratcheting of IP law under the Uruguay Round of GATT and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: entertainment, software, electronics, biotech, and pharmaceuticals. They would not exist in a remotely recognizable form without these state-enforced monopolies.

International IP law, specifically the long terms of patents, locks transnational corporations into control of the latest generation of production technology, and effectively relegates Third World countries to the supply of sweatshop labor for Western-owned capital.

Intellectual property plays the same central protectionist role in today’s corporate global economy that tariffs did for the old national corporate economies.

Most safety and quality regulations serve in practice to limit competition in terms of the features covered by those regulations. The minimum standards enforced by the regulations usually become a maximum. Their effect is exactly the same as if all the firms in an industry got together to formulate an industry quality and safety code in order to reduce quality and safety competition to a manageable level, except that by acting through the state they avoid the destabilizing possibility of defection by individual firms. And in practice, safety and quality regulations absolve the corporation from meeting any standard of civil liability higher than the state’s dumbed-down, lowest common denominator regulatory standard. Under the common law of nuisance, as it existed into the early nineteenth century before the courts eviscerated it to make it more “business-friendly,” a firm was liable for any harm it caused–period. Today, if a firm pollutes the air or water in a manner that causes objective harm, but falls within the limits set by the EPA, it can use those limits as a fig-leaf to escape tort liability for the harm it does. Monsanto has attempted to use FDA standards as a club to suppress commercial free speech, arguing that it should be illegal to advertise milk as free from recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone; it is libelous, they say with a straight face, to suggest there is something deficient in practices which fully meet FDA standards.

On the most general scale, Gabriel Kolko argued that it was the Clayton Antitrust Act which first made stable oligopoly markets possible. Its prohibition of “unfair competition” made destabilizing price wars illegal for the first time, and for all intents and purposes placed each industry under a government-sponsored trade association.

The best analogy I’ve ever seen for understanding the close ties between the state and the corporate economy, and their conjunction in a single state capitalist ruling class, was thought up by Brad Spangler, in “Recognizing Faux Private Interests that are Actually Part of the State“:

Let’s postulate two sorts of robbery scenarios.

In one, a lone robber points a gun at you and takes your cash. All libertarians would recognize this as a micro-example of any kind of government at work, resembling most closely State Socialism.

In the second, depicting State Capitalism, one robber (the literal apparatus of government) keeps you covered with a pistol while the second (representing State-allied corporations) just holds the bag that you have to drop your wristwatch, wallet and car keys in. To say that your interaction with the bagman was a “voluntary transaction” is an absurdity. Such nonsense should be condemned by all libertarians. Both gunman and bagman together are the true State.

The implication of this, he followed up elsewhere, is that “the true state is the entire political class, the parasitic net beneficiaries of the coercive apparatus of government.” And more specifically, “corrupt government ‘privatization’ schemes that benefit large corporations are thus seen as mere transfer of assets to a different arm of the political class…” In fact he cited Murray Rothbard’s argument, which I plan to treat more fully in a future post, that corporations that get the majority of their profits from state intervention should simply be regarded as state enterprises and expropriated by their own workers, transformed into genuine private property in the form of worker cooperatives.

Update:  TGGP, in a comment to another thread, posted a link to an excellent piece at 2Blowhards I’d forgotten about:  “The New Class and Its Government Nexus, Part I.” It described the New Middle Class as  a collection of,

financiers, senior corporate and government bureaucrats, and professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.), all of whom collect high incomes without being required to put their own money at risk. These people make up most of the people in the top 10% of the income distribution, and a very high percentage indeed of people in the top 1% of the income distribution. (Another, much smaller chunk, of the people in the top 10% and the top 1% are entrepreneurs, who are assuredly not members of the New Class; they are economic experimenters and risk takers, as their high bankruptcy rate demonstrates.)

This ties in with what I said above.  Corporate management, through its control of organizations, collects all the benefits of actual property ownership.  But because what it exercises is mere control over property that really isn’t owned by anybody, it has none of the risk of personal loss that comes from having actually invested their own resources by buying into the property (holding, at best, stock options that are a tiny fraction of the equity they control).

I believe this was one of Mises’ criticisms of the Lange model of market socialism:  the manager of a state-owned enterprise was not a genuine entrepreneur, even when he had administrative incentives to maximize the profits of the enterprise, because all he risked was loss of future income; he didn’t risk the value of the enterprise itself, because he hadn’t invested his personal wealth in it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Setor “Público” versus “Privado”.