I’ll tell you a secret Coy: from about 2001 to 2005, I was a pretty big libertarian. I was a staunch proponent of all things capitalist. I read Ayn Rand, essays by Ludwig von Mises, and Anarchy, State and Utopia by Nozick. But in 2005, as I was arguing with a philosophy major classmate at a party about my views, and I was trying to justify the morality of property, that essentially my worldview collapsed. I explained the notion of owning one’s labor and acquiring a right to property by doing work on physical things as the source, and he asked “What if I sprinkle a pinch of salt on the ground? Does that give me a right to the land? How much of the land? For how long? For all time to my heirs and their heirs? How substantial does the work have to be?” I couldn’t answer him. I mean, I didn’t have an epiphany right then and there; it took about 6 months to a year, but that inability to answer the question of “why property” in a way that made moral and logical sense was what turned everything around for me.
There was a time in this country when a man could own another man, a woman, a child. We don’t allow that kind of property relationship anymore. And why not? Using the tenuous, specious logic of John Locke, of “mixing your labor with a thing” you could justify the ownership of a man just as easily you could justify the ownership of a horse. Slaves are reared, bred, fed; it takes “labor” to “exercise exclusive control” over a slave. Well the answer to why not was and is that there is an issue of the human rights. There is an idea that one’s rights only extend up to the point where someone else’s begins. So we ended the notion that one’s person and one’s labor can be “owned” as the property of another.
But what do we have now? We have a system where pretty much anything that is not a person can be “owned”, and persons can be consentingly rented. Money is made either through owning things or renting things, and wage labor is essentially the “rental” of your person and your labor. You can quit and terminate it, but still, until you quit the job, your employer is renting the right to have you do work in a certain place, manner, and time. Renting a person rather than owning them is much less profitable, but it’s all the capitalist class has now if they need something to be done that an owned farm animal or the harnessed forces of nature can’t do.
So my next question is, if we should end the ownership of persons because it’s antithetical to the idea of human rights, are there other kinds of property ownership that should also be ended or reformed because they conflict with human rights? Think about some of the planks of the UN’s universal declaration of human rights. How many of these “rights” are infringed by property ownership. Don’t corporations “arbitrarily interfere with privacy, family, home or correspondence”? Doesn’t unequal distribution of assets weaken the ability to exercise our rights of freedom of movement between countries and places? Doesn’t property ownership interfere with the “right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”? Doesn’t property ownership and the distribution of wealth and money interfere with the right to education? But how could it be any different? Communism was a failure, right? Without the ability to amass property security, there is not enough incentive to produce; people become lazy.
But think about this: Intellectual property expires. After a certain point, it goes into the public domain. And yet, our capitalist planet buys and sells and produces trillions of dollars of it every year. In a sense, if you come up with an idea, you can have an exclusive “license” to it for a period of time, and this is enough “ownership” structure to hold together many industries that involve intellectual property. Well, why can’t ownership of land expire? I mean, sure, land is finite and ideas are infinite, but what if ownership of land certain kinds of land rotated equitably? Or what if, in the case of land that is farmed, or mined, after a certain point the ownership of the land devolved from the exclusive ownership of the developer to a cooperative made up of the persons who actually worked the land. You know, something not too far from this idea is commanded in the Bible. Every Jubilee year, land in ancient Israel would revert back to whoever owned it previously (Leviticus 27:24).
Several people in class today mentioned that morality is subjective and individual, and I can agree with that, but what system of coherent morality supports the way property law works in our world today? The morality of Christ? Christ said that if someone tries to rob you of your coat, that you should offer them your shirt too, and that if somebody asks you to give them something, you should give it to them. The morality of the Torah? The Torah commands that you should leave the edges of your fields unharvested so that the poor can eat. The Torah requires that ownership of land devolve automatically to previous owners. The Torah commands compassion towards the stranger and the widow. The morality of the Buddhist eightfold path that advises that part of reaching enlightenment is picking the “right livelihood”, which is necessarily one that does not increase human suffering? What religions say we should amass wealth at the expense of others? And if it’s not a religious morality, if it’s a secular, philosophical morality, what are the fundamental tenants of such a morality? Where does it start and how does it get to the point we are at today?