Yesterday we looked at Pre-postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part IX (today's subject)
      
      
      
       Tomorrow:
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Yesterday we looked at Pre-postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part VIII (today's subject)
      
      
      
       Tomorrow:
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Last week we looked at Pre-postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part VII (today's subject)
      
      
      
       Tomorrow:
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Yesterday we looked at Pre-Postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part VI (today's subject)
      
      
      
       Monday:
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Thursday, August 21, 2015

Yesterday we looked Pre-Postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part V (today's subject)
      
      
      
       Tomorrow: (or Monday:)
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Yesterday we looked at Pre-Postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part IV (today's subject)
      
      
      
       Tomorrow:
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Yesterday I said that Phenomenology was a link to both Pragmatism and Existentialism, but I didn't explain what it was. Pre-Postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part III Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer.
      I begin with
      
      
       Tomorrow:
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Last week we looked at the terms "Postmodern" and "Pre-postemodern" and I made the claim that both Pragmatism and Existentialism are Pre-postmodern philosophies. Pre-Postmodernism & Process Epistemology Part II From Phenomenology to Existentialsm
       Existentialism begins with the premise that Existence precedes Essence. It is more of a philosophical attitude than a philosophy, per se, which is why guys like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the Russian author, Dostoevsky can be counted among the Existentialist thinkers, retroactively. They didn't have that term in their day but modern Existentialists refer to their ideas as being in their tradition.
      To say that Existence precedes Essence is to say that there is no inherent meaning to life, but we, as conscious and active Beings, have the power to create meaning. Some students may accuse Existentialists of being Atheists, but, as the song goes, "It ain't necessarily so." There are Christian and Jewish Existentialist as well as Atheists and Agnostics.
      Phenomenology is also a relatively recent term but is also applied to older philosophers. What sets those modern philosophers who call themselves Existentialists apart from the older ones who didn't use the term, is the addition of phenomenology to the prerequisites of Existentialism. Phenomenology, like Existentialism, is not so much a philosophy, as a philosophical method used by philosophers. In future posts I will show that it is also another link between Pragmatism and Existentialism, in that some Pragmatists also use the phenomenological method for their starting points.
       Tomorrow: Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer
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Yesterday we looked at the parallels between George Kelly's philosophy and William James' Pragmatism. Pre-Postmodernism and Process Epistemology Part I Why pre-Postmodernism?
      I said, in an earlier post, that I would explain why I call Postmodernism Pre-Postmodernism. It is simple. We can't be postmodernists because we are still in the "modern" era, also known as the Cartesian era. Philosophers who are called "postmodernists" are those who understand why (but not always how) we must break away from the dualistic Eith/Or fallacies that plague our critical thinking. Besides Pragmatism, I have already mentioned Existentialism as also being a precursor to postmodernism which, logically, would be Pre-Postmodernism.
      In fact, the whole dichotomy of modernism vs. postmodernism is a totally Cartesian, pre-postmodern concept. In the future, when philosophers become truly postmodernist, they won't call themselves that, because the whole dichotomy of "modern v. postmodern" is a modern, Cartesian concept, not a postmodern concept.
      I also mentioned that, in my personal construct of philosophy, American Pragmatists and European Existentialists are all saying the same things using different philosophic vocabularies. The Existentialists, for instance, may talk about a person's choice of personal constructs as being either "authentic" or "inauthentic", but they would never describe a choice as "having cash value" (William James' term). That is so American.
      This next series of rants will take us from Existentialism/Pragmatism/Constructive Alternativism to what is usually called Postmodernism (to their credit, many Postmodernists do not like to be called that), and then into the most recent developments in philosophy: Process philosophy and process epistemology. To understand that though, we have to explore the precursor to Existentialism, which is Phenomenology.
      For those readers who were skeptical of Kelly's and James' constructs of reality (in yesterday's post) as being both ideal and material at the same time, I might add that the science of quantum mechanics backs them up.
Monday: From Phenominology to Existentialism
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Yesterday we looked Kelly's position on determinism and free will. George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part V Constructive Alternativism and Pragmatism
      In section 8 of chapter 1, "Relation to philosophical systems," Kelly says that ontologically his position is a form of substantival Monism but a neutral form, "and, like Spinoza, we are prepared to to apply attributive pluralism to the substance." Furthermore, Kelly says that "the differentiation of its (the substance's) monistic from its pluralistic aspects is hardly worth the effort." Or, as William James would have put it, "If the difference doesn't make any difference, then it has no cash value."
      William James introduced the concept of neutral monism in his essay "Does Consciousness exist?" James' argument was that consciousness does not exist as an entity, but it does exist as a function. Furthermore, abstractions like "function" and "thought" are not made up of any difference kind of "stuff" than is matter. This is what is meant by neutral monism in Kelly's Constructive Alternativism and James' Pragmatism.
       The term Monism is in contrast to Dualism. Dualist philosophers believe that reality is made up of two kind of "stuff"; material things and immaterial things. Monists, on the other hand, believe there is only one kind of stuff; but Materialist Monists believe there is only matter, and Idealist Monists believe there is only ideas. By staking out the pragmatist territory of Neutral Monism, James, Kelly, and others are saying there is both matter and ideas but that they are not different kinds of stuff. This is a breakaway from most philosophy since Descartes left us with the mind/body duality conundrum. It is also where we segue into postmodernism and process philosophy.
Tomorrow: Postmodernism and Process Philosophy.
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Yesterday we looked at the relationship of Kelly's philosophy to Existentailism. Today we continue that theme with a more specific discussion of determinism and free will. George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part IV Constructive Alternativism and Existentialism. Deterrminism and free will
      The first thing one must notice is that Kelly uses the word "determinism" and not "pre-determinism". Nowhere does he talk of any teleological forces or processes that inevitably lead from a past event to a future event. Remember, earlier he had said that our constructs are designed to predict and control, but he also said that as scientists we must always test our contructs for their accuracy, and he said that can only be done with immediate events, not far in the future events like life-after-death or anything that depends upon religious faith.
      Kelly's position is that the facts do not determine our constructs, but our constructs determine how we live with the facts and that is the only kind of determinism that concerns him. He also says that freedom and determinism are two sides to the same coin. He is not concerned with the freedom of chaos, only the freedom of humans to chose. Our constructs may determine our lack of freedom, but we can always free ourselves from past constructs by constructing new ones.
      Years ago, in one of my own essays on free will, I stated that the problem of free will, for most people, is that they frame it as an absolute. If I say "I have free will," you can counter with "No, you do not have free will because you aren't more powerful than a locomotive, you can't leap tall buildings at a single bound, and you aren't faster than a speeding bullet." My bad. I framed it as an absolute and you were right to call me on it. So then I say, "I don't have free will," and your rebuttal is that maybe I don't, but it doesn't follow that nobody else has free will. Again, the mistake was in fram,ing it as an absolute.
      Free will is relative on a scale of zero to some non-zero finite number. Some people really do not have any free will at all, some have more than others, some have lots and lots of free will but usually not as much as they would like to have and/or as much as they think they have. Nobody has absolute free wiil, but that argument does not negate the probability of some free will.
      Kelly backs me up on this. Our choices of constructs, he says, and our choice to test, reevaluate, or change our constructs will eventually gain us more free will than we started with. I like to use a card game as a metaphor. In the first place, you can't win if you don't play the game. Then, the cards in your hand may be dealt to you by the Cosmic Coinkydink, but it is your turn to play them with the goal of improving your hand. That's Basic Existentialism 1A, If you don't play the game, The Cosmic Coinkydink will make the choices for you and you are still responsible for the consequences of whatever happens next.
       Tomorrow: Constructve alternativism and Pragmatism
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Yesterday we looked at Kelly's philosophical system George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part III Constructive Alternativism and Existentialism
      As an undergraduate philosophy major I developed a theory that American Pragmatists and European Existentialist were really saying the same thing in different languages. Pucture yourself sitting in a cosmopolitan restaurant near two other tables and you can overhear the conversations going on at the other tables. Now let us suppose that by a very strange coincidence, the people at one table speak French but not German, and the at the other table the conversationalists speak German but not French. And by an even wierder coincidence they are both having the exact same conversation. And you are able to know this because you happen to speak both German and French.
      My point is that Pragmatists, having arrived at their constructs by specifically American experiences, and using their specific philosophic vocabulary in their dialect of English are discussing their philosophy of life, while the Existentialists, having arrived at their constructs by the specifically European experience (Russian, German and French), and having their own philosophical vocabulary, do not realize that they are mostly saying the same things.
      George Kelly, being an American, understood how his philosophy was in line with Pragmatism, but we can also see in his work many parallels with Existentialism. Existentialism begins with the notion that existence precedes essence. That is, first we are born and we just exist. But our essence, that which makes us human, has to be deliberately developed by ourselves. Existentialists also have a concept called "choice by default." If some of us are not alert to the absurdity of our human condition, and do not consciously make choices that will give us freedom from deterministic forces, then Reality has a way of making choices for us that, in all probability, will not result in freedom. In other words, if you do not choose, then you have made a choice, by default, not to choose, and you are still held responsible for the consequences of your choice not to choose.
       You do not even have to believe in free will, you just have to act as though you had free will. Many people think of Existentialism as an atheist philosophy, and many Existentialists are atheists, but many other important Existentialists were/are Christians and Jews.
      As you can see, I find George Kelly to be a convenient link between Existentialism and Pragmatism. Read yesterday's (Mon. Aug. 10th) blog again and see how Kelly views the consequences of our choices. Remember, just as not all choices are good ones, so not all personal (and social) constructs are good ones. We have to live by the ones that Reality chooses for us, or we can choose better ones.
       Tomorrow: More about Constructive Alternativism and Existentialism. Determinism and free will
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last week we began with Kelly's overall personal construct about personal constructs. George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part II Kelly's Philosophical Position
      George Kelly called his philosophy "Constructive alternativism." It assumes that the universe is constantly changing. In trying to figure out our changing environments we try out different constructs of reality to see how well they work for us, i.e. how accurate they are at predicting events so that we can control them rather than being enslaved to our past experiences. There are always alternative constructs and since, as amateur scientists, our experiences are also experiments, we can change the variables in our environments if our original constructs (hypotheses) prove to be unsound.
      Kelly mentions several philosophical positions that have many elements in common with his own Constructive Alternativism including American Pragmatism. He does not mention European Existentialism by name but his section on free will and determinism seems, to this writer, to be very much in keeping with existential philosophy and, more to the point, Existentialist Psychology.
      Kelly is not only a Pragmatist and an Existentialist, but his philosophy also fits perfectly into framework of Process Epistemology. Kelly was so far ahead of his time (he died in 1965) that he didn't seem to be aware of the newest, developing field of process philosophy, at least not by that name. Since Process philosophy and Process Epistemology are my specialty, I will talk more about them later, but first I want to discuss how Kelly's Constructive Alternativism ovrlaps with Pragmatism and Existentialism. Tomorrow: Kelly and Existentialism.
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Friday, Aug. 7, 2015)
George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part I What is a construct and how does it work?
      Dr. Kelly wrote this two volume book in 1955 but I believe his work is more important now than it was then. He died in 1965 so he was not able to witness the vast and complex changes in social and cultural constructs (he called them "public constructs") that have developed since then, due to the internet and the ubiquitness of digital social media.
      Dr. Kelly was a psychotherapist and his work is always referenced as psychology but this writer will always think of him as a great philosopher. Ironically, he emphasized that his theory of constructs, as well as people's personal constructs, are interdisciplenarian. He devotes a whole section in chapter one to pointing out the overlapping of psychology and philosophy, so he would probably call me to task for labelling him as either one. My bad. My own papers on process epistemology stress that same point, but it is hard not to fall back into the language pre-postmodernism. After all, our schools still divide up our areas of study into discrete disciplines whereas all knowledge is analog, not digital.
      Kelly is more specific when he talks about the difference between physiology (how our bodies work) and psychology (how our minds work). Using the quantum mechanics analogy again, our physiology operates by digital particles and our psychology is driven by analog waves. But our minds and our psychological constructs are just as real as are our livers and hearts. Plus, (since postmodeernism rejects Descartes mind/body duality) our minds and our bodies do interact. Or, as we "pre-postmodernists" (ha ha I'll explain that term in a later blog post.) always say "You cannot separate ontology from epistemology."
      The main point of Dr. Kelly's work is that we are all amateur scientists. The goal of science is to predict and control, and all of us, no exceptions, are always creating our constructs of what we think reality is all about. Through our experiences we try to predict how our lives will turn out and control our environments to create more beneficial outcomes. Not all personal constructs are practical or benefsicial, so the more alert we are, the more often we test our constructs for accuracy and predictability, and either discard or modify those ideas that do not work. Kelly even goes so far as to say that a bad personal construct is still better than no construct at all. (In later posts I will be discussing how many social and cultural constructs are also harmful and need replacing or modifying.)
Monday: George Kelly's Philosophical Position
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Yesterday we finished up our rant on private property with a conclusion, including a page of cited references. Getting & Putting It All Together       Previously we covered racial identity and private property. Tomorrow we will be looking at personal (psychological) constructs, and culture (social constructs). We will then go into the areas of process philosophy and process epistemology and see how they are informed by neuroscience and quantum mechanics. Eventually we will be designing a meta-algorithm; an algorithm for creating other algorithms. And this is where you, the reader, can participate.
      No matter who you are, where in the world you live, or what culture you grew up in, you will be able to design your own World Peace Algorithms in your own local areas. You will be thinking both globally and locally as you network with all the other agents of the World Peace Algorithm.
      So stay tuned to this blog and tell all your friends that, not only is world peace a possibility, but you will be able to make it happen!
Tomorrow: I begin a series on Psychologist Dr. George Kelly and his work on personal constructs.
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Yesterday we (again) looked at what Locke, Hobbes & HUme had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XXI Conclusion(s)
       Aristotle said that “in some sense” property should be held in common but privately owned. Since we are talking about the possibility of creating a new social contract wherein the people finally get to view the government as themselves (by the people, for the people) rather than as some outside, hostile entity, it is also possible to consider that all the environment, land, water, air, sunshine, &c. really are owned by all of us, collectively. In order to allow the occupation of land for home or work use by individuals, it is only necessary to collect rent. Without all the externalities and land speculation that comes with corporate ownership of the land, I am convince that rent for the average individual would be much less than it is in our present economy. That rental income could also pay for a lot of good social programs.
       I have already discussed the differences in the programs proposed by Paine, Skidmore, and George, but what they all had in common was a non-violent, legal, democratic, political solution. Thomas Paine and Thomas Skidmore were innocently naïve in that they believed in democracy and thought that it actually existed in their time and place. Skidmore even appealed to the literate citizens of New York State which he estimated to be a full 19/20 of the population (Skidmore [1829], 9), apparently assuming that literate also meant educated. It is true that in their time the industrial revolution had not yet reached its apex, and the power of corporations was not as overwhelming as it would later become in Henry George‘s (and Karl Marx’s) time. But both Paine and Skidmore, in their earnest appeal for a new social contract, overestimated the power of the educated masses, and underestimated the political power of wealthy landowners. Skidmore argued against Locke’s theory of labor, but too late. The U.S. Constitution had already been designed, a generation before his time, to use Locke’s theory to justify the government’s obligation to protect individual property ownership rights, and to bias the law in favor of property owners.
       How prophetic that Skidmore should write, in 1829, that 1% of the population owns most of the wealth and the other 99% own very little or none at all, (Skidmore [1829], 17) about one hundred eighty years before the Occupy Wall Street movement of the 21st century.
       So now, in a political/economic climate dominated by the wealthy 1%, and with the 99% of citizens undereducated and underrepresented (and under insured), I find myself in the unenviable position of the non-violent political philosopher, paraphrasing Skidmore, who was paraphrasing Rousseau. Their sentiment, and mine, is that if I were a legislator I would not bother writing my opinions, but would put them into action. Not being a legislator, I can only hope that the publication of my opinions can influence those who do have political power. (Rousseau [1762], 5) and (Skidmore [1829], 7-8).
       Ethically any right to private property, either collectively or individually, should be justified on consequentialist grounds, but the consequences of making land, as well as labor, a commodity for sale, has not been morally justified by empirical evidence. Here are some idea for future lawmakers to kick around. 1. Real estate is treated by the market system as a commodity to the detriment of society.
2. The price, or value, of Real estate is a derivative, based on purely speculative psychology and economic externalities..
3. Derivatives, of any kind, also create more negative externalities and should be regulated , taxed, or outlawed altogether
4. Rent on property should go to the government, not to the private sector.
5. The cost of negative externalities can be taxed to the appropriate corporations and converted to benefit to society in the form of progressive social programs.
6. To be really generous, the benefits of positive externalities could go back to environmentally and ecologically friendly corporations in the form of tax credits but the education of the public about the benefits of positive externalities has to be made more clear. (end)
Tomorrow I explain how all of this fits into the World Peace Algorithm (WPA)with previews of coming attractions

Friday: I begin a series on psychologist, Dr. George Kelly and his theory of personal constructs. References
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       http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s10.html
       Accessed 4/27/2012.
Aristotle. [350 B.C.E.]. Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. http://classics.mit.edu/
       Aristotle/politics.html Accessed 8/24/2011.
Avalon Project. (no date) “Agrarian Law, 111 B.C.” Yale Law School Lillian Goldman
       Law Library. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/agrarian_law.asp. (Accessed
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Hobbes, Thomas. [1651]1962. The leviathan. New York : Touchstone
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       Allen & Unwin.
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       Franklin.
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       Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Ed. Herbert B.
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       The American political system. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Yesterday we looked at what Herman Daly & John Cobb had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XX Recap: Locke, Hobbes & Hume
       As was mentioned earlier, John Locke’s philosophy was the one adopted by the Founding Fathers of the United States, but let us consider its merits and demerits, and then consider what could have been the alternatives, Hobbes or Hume. Locke (again)
       When Locke tried to theorize about the origins of government and the justification of same, he went into more detail than had been done previously, about how property is acquired. In his logical progression from the “state of nature” to the advent of “civilization,” Locke’s argument centers on property as personal possessions. It is only later that he makes the rhetorical leap to real estate as “property” and tries to convince us that the same rules apply to both, as if they were both the same thing. I maintain that his defense of private property as personal possessions acquired and made legitimate by labor, is well founded, but breaks down when he applies it to property as real estate.
       The taking of natural resources and using them to support oneself and one’s family, according to John Locke, gives ownership of those resources to the individual, as long as he only takes what is immediately needed, “at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others” (Locke [1690], 329). Also, creating something new from those resources, such as toys or tools, also confers ownership. Labor, then, is what makes property legitimate, and Locke specifically argues against both waste and greed. In the case of land-property, however, his arguments do not apply.
       In a simple scenario, a man can fence off some land to build a home, plant some crops, or raise some livestock. If a miner, he can dig for valuable minerals. In a more urban setting, a man can set up a shop and manufacture goods. As long as he is living in his home, harvesting his crops and/or his livestock, the house, the crops, the livestock, the minerals, the manufactured goods, are all his personal possessions because he has earned them by his labor. And the importance of protection of this right by the government should be obvious. But Locke just assumes that we are all going to accept his logic as applicable to the land itself, when he has actually failed to show cause.
       In all the above scenarios, the individual is using the land to create something else, he has not created the land. He also has not improved the land. The land is being used as long as someone is creating something on it, but no value is added to the land. When he stops laboring, stops creating, the land is no more valuable than it was before. In fact, if he stops harvesting, stops raising livestock, stops mining, stops living in his house, the land is then going to waste, becoming less valuable. He can sell his crops, sell his house, sell his livestock, sell his manufactured goods and the minerals he has mined, but none of these things are part of the land, they only exist on the surface of the land and they can be bought, sold, and distributed elsewhere. In fact, the land, as an object to be possessed, does not even exist. It is just an abstract concept. The earth does not come with natural boundary lines marking off pieces of it as things, but as we have seen (Rohrbough 1968), (Cronon 1991), and (Polanyi 1968), the U.S. government did just that; marked off pieces of the earth as things, as commodities for sale. It is a metaphor, a social construct, that humans use to navigate in.
       Locke, I maintain, has not shown logically how anyone can own the land underneath all of this. His arguments only apply to personal possessions. In other cultures, notably that of Native Americans, (to which Locke pays lip service and of which he ignores the implications) the ownership of the land is not necessary for a viable economic system, and therefore does not justify a government that feels it has to protect land ownership rights. As Henry George has stated, “It is not necessary to say to a man. ‘this land is yours’ in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it, it is only necessary to say to him, ‘whatever your labor or capital produces on this land shall be yours’” (George [1879] 398). And that brings me to two more fallacies; Locke’s commingling of the terms “common“ and “uncultivated“ in one instance, and “industrious” and “rational” in another.
       Locke admits that originally the land was held in common, but he argues that God did not intend for it to “always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational” (Locke [1690], 333).
       Common does not mean uncultivated, as any collective farm or coop can attest. And not all rational people are “industrious” as Locke defines industrious. And conversely, not all industrious people are rational, however much those businessmen who fit Locke’s definition of “industrious” would like us to believe. Before colonialism, Native Americans had no concept of “owning the land,” and yet they were able to create a valid economic system, using Locke’s labor justification for private possessions (of which they were unaware). They owned what they hunted, harvested, or manufactured, and had no need for ownership of land. In other words, they were both “rational” and “industrious,” by their own definition of the terms, but Locke would have said they were not rational, and only industrious in a limited way. And the social construct (read social contract) by which the colonists guided themselves justified taking the land away from the Native Americans, often by force and violence, and using it in an entirely different way.
Hobbes & Hume (again)
       In America, nobody likes a smarmy monarchist, but let us give Hobbes his due. Like Machiavelli before him, Hobbes understood realpolitik, and probably would be welcomed as a brother-in-arms by the Neo-conservatives of today But his point is still a good one, even if it is expressed in too extreme terms: We need a government to keep law and order, but any laws about property rights do not come from natural law, they come from lawyers, and everyone knows that lawyers can argue any position that suits their fancy. David Hume said pretty much the same thing and he also added that it was all just so much psychobabble anyway.
       If the founding fathers had favored Hobbes…oh wait, they did, that is what Republicanism is all about, and now we don’t need Locke any more. If they had paid more attention to Hume we might have an understanding about how relationships can be changed if they don’t work out. Oh, well, let’s just do it anyway, since we don’t need Locke anymore. Real Estate as a Derivative
       Economically, land as a commodity is also derivative, one of those artificial financial instruments that allow clever people to manufacture wealth out of nothing. Property values are based on the value of adjacent property in a complicated feedback loop using hidden externalities, so land speculators can buy land in anticipation of changing property values and even artificially manipulate property values through designed externalities. Also land developers can buy large tracks of land, subdivide them, and resell smaller but more expensive tracks, much the same way that drug dealers buy kilos of heroin and cut it into baggies to sell at a profit. Wednesday: Conclusion and citations page Alert all your friends who won't give up their racial identities and/or who make money from owning private property that this blog challenges their personal and social constructs.
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Yesterday we looked at what C. B. Macpherson had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XIX
Daly & Cobb knew that the Native Americans had the right idea all along
       Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr, in their book ,For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a sustainable Future, make the point that our modern problems with the environment, stem from the economic theories based on land as a commodity rather than as our environment. They don’t have to specifically mention Locke, to point out that seeing the land as something than men labor with, land being passive and men being active in the relationship, ignores the empirical fact that the land, (as well as the rest of the environment), is perfectly productive on its own, without any labor from humans (Daly 1989, 99). They call this misplaced concreteness because economists have abstracted land as a labor/property relationship but have tried to use it as a concrete, empirical fact in their economic theories. We would have a whole different (and better they say) political economy if we had paid more attention to ecological relationship of people to their environments, instead of looking at the land as something to be divided up and resold at a profit. Summary of arguments
       We have learned that property is considered a “right” but, depending on the specific argument, it can be either an individual right or a collective right. We have also learned that “property” means different things to different people. It can mean personal possessions, or land, or both. But “land” can also be thought of as nature, a relationship to human beings that also includes the water and the air. But there can be different relationships, depending on whether humans look at land as a commodity or as an integral part of their whole environment.
       We have learned from the ancient Greeks and Romans that, in real politics, landowners (those who have a right, as individuals, to own as much land as they can get their hands on) tend to form oligarchies to perpetuate their power, and we have seen how this power was specifically perpetuated in the United States legal system. We have read some philosophers who tried to address this injustice: Paine, Skidmore, and George. We have also seen them ignored in real politics, as the oligarchies prefer to cite the philosopher (John Locke) who favored their point-of-view. But we have also seen that any point-of-view can only be enforced by a social contract, not from any “natural law,” and there is something to said for the writings of both Hobbes and Hume.
Tuesday: "Recap: Locke, Hobbes & Hume
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Yesterday we looked at what Karl Polanyi had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XIII
C. B. Macpherson turns that “exclusive property” idea on its head.
       C.B. Macpherson’s book, Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, like Schlatter’s before him, is an anthology of theories about property, but in his conclusion he comes up with a more original idea. All previous classical, or Lockean versions of the right to own property, as individuals, meant that the individual has the right to exclude others from his property. But Macpherson’s idea is that all individuals should have the right not to be excluded from the use of property for their labor (Macpherson 1978, 199-207). I think it’s a clever, sneaky way of switching to collectivist mode without alerting the guardians of Lockeanism, but I won’t tell on him. After all, if we all owned the environment together, collectively, then, de facto, nobody would be excluded from the use of it.
Monday: "Herman E. Daly & John B. Cobb knew that the Native Americans had the right idea all along."
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Yesterday we looked at what Henry George had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XII
Karl Polanyi, the “not quite Karl Marx” guy
       Karl Polanyi, in his book The Great Transformation, originally published in 1944, during the Second World War, discusses the big three elements of the market system that all economics textbooks talk about; land, labor, and capital. In the market system, these three commodities, along with goods and services, have their prices in rent, wages, and interest respectively. However, Polanyi argues, effectively I believe, that these are fictitious commodities, only invented by industrialists to keep the self regulated market system going. Goods and services, he argues, really are “commodities here empirically defined as objects produced for sale on the market; markets, again, are empirically defined as actual contacts between buyers and sellers” (Polanyi 1975, 72). But land, labor and capital, even though they have been artificially turned into commodities, are not and should not be commodities. Labor is just a name for what people do to live, land is just another name for the natural environment, and money is a just a social agreement about what constitutes a medium of exchange, and none of the three are actually produced the way goods and services are produced, as commodities for buying and selling.
       I am not able to refute Polanyi’s argument that making these into commodities really is essential to a self-regulating market, but whether or no, I agree that they are not really produced and should not really be commodities. If they are not really essential to a self-regulating market, then we can stop using them in this way and the market system can continue without them. If they really are essential to the market system, then I suggest that we get rid of the market system and try a much more regulated political economy. Richard Schlatter writes a redundant anthology
       Richard Schlatter, in the conclusion to his 1951 book, Private Property: The History of an Idea, after assessing many theories of private property throughout history, including the Christian medieval and reformation thought, notes that the Classical theory of the natural right to property, as fashioned by John Locke, is almost impossible to defend in modern Capitalist theory, and yet it is still being used, in different situations and even by opposing viewpoints (Schlatter 1951, 278, 281). At first glance, he seems to be confusing Locke’s theory of labor with the State of Nature theory, but on second reading I realize that he is right; nobody uses the State of Nature theory anymore, yet everybody, Capitalist and Socialist alike, feels comfortable with Locke’s labor theory, even though it is no more valid than any other theory. Also, Locke’s theory can be easily modified to fit either a collectivist rights theory or an individualist rights theory. Laborers, as individuals have a right to the fruits of their labor (Free Market economics) and laborers collectively have a right to the fruits of their labor (Socialism and Communism). Schlatter’s most ironic point is that modern Capitalists still pay lip service to that theory, even though their economic activities work against it.
Friday: C. B. Macpherson turns that “exclusive property” idea on its head.
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Yesterday we looked at what Thomas Skidmore had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XI
Henry George likes only one kind of tax
       Another nineteenth century philosopher of political economy, Henry George, (1839 – 1897) wrote Progress and Poverty, in which he says almost exactly the same things that Tom Paine was saying about the relationship between wealth and poverty, although he has different remedies for the evils of modern society. Like Thomas Paine, Henry George saw that wealth created poverty and, also in agreement with Paine, that people living in other than industrial societies may seem poorer compared to the wealthy, but are still much better off than the poor in those more technologically “advanced” societies.
       Henry George’s “purple prose” style is so bad that it is good, especially if you are writing for National Lampoon, or some such periodical, and I wonder if that might not have been the reason for his not being taken seriously in his own time. He writes gushingly of the hoped-for utopian paradise that was promised by the industrial revolution, and then brings us down with a jolting thud. After noting that poverty and wealth exist side by side in all civilized societies, he explains that the common cause is industrial depressions which always accompanies material progress, that “where material progress everywhere tends are the most fully realized – that is to say, where populations is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed – we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness“ (George [1879], 6).
       Unlike Thomas Paine’s rent on land, Henry George’s remedy is a single tax on land. But, like Paine, he was not threatening to rob anyone of their land. “I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.” (George [1879], 405).
       I noticed that George has confused the terms “rent” and “tax,” but I will show, in my conclusion that that is not really a problem. Whether one calls it a “tax “or a “rent” will only make a difference as to how the idea is presented, and to whom it is presented. As David Hume might have said, if he was living in our day, it is no big deal to consider a tax as just a rent. It is just another artifice of the mind.
       Henry George was not just some deductive theorist wondering “what if….” He was an inductive, empirical economist, and he did his homework. Progress and Poverty is a long book, and it is full of good economic data. What is more, he does not blame capitalists for poverty; he considers them victims as well, of the injustices brought about by landowners. His economic arguments show how his single tax on land is good for Capitalism.
       George argues that “…Taxes on the value of land not only do not check production as do most other taxes, but they tend to increase production, by destroying speculative rent.“ Then he cites speculative rent as a cause of industrial depressions all over the world. “causing more waste and probably more suffering than would a general war. “ Taxes on the land, he argues would keep the land from being left idle. “The dog in the manger who, in this country especially, so wastes productive power, would be choked off“ (George [1879], 413).
       Gathering up all those thoughts from previous ages, let us now compare them to the moderns.
      Thursday: Karl Polanyi, the “not quite Karl Marx” guy
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Yesterday we looked at what The Founding Fathers had to say about private property
Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part X
Thomas Skidmore has a plan to save the whole world
       The title of Thomas Skidmore’s book, The Rights of Man to Property, could be misleading to those who are looking for a philosophy that justifies unlimited individual ownership of private property in the Lockean sense.
       In the preface to his book, he rejected as absurd the idea that some are born to rule and others to be ruled. He maintained that the possession of too much wealth allows property owners to live on the labor of others because property is distributed unequally.(Skidmore [1829], 3-6). He anticipated Proudhon (or maybe Proudhon paraphrased him?) because he used the same metaphor that Proudhon will later use (“Property is theft”), claiming that property should be taken away from those who abuse the privilege “… on the same principle, that a sword or a pistol may be wrested from a robber…” (Skidmore [1829], 3). He argued, as did his predecessors, that there is no legitimate claim to private property by individuals, but said that, even if there were a legitimate claim, the abuse of power negates any claim to legitimacy.(Skidmore [1829], 4-5).
       In the first chapter Skidmore quoted Thomas Paine’s prophesy, (written in The Rights of Man), that there would be no more monarchies in Europe after 1800. Skidmore proudly pointed out that while the prophesy did not come true in Europe, the logical explanation for why it did come true in America is simply America’s great literacy rate. He claimed that those who cannot read or understand what they have read were only one twentieth of the population of New York State, while in France the ratio was 17 out of 30 (over half their population) (Skidmore [1829], 9). (I am not sure why he chose France for this statistic since they also threw out their monarchy.) After quoting his researched statistics showing that literacy is also high in other states besides New York (his home state), he optimistically hoped that the 1% very wealthy citizens can be outvoted by the 99% non-wealthy, but literate, citizens, to carry out the legal reforms that he was proposing in his book (Skidmore [1829], 17).
       Skidmore had high hopes for the newly invented political institution called Democracy, wherein all citizens have the right to vote. He expressed pity for all previous, non-democratic states that could not correct the evil that is private property, and he then discussed the problems in ancient Rome’s Agrarian Law.
       When Skidmore talked of Roman Agrarian laws he echoed Cicero in pointing out that even though the original intent of the laws was to place a limit on the size of privately owned land and to take the excess for the public domain and to give some to land-less citizens including Roman soldiers, the Patrician class “were, therefore extremely unwilling to give them up; and such was the structure of their political fabric at the time that they alone had the power of originating all laws, the Agrarian as well as every other. They were, therefore, disposed, as often as they dared, to render it nugatory, or of little effect” (Skidmore [1829] 20). He went on to lament the fate of the ancient Romans “Who could not succeed in permanently establishing the Agrarian law.” To do so, Skidmore maintained, would require that the majority overrule the minority and understand “the origin and fountain of all right, and of course all power” Then he excused the ancient Romans because the printing press hadn’t yet been invented, and he really wanted to link good political policy to literacy (Skidmore [1829] 21,22).
       But there are two different issues under discussion here. One is the injustice of wealthy landowners having power over all the laws, and the other is the specifics of the laws themselves. Skidmore was against the former but not necessarily for the latter. Instead of restrictions on the size of privately held property, he wanted all men to hold an equal amount of property no matter what size it is, so that every man could labor only for himself (except for contributions to the public good). Apparently someone who he only referred to as Mr. Raymond (he offered no citations) had written that the idea of equal division of land is against the dictates of nature. Mr. Raymond was an easy straw man for Skidmore to dispatch with the obvious question of: why would an unequal division of land be considered natural? He noted that in countries where public land is held in common by all citizens, if it were to be divided up for private use, the natural division would be of equal parcels. In the state of nature thus was the case so why would government go against the state of nature? (Skidmore [1829] 27,28).
       But Skidmore was a rationalist, relying on a priori knowledge. He said that “rights are like truths, capable of being understood alike by all men, as much so as the demonstrations of Euclid.” His corollary to that logic was that “if what are called so (rights) are not so understood, it is proof that they are not rights but the arbitrary commands of power”(Skidmore [1829] 31). If I were to turn that logic into a syllogism, my conclusion would be something like: since not all men understand an equal distribution of land as a right, any solution would have to be an arbitrary command of power. I believe that is what all social contract theories have in common, regardless of anyone’s idea of natural rights or the state of nature. And Skidmore got on board with that anyway, since he was trying to drum up public support for a very complicated program of changes in property laws that would eventually give everyone in the world an equal amount of private property. The accent is on the word “private.” Never mind that in the original state of nature, land was commonly held by all without any social contract. This was Skidmore’s way of dealing with the effects of civilization.
       In his conclusion, Skidmore made an analogy to men at a dinner table eating all the food before the other guests arrive and then making up the rules that the late-comers are to obey. He also said there would be no wars if soldiers had been given their fair share of property in the first place because all wars are over property (Skidmore [1829], 359).
Wednesday: “Henry George likes only one kind of tax.”

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Last week we looked at what Thomas Paine had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part IX
Native Americans get suckered by scam artists
       David Hume viewed property as a relation between an object and its possessor. With land, he says it is even more psychological. “The sight of a thing is seldom a considerable relation and is only regarded as such when the object is hidden or very obscure, in which case we find that the view alone conveys a property.” By that logic, he says, a nation can claim a whole continent by being the first to discover it. “It is however, remarkable that both in the case of discovery and that of possession, the first discoverer and possessor must join to the relation an intention of rendering himself proprietor (Hume [1740], 506). Of course Christopher Columbus and all subsequent conquistadors had been appointed proxy “proprietors” by their patron governments, thus the right of possession. But how did they rationalize away the idea that the present occupants might also have a legitimate claim to possession? For that answer, we look to the Doctrine of Discovery.
       During the time of the Crusades, and for years after, all European nations were united in their allegiance to Christianity, and all non-Christian nations were considered enemies. In five Hundred Years of Injustice: The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religions Prejudice, Steve Newcomb documents the history of property right by conquest. “In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued to King Alfonso V of Portugal the bull Romanus Pontifex, declaring war against all non-Christians throughout the world, and specifically sanctioning and promoting the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian nations and their territories (Newcomb 1992, 1). As “discovery” and colonization became all the rage among European nations after Columbus, they each made agreements to honor each others claims, except when they didn’t. The overseas land-rush thus caused much violence by the European nations not only against the indigenous peoples who happened to already occupy those lands, but often against each other, especially after the Protestant revolution when the Christian nations were no longer united by Catholicism.
       However, as Newcomb points out in the rest of his research, the Catholic Popes kept on issuing bulls (the line that divided all of the South American continent between Portugal on the east and Spain on the west is a good example.) and even some Protestant nations decided to honor them when it became politically expedient to do so.
       “In 1823, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery was quietly adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case, Johnson v. McIntosh. In Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion, since the “Christian European nations had assumed ‘ultimate dominion’ over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery, and that - upon ‘discovery’ - the Indians had lost ‘their rights to complete sovereignty as independent nations’ and only retained a right of ‘occupancy’ in their lands” (Newcomb 1992, 2). I can really appreciate the logic of the U.S. government here. Locke’s theory of labor was sacred to all God-fearing American politicians and legal experts. If you are a farmer, then farming is your labor and your labor gives you the right to own the land. If you are a conquistador, then conquistadoring is your labor &c. &c. America couldn’t, after all, refuse to accept such already accepted wisdom.
       I have already mentioned how Locke paid lip service to the Native Americans by using them as examples of his theory of labor (Locke [1690], 338) The “Nations of Americans” used bows and arrows to take possession of game animals and hides, and they used trees to build their homes, but they only (unwittingly) used Locke’s labor theory to justify their personal possessions. In spite of what Locke meant, or what anybody else thought he meant, the Native Americans never tried to take possession of the land itself because they had no such concept. The land to them was nature, wholly a part of their environment which included the water and the air and the sunshine. So I guess the European’s attitude was like “Oh well, if they don’t want it…” and when they couldn’t trick them out of it, they took it by force. After all, the Christian nations had honored the Doctrine of Discovery as law for centuries, and the newly formed government of the United States naturally inherited it from the English, purchased if from the French, and re-conquered it from the Spanish. The Native Americans never understood what was happening until it was too late, and Chief Justice Marshall declared it a done deal.
       David Wilkins, in “A History of Federal Indian Policy” tells the long sad tale of Native Americans’ treatment by the Federal Government over the “land as a commodity” economic system. During those periods when the Government tried to redress past injustices by giving land back to the Indians, it was on the condition that the Indians learn to use it as a commodity, to help them assimilate into the free-market system. (Wilkins 2002). Thomas Paine, Henry George, Karl Polanyi and others would explain how this economic attitude was devastating to poor white people in America and Europe, but it was even more devastating to the Native Americans because they didn’t even understand what the white man meant by “land.”
      Tuesday: "Thomas Skidmore Had A Plan to Save the Whole World"

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Yesterday we looked at what The Founding Fathers had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part VIII
Thomas Paine wants a non-violent revolution, legally
       Now we come to a thinker who realized that property, as land, was linked to injustice. Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809) continued in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, & Hume but, instead of positing a hypothetical “State of Nature,” he used, as a real-life example, the situation of our Native Americans. “There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe. Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state” He goes on to point out that compared to the poor in industrialized Europe, “The life of an Indian is a continual holiday” (Paine [1795], 11).
       Paine continues by explaining that the problem of private property as land is one of the causes of this inequity. “It is a position not be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.
       “Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue“ (Paine [1795], 12, 13).
       The “plan” to which Paine refers, is his plan to pay retribution to poor people on the premise that their poverty is due to their being denied their natural right to the common property, because it was taken from them by rich landowners.
       “In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us do honor to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessing.
       “Having this in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,
       “To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property” (Paine [1795], 14, 15).
       This idea was never adopted in Paine’s time. To those who consider it an extremely radical idea, I want to address a few remarks. (1) Paine never called for a violent revolution to take land away from the rich. The American and French Revolutions had already happened and all he wanted was for the new regimes to adopt his plan. (2) He allows landowners to keep their land, he only wants them to pay rent to the community. These ideas too, I will elaborate on more later. Now let us continue our chronological survey of the issues arising out of the concept of “private property.”
      Monday: "Native Americans Get Suckered By Scam Artists."
My rants on racial identity began on July 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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Yesterday we looked at what David Hume had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part VII
The Founding Fathers thought John Locke was some kind of genius
       Hobbes, Locke, and Hume had all been published before the American Revolution, but most historians agree, from some letters between colonial revolutionaries, and even in some of the wording of the Declaration of Independence, that the Founding Fathers were most influenced by Locke’s Two Treatises on Government. They wanted freedom from English rule, but they had no problem with the British tradition of land owners running their government. If, as in the theory of democracy, government is by the people and for the people, then land must be a commodity that all the people should be able to buy, Individually, that is, not collectively.
       Both as part of profiting from their colonies and to finance their war against France, the British government set up a rigid system for selling land to colonists. After the revolutionary war, the new American government did the same to pay for their revolutionary war and to expand into the western territories. As Malcom J. Rohrbough, writes, in The Land Office Business, the government had already promised land grants to Revolutionary War veterans, and the need to expand and put land in the hands of the citizens made the Americans much less rigid in the structures of the land offices created for that purpose. For instance, “The real estate northwest of the Ohio River remained attractive to speculators, however; and through their influence in congress and the failure of established practices to produce sufficient revenue through small sales, entrepreneurs succeeded in introducing the sale of large tracts” (Rohrbough 1968, 1-11). And William Cronon, in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, writes, “Few other regions in the United States were better suited to the system which the government had used since 1785 for selling public lands, subdividing the nation into a vast grid of square-mile sections whose purpose was to turn land into real estate by the most economically expedient method. By imposing the same abstract and homogeneous grid pattern on all land, no matter how ecologically diverse, government surveyors made it marketable” (Cronon 1968, 102).
       In part II I will discuss the social consequences of this transformation of land into a marketable commodity, but next I want to discuss how the new economic system perpetuates itself through the legal and political institutions.
       The Founding Fathers of the new American nation envisioned a government wherein only property owners had the right to vote. In a letter to James Sullivan dated May 26, 1776, dated May 26, 1776, (before the Declaration of Independence) discussing any new laws that would come with Independence from Great Britain, John Adams tries to justify not allowing women and men without property the right to vote. He uses two, slightly different arguments.
       Adams’ first argument is about women; their “delicacy,” their inexperience in important public matters, and their dependency on men. (That third point is a circular argument, but nobody called him on it at the time: women wouldn’t be dependent on men if they had the vote.) His argument against voting rights for children and men without property rests on the same points as the argument against women; inexperience and dependency. As to men without property, his reasoning is that, having no property of their own, they have no experience with important public matters. Also, he claims that men without property are dependent on men who do own property, and therefore have no will of their own (Adams [1776]). If men without property did vote, Adams thinks, it would corrupt the “one man, one vote” ideal, because then the men who had the most slaves, indentured servants, tenant farmers, or any other kind of debtor, would have the most votes by proxy.
       Adams second argument does not directly speak to inequalities of age, gender, or class, but just falls back on Tradition. Men of property have always had the vote, and to make any changes in tradition would open up a floodgate of minorities clamoring for the vote (Adams [1776]).
       In the Federalist paper #10, James Madison explains what is wrong with a direct democracy and pushes for a “republic” that is, a government whose laws are made by elected representatives of the people, rather than by the people themselves. His argument rests on addressing the problem of factions that can split the people‘s consensus. He claims that a republic can prevent a minority faction from forcing its will on the majority, but worries that a majority might take over the government. He writes: “When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed” (Madison [1778]). I am not sure how the spirit and form of popular government is preserved when a wealthy minority can override the wishes of the majority but that is what a republican form of government can do, especially when “the public good” is defined as protecting private property.
       But not all property owners are created equal; small farmers are not as wealthy as the big plantation owners. Men who signed themselves as “Federal Farmer,” wrote “to the Republican” what are also called “the Anti-federalist Papers,” voicing their concerns about the political structure of this republican form of government that the Federalists were proposing for the new Constitution of the United States.
       In Federal Farmer letter no. 3, one astutely predicts that in a Republican government, the elected officials will usually come from the upper classes, without any care for the needs and interests of the lower classes. His solution seems, at first, a logical one. He writes “…we ought to provide for dividing each state into a proper number of districts, and for confining the electors in each district to the choice of some men, who shall have a permanent interest and residence in it” (Federal Farmer [1787]). However, history has shown that even with men elected from their home districts, most elected representatives will still be wealthier than their constituents.
       Thomas Jefferson, like Madison, was a property owner and also assumed that property meant land as well as personal possessions, but unlike the Federalists he did not necessarily side with the rich, saying that he was “not among those who feared the people” (Jefferson [1816]). And when he warned of too heavy taxation because of government debts, he first mentioned the taxing “in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements,” the kind of personal possessions that everyone has regardless of class, and the kind of property justified by Locke. Jefferson only mentioned the tax burden of landowners secondly (Jefferson [1816]).
       Eventually, men without property in the United States were granted the franchise, but by this time the economics of the industrial revolution and the expansion of the western territories had given the most political power to the wealthy landowners.
      Friday: "Thomas Paine Wants A Non-Violent Revolution, Legally”
My rants on racial identity began on July 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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Yesterday we looked at what John Locke had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part VI
David Hume understands us
       David Hume (1711 – 1776) has continued the tradition of Hobbes and Locke to derive our right to private property from the social contract. In his Treatise on Human Nature, Hume describes three different species of “goods.” They are “the internal satisfaction of our minds, the external advantages of our body, and the enjoyment of such possessions as we have acquired by our industry and good fortune” (Hume [1740], 487). The internal goods are perfectly secure, the external advantages of our bodies we can lose “but can be of no advantage to him who deprives us of them“ (Hume [1740], 487). The third, our personal possessions, can not only be taken from us, but others may profit from them. In addition to this instability, “…from their looseness and easy transitions from one person to another (my italics),” there is also scarcity of possessions, and therefore it is the duty of society to put them on the same footing as the other two.(Hume [1740], 487, 488).
       Hume has described man’s natural “affections” to desire other people’s goods, and then explains why society should protect the individual’s right to his private possessions. A few paragraphs later he states, “The remedy then, is not derived from nature, but from artifice; (Hume [1740], 489). By “artifice,” he means the social contract, or conventional law. In other words, Hume is saying that, in order to protect our own goods from theft, we must all agree not to steal from each other. Unlike previous philosophers he is not invoking some “natural Law” to justify this, but admits that it is an artificial concept, created by men and for men. (I am using the sexist terms of that period because that is what they meant in those days.)
       But notice, I italicized Hume’s phrase, “…from their looseness and easy transitions from one person to another.” Does this sound like he is justifying a right to private “real estate, land, “property? I do not think so. I believe that Hume’s discussion of the subject is more logical than Locke’s, but most of the modern philosophers defer to Locke, and slight Hume, when justifying their so-called “right to private property.” Why? Because what Hume does have to say about land, as property, will not justify any right of possession. In point of fact, Hume says that the relationship between men who use the land, and the land itself, is just that, a relationship based on use, not ownership. Both Locke and Hume were philosophers of Epistemology, as well as Political Economy, but Hume, more than Locke, has kept his political theory consistent with his theories of the mind. To explain the relationship of men to the land he says:
       “Since, therefore, we can feign a new relation, and even an absurd one, in order to compleat any union, it will easily be imagined, that if there be any relations, which depend on the mind, it will readily conjoin them to any preceding relation, and unite, by a new bond, such objects as have already been an union in the fancy….by modifying the general rule concerning the stability of possessions. And as property forms a relation betwixt a person and an object, it is natural to found it on some preceding relation, and as property is nothing but a constant possession, secured by the laws of society, it is natural to add it to the present posssession, which is a relation that resembles it…. But we may observe, that though the rule of this assignment of property to the present possessor be natural, and by that means useful, yet its utility extends not beyond the first formation of society “(Hume [1740], 505).
       However, while Hume does not logically justify any “right” to landed private property, he does accept that society has assumed it.
       As for justifying right by possession or conquest, Hume has a clever passage where he makes fun of ancient Greeks competing with each other for claim to a deserted town, first by racing to see who could get there first, and then by throwing spears at the wall to claim the territory. (Hume [1740], 506).
      Thursday: "Our Founding Fathers Thought John Locke Was Some Kind Of Genius."
My rants on racial identity began on July 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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Yesterday we looked at what Thomas Hobbes had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part V
John Locke labors for a living
       John Locke (1632 – 1704) had a more mellow take on the original “State of Nature” than did Hobbes and, as a result, his theory about the social contract is more benign and less cynical. He does believe in the right to private property and goes at great lengths to describe how men earn their property by their labor. In his 2nd of Two Treatises on Civil Government, Chapter V, “Of Property,” Section 27, he states,
       “The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. Whatsoever he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property” (Locke [1690], 329).
       This sounds like he is talking about personal possessions as property, but then in Section 32, he says, “But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth, and the beasts that subsist in it, but the earth itself, as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest, I think it is plain that property in that, too, is acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (Locke [1690], .332).” I am arguing that his conclusion does not necessarily follow from his premise.
       All the improvements that people have made by their labor are still only upon the fruits of the land, not the land itself. A person can take as much from the land as he wants, and fashion them into anything he wants, and call those his possessions, his personal property, but the land remains only the land, an arbitrary enclosure of a measurement on the face of the earth. He can’t take it with him to market, and he can’t pick it up and store it somewhere else. He has not really improved it because after he has done with using it, and has moved on to greener pastures, it remains as it was before he found it, with only the potential for someone else to use it. (I realize that the agricultural argument maintains that cultivated land has been improved, but with the anti-ecological practices of modern agribusiness, farmlands are less sustainable after use. But even without that, not all land use is agricultural and any new use of the land has to start all over from scratch.)
       Land (real estate) values are an arbitrary economic social construct, invented by men who wanted to claim and then resell the land for their own profit. Calling a donkey a “horse” does not a horse make, and calling land “property” commits the same fallacy. I will elaborate on that theme later, but first, let us hear from another philosopher, David Hume.
      Wednesday: "David Hume Understand Us."
My rants on racial identity began on July 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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Last week we looked at what Cicero had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part IV
Thomas Hobbes hedges his political bets
       Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), was not a champion of the common people, but he was one of the proponents (along with Locke, Hume, and Rousseau), of the theory that a social contract evolved out of the state of nature. Also, like other philosophers before him, he listed three types of governments which he called Commonwealths. In chapter XIX of his book, Leviathan, he writes: “The difference of Common-wealths, consisteth in the difference of the Soveraign, or the Person representative of all and every one of the Multitude” (Hobbes [1651], 142). He explains that the sovereign can be one man or an assembly of men. (That was how he was able to appeal to both sides in the English civil war. He was always a loyal monarchist, but Cromwell allowed him back into England because of this quasi-parliamentary idea, where he bided his time until the restoration of his favorite pupil, Charles Stuart II.) He named the three sovereigns who represent all men in a commonwealth: one man is a Monarchy, a few men are an Aristocracy, and all men are a Democracy. Then he points out, sarcastically I think, that these three kinds of governments had different names in the past. “But they are not the names of other Formes of Government, but of the same Formes misliked” (Hobbes [1651], 142). Monarchy (when misliked) is called Tyranny, Aristocracy is called Oligarchy, and Democracy is called Anarchy.
       Hobbes had some interesting things to say about property as it relates to society as a whole. Those who would look to him for verification of their “right to private property” ideology will not find it in Leviathan. In Chapter XXIX he lists several “doctrines repugnant to the commonwealth.” The fifth of these bad ideas is “that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods; such, as excluded the right of the sovereign” (Hobbes [1651], 250). He explains that this right only excludes other citizens from his property, but property, rather than being a natural right, is a right only granted by the sovereign. The sovereign, whether it be a king or a parliament, is part of the social contract that people set up to protect themselves from the viciousness of the original state of nature. So the sovereign can protect one man’s property from the encroachment of another, but the sovereign itself cannot be excluded from the property or he couldn’t “perform the office they have put him into”(Hobbes [1651], 250), which means collecting taxes to pay for the military and police protection that the government affords. Those passages included personal items as property, but then he gets more specific about landed property. In chapter XXIV, he writes that the division of land is apportioned according to only the sovereign, and not to the judgments of any subjects (Hobbes [1651] 190). As we shall see, not all theories of the social contract evolving out of the state of nature, describe either the original state of nature the same way, or of the same form of social contract.
      Tuesday: "John Locke Labors For A Living".
My rants on racial identity began on July 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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