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.”

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.
For those of you who have only recently joined us, my rants began on January 1, 2011. Scroll down to that date to begin.
My rants on racial identity began on July 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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