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
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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