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.
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.
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.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment