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.”

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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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"

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, 2015.
My rants on private property began on July 14th, 2015.

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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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