I worked hard for my property!

Imagine a man who works hard in his chosen trade.  He has honed his skills with long practice and dedication, innovated techniques unknown to his rivals, cleverly sidestepped routine bureaucratic and managerial obstacles, and ultimately employed his talents more profitably and advantageously than any of his competitors.  By his greying years he has amassed a considerable fortune.  Now he wishes to retire and pass on the accumulated fruits of his hard work to his biological heirs.  Sound familiar?  Unobjectionable, surely!  Now picture this same man with the knowledge that he is a housebreaker, a professional thief, a career criminal.  He has robbed private homes, businesses, even a few banks.  He has expanded his operations as new market opportunities have presented—waylaid armored cars, hijacked sea cargos, even developed clever software that empties the savings accounts of anonymous pensioners with weak passwords.  In all these ventures, he has proved himself to be exceptionally skilled at what he does.  He could write best-selling memoirs, fill theaters were he to market his skills.  So, does the fact that he is a thief change anything about his right to pass on his accumulated wealth to his heirs?  Every warlord or king that has acquired hereditary possession of some government or realm has likely had an ancestor who took that kingdom from another by main force, bluff or luck.  But time has made his rule familiar, his claim legitimate, even divinely-sanctioned.  How much time is enough?  At what point do ill-gotten gains become legitimate property that can be passed on without legal objection to future generations?  It probably doesn’t take very long at all.

To suggest, as Locke did, that mixing personal labor with some found resource makes it one’s personal property can be used to justify all sorts of theft and conquest.  (Locke himself was a shareholder in slave-owning companies.)  The Spanish conquistadors worked very hard to liberate extensive territories from their indigenous inhabitants.  American westward settlers characterized the lands adjacent to the railways and the wagon trails as untilled and therefore unoccupied, the native peoples merely savages, hardly removed from wild animals.  One might object that these lands were not at all unclaimed resources but already someone’s property, and their occupation acts of theft or violence.  But how many terrestrial resources are really natural, entirely unclaimed by another?  Later American mineral and oil barons made their private fortunes to a considerable degree from public lands.  Cattle barons did likewise, though the cattle might have objected that their flesh did not belong to the cattle-men or the meat-processors to exploit for their personal advantage.  International energy corporations have made staggering private fortunes, but hardly begun to repay the environmental costs of their activities to the public, which will bear the lasting burden.  (The public has failed to press the case because it has also been a short-term beneficiary.)  One might easily imagine that thieves are convinced in their own minds that they have rightly earned the profits of their trade through cleverness and hard work.  If they are able to launder their proceeds through legitimate organizations, the law and the public will soon agree.  A great many Americans still hold that they have acquired their national territory and all of its natural resources by some Manifest Destiny—divine or otherwise—and that it has therefore not been wrongfully acquired from its long-standing occupants.  But Locke’s view of property is as much an argument against excessive property-holding as it is a justification for private ownership.  One might use it to argue that an individual is entitled to claim as property only what he has mixed with his personal labor, or what he has direct use of, and not what is beyond the scope of his personal labors and horizons.  But what of his heirs, who have mixed no labor of their own with these resources of nature?  Can they claim to own such property?

Now of course most folks who pass on personal property are not criminals but rather law-abiding citizens.  They have spent years in education, learned a profession, put in countless hours of work, acquired enviable skills, played by the rules.  Why should they not enjoy whatever they have gained from their labors?  And why should they not pass it on to their chosen heirs or worthy causes as they see fit, with minimal oversight from the greedy, grasping state?  Never mind Locke!  (Never mind either that a state has no feelings and cannot be greedy or grasping.)  A man’s home is his castle, and all that.  (Never mind that a castle must be vigorously defended.)  It is a widespread sentiment and likely to win overwhelming approval in any referendum, even from those who have not accumulated much property to defend.  And inasmuch as it is a widely-shared and popular sentiment it will have legitimacy.  That is exactly what legitimacy indicates—the support and approval of the greater part of the community.  That is what the very notion of democracy assumes is the foundation of its legitimacy.  We can consider property in these terms.  What notions of property and what limits on property would most likely enjoy such widespread social consent, if clearly understood?

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We often defend our claims of property by simply declaring, “I worked hard for this.  I earned it!”  Those listening will usually accept this claim at face value, without need of elaboration.  But suppose we decided to elaborate a bit: “Yes, I made this estate what it is.  I brought these lands together.  I conquered them with my own determination, my sweat, my vision, my planning.  I cleared the fields with my own hand.  I burned the villages that were in my way.  I chased out the lazy squatters.  I captured these worthless slaves, bent them to my extraordinary will.  Oh, yes, they resisted, the ingrates!  But by my determination I brought them into line, made them work for their living.  Yes, and I was kinder than I needed to be.  Gave them a proper life, for which they hardly thanked me!  And I secured a worthy life for all those around me.  It was I who made sure we have right-thinking magistrates and judges in place.  It was I who hired the guards to protect this remarkable order.  It is I who gave due honors and sacrifices to the gods—and look!  They have blessed me and my estates.  Glance over what I have accomplished and marvel!  Who would dare say that these things are not mine by right?  No one else could have done what I have done.  This is my property, everything here, all mine!”

How far can you carry this justification for your present holdings?  And if another were to take it from you, with harder work and more determined guile, with similar declarations of bravado or perhaps with the aid of clever lawyers who have found a shorter way with the order you helped create, would you object?  If the other succeeds, you have given them their justification.  But it is mine, you say.  I earned it!  You can never take what is mine!  Was it yours before you gained it by your skill and hard work?  There was a time when you did not have it.  Then you did.  What has happened since to make it irrevocably yours?  At best, your argument is that it is yours as long as you can keep it.  If someone worthier comes along, you will have to give it up.  Well, perhaps, you say grudgingly, in a competitive environment like business or sport.  After all, Michael Jordan was once the best at his game, but there will always be a Steve Nash gunning to take his place.  Same with business.  New barons rise to the top.  Best for the economy, for everyone.  But what they have made in the meantime will always be theirs.  Their houses, their vacation properties, their investments, their bank accounts.  Hands off all that, they worked hard for it!

Perhaps these property-holders did work unusually hard, though we have only their word for the superlative quality of their skill and sacrifice.  Many others have also worked hard who did not receive similar compensation.  Should we say then that they did earn what they did not receive?  Would you have been content if your hard work had earned only a modest reward, a tenth or hundredth of what you received, which is what most people get?  Why do you deserve your specific bundle of rewards if it is out of proportion to the rewards received by others for similar quantities of work and risk?  But my rewards are greater because my talents are greater! you insist.  Your talents.  How exactly did you earn your talents?  I earned my talents through hard work!  You earned your skills, perhaps, but not your natural endowments.  Those were acquired by the lottery of birth, through luck and circumstance.  Not all children are born to well-educated parents or in places with safe streets and high-quality schools.  But I made the most of my talents and opportunities.  And did you already have your hard work ethic before working hard?  I worked hard for that too!  And so it goes.  Michael Jordan was unusually skilled, not to mention vertically talented.  By what process did he earn his loftiness, his physical coordination?  Many slightly shorter and marginally clumsier young men practiced hard but never rose to fame and wealth, or ever left the neighborhood.  And young women in the same neighborhoods were seldom invited onto the court.  With all their hard work and skill, those few women who did persevere could not hope to earn in the WNBA what their slightly-less-talented colleagues in the NBA could take for granted.  Hard work may have been behind many accumulations of property, but tends to be very inconsistently rewarded.  But suppose we grant the hard work criterion—are you willing then to claim that those who have not worked hard for what they presently hold should have no legitimate claim to it?  Rentiers?  Not any more.  Heiresses?  Sorry, Paris Hilton.  Nothing that looks like a hereditary aristocracy, certainly no legally-sanctioned nobilities.  Royal successions?  They should be open competitions, available to all comers, which might spoil the attraction.  And should the rewards of hard work be strictly proportioned to the degree of it?  We would have to establish and agree upon some objective measure, applying rewards only in proportion to hours invested, difficulties endured, obstacles overcome.  Hope then for all those young garbage-pickers supporting large families in developing-world slums.  And perhaps good news for those who labor over unpublishable manuscripts.

So hard work may be one of the criteria required to make a legitimate claim to the private and exclusive use of a resource.  But by itself, such a justification would rule out the claims of many who presently hold and benefit from property.  They would need an entirely different justification.  (And it is no good saying, But it’s their property! since that is the very question at issue.)  Perhaps vision, or risk, or sacrifice?  What of talent?  Or the venerable meritocracy?  Should merit be deserving of an unusual share of the resources found in our common world, resources that might be used by other claimants than the ones who presently control them?  Merit does indeed sounds promising.  After all, who could be more deserving than the meritorious?  It seems to answer itself.  Of course, we would have to agree on what exactly constitutes merit, as well as who among us holds the greater share of it.  Me might find ourselves in disagreement.  Is a highly-successful online publisher of pornography meritorious?  Is an innovative manufacturer of landmines?  Is a missionary or medic who devotes her life to living among and caring for the most neglected of human beings?  But where property is concerned, the only criterion we seem to have consistently respected is the assumption that those who have accumulated the most legal property must have earned it, and must therefore have been meritorious.  It is a retrospective justification.  We don’t laud the creators of innovative businesses that did not attract sufficient customers to stay afloat.  We don’t praise the hardest-working footballers with the lowest-scoring records.  (That boy’s got heart, I’ll tell you.  Too bad he can’t score.)  Considering the immense variety of things that human beings value, it seems that agreeing upon a definition of merit would be about as difficult as agreeing on any other kind of public policy.  (And we suffer through the endless drudgery of democracy—endure government itself—for the very reason that we do not already agree on which things to value and how much.)  And if we did land upon a widely-shared measure of merit deserving of unusual control of resources, we would still have no reason to suppose that the talentless children of the meritorious deserved to inherit any of it.