Is private ownership the only way?

Exclusive or private ownership is not the only way to distribute and manage resources.  Before you stuff your fingers in your ears, consider that this observation need not lead inevitably to state ownership or a communistic regime.  There are various styles of ownership between these extremes, such as family trusts, corporations and cooperatives.  There are churches, mosques and synagogues—all owned by communities.  We are used to the idea of owning shares—in companies, holiday properties, social clubs.  At least a privileged few are.

The prospect of enjoying exclusive ownership of a private home has become enormously popular in the West, supported unquestioningly by all political parties with mainstream ambitions.  Such ownership advertises a degree of financial independence of the homeowner from the will of others—a worthy aspiration in its own right.  But the elevation of this narrow notion of ownership into political orthodoxy has generated some perverse and unintended consequences.  It has reduced the mobility and flexibility of cultural explorers and jobseekers by tying them to specific houses bound to local markets and bureaucracies—not an easy asset to unload in a hurry, especially if others are doing the same—and prevented many from relocating from areas that have become economically constrained or unviable.  It has encouraged unsustainable property bubbles, such as the one that triggered the Great Recession of 2008.  Politicians have responded by trying to save or resurrect towns that can no longer support their historic populations.  Ironically, this has only increased the scale of government intervention and wasteful spending—hardly a libertarian goal.

But governments do not need to put their fingers on the scale by advocating a preferred model of ownership.  They could instead facilitate a range of resource-controlling models—not necessarily administered by government entities—to individuals and families with diverse needs or at different stages in their lives.  Many families are stable enough in employment or enduring communities to take advantage of private home ownership, though private homes need not be tied to squarish plots of land with surrounding yards, much of which suburban space is simply wasted.  Some individuals with mobile or changeable forms of employment might be encouraged to own not specific houses but shares in housing companies that would allow them to relocate within wide-ranging leasing markets.  Perhaps time-shares without fixed termination dates, which can be shifted quickly as needed.  This might suit young, growing families.  Or housing coops, with housing-share buy-ins and redemption points so that value can accumulate over time and be transferred to parallel organizations.  Or perhaps we might retrain ourselves to think that renting is not such a bad option, though it would seem so with more flexible and transferable leases.  Retirees frequently give up big family houses for the convenience of independent living in a shared facility.  This model can be expanded.

And what of the private car, which has in the last century become the symbol of personal freedom and autonomy, not to mention identity and aspiration?  It allows us to go where we want, when we want, with no one else’s leave.  Surely it is indispensable to individuality itself.  This romantic, mostly unchallenged view has bound private individuals to exclusive-use vehicles, though these costly investments sit idly and wastefully most hours of the day.  They are expensive in terms of initial purchase, maintenance, energy demands and storage space.  (Think of empty parking spaces in vast, sunbaked parking lots.  How much smaller would our cities be—and easier to traverse—if these did not require so much urban space.)  Most of the time we are not trying to assert our individuality but merely getting from one place to another.  Any number of vehicles would do just as well as our familiar car (though don’t say that to a seventeen-year-old who has just spent his savings on his first).  What if a reliable vehicle could pick you up and deliver you where you needed to go without the bother and expense of leasing, storage and parking?  What if another was waiting to return you when you were done?  And what if you didn’t have to spend every trip paying close attention to the hazards of the road, freed up to do other tasks or just take a nap?  What if all this was less costly than taxis, Ubers or private transportation?  Such outcomes are quite feasible if we could unfasten our expectations from the ownership of exclusive vehicles.  But we would have to give up some of our prejudices about the meaning of individuality and the sacrosanctity of monopolistic property.  And we would have to work collectively to create a more efficient infrastructure.  (We already do as much with public roads.)  It would ultimately be more efficient, less resource intensive, much less expensive.  Faster too.  It would also be more equal in outcome (perhaps one of the unspoken objections against it) and might, ironically, allow us greater individual movement and freedom.

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This is hardly the end of possibilities.  We have more ownership options than we think, and might gain more in individual flexibility and practical freedom than we lose in middle-class respectability.  But there is another consideration.  Property is only ever found in social and civic contexts.  We are long removed from the era of self-sufficient villages and estates—if such were the reality for more than a desperate or privileged few.  Our prosperous modern economies and indulgent lifespans would not be possible without a highly-integrated and global-spanning civic environment.  But we don’t tend to think of that.  We live in local places among people like ourselves, with whom we share power.  But even in these familiar contexts we hardly share alike.  We exercise widely different degrees of control over the resources that belong to our common realm.  And we are very sensitive to these differences, even when we claim not to notice, even while we insist that we already enjoy social equality.  We know that some are much more dependent on the will of others than we are.

Inequality of property is most damaging to a civil society when it forces a portion of its members (sometimes a majority) to depend on the will of the few who control access to local resources, and the employment that depends on those resources.  When private property permits and encourages the suborning of the freedoms of some members of a society to the will of others, it becomes dangerous to the public good.  Slavery is only the most extreme manifestation of such inequality.  So when we are considering the rights and limitations of private ownership—a negotiation that properly belongs to all the members of a civil society—we should start from the social principle that private control of resources must never permit any individual member of society to be placed under the will of another.  This does not mean that an individual can never be employed or supervised by another (which are variations on inequality) but rather that no individual member of society can be permitted to monopolize resources and opportunities to a degree that others have no choice but to bend to that person’s will.  Every individual member of a society must have choices—practically speaking, alternatives—if their freedom is to have useful meaning.  They must be able to turn down as well as accept opportunities.  Monopolies of control undermine the freedoms of others, so cannot be entrusted without limits to private hands.