The limits of private ownership

Can there ever be an unqualified right of private control of any resource, aside from the mostly-unobjectionable daily sorts of exclusivity?  (My sweater, my toothbrush, my bedroom.)  Such a right, to be effective, would require the recognition and consent of the other members of the community—those who might also want access to the same resource—and a robust system of public oversight able to distinguish and enforce such rights, as well as use coercion when necessary.  Such a system of recognition and oversight (that is, law) would necessarily be a public utility—answerable to the assembled members of the community.  Those who refused to play by this publicly-agreed-upon system of enforcement would forfeit their rights to be recognized and protected by it.  (We would call them outlaws, though they might prefer resource entrepreneurs.)  Their claims of private property would be unrecognized by the other members of society, their monopolies liable to invasion by rival claimants, which would effectively negate their exclusive control.  So, no—there can be no absolute or unqualified right of private ownership.  Any private claim of property must necessarily have the recognition and consent of the members of the community at large.

Property is only meaningful within an artificial system of law.  Nature recognizes no such right.  And the rule of law itself can only be meaningful within the social framework of an established government—specifically a government that is competent, vigilant, even-handed and effective.  Government cannot enforce rights of property without being consistently coercive.  So it is inconsistent to demand robust protection of property rights while advocating a weak, non-intrusive sort of state.  Property, to exist reliably for any private individual, must be negotiated with all the other members of society.  And to be enforced, it must have the support of a bureaucratic magistracy.  This will necessarily cost time and money, more so as the claimants insist their rights be safeguarded and enforced.  The cost of protecting property must come from existing resources within the community, specifically from the members who hold recognized (that is, taxable) property.  Taxation is inevitable if property is to be recognized.  Taxation is inherent in the very notion of property.  And further, a taxation regime must be sufficient to cover the costs of the social arrangements that would allow the unequal control of resources to be made acceptable to all members of society.  For the few to control unusual quantities of property (that is, to monopolize a disproportionate share of a society’s available resources), the property owners will have to surrender some of their desired control of the resources in order to appease the majority.  If they do not, the majority will take back the resources, by force.  The amount of this surrender is liable to public negotiation.

Not sure?  Imagine that you have a suitcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills representing your personal wealth—that is, your capacity to acquire other desired resources.  You may imagine this suitcase to be as big as you like.  Of course, the bigger it is, the more attention it will draw from others.  You notice those around you eyeing your case, some of them hungry and desperate.  But you close the lid, put your arms around it, growling, “Get away!  This is mine.  Keep your hands off.”  The others take a step back, saying, “All right.  Be that way if you like.  We’ll have nothing more to do with you.”  So you hang on to your suitcase stuffed full of bills, feeling pretty righteous about your ownership.  These bills will safeguard your future, which you surely have a right to do.  But soon you get hungry, and so you open your case and try to exchange some of those bills for food, maybe hire someone to build you a shelter.  But you find that the others are true to their word.  They will not bargain with you.  They will not take your money, won’t give you anything in exchange for it.  They carry on trading for food and shelter among themselves, but ignore you and your suitcase.  You might try managing your needs by yourself, perhaps scrape together enough to keep yourself alive.  But what then is your money worth?  It’s yours, to be sure, until you realize it is only a suitcase full of paper, a symbolic display of your claims of resource control.  Yet it has no actual value but what others are willing to assign it.  Sure, it might kindle a useful fire, but it’s worth nothing more than this to you unless it’s worth something to others, and it’s not worth anything to them until they agree that it is.  Your best hope now is to find some unscrupulous individuals who might break faith with the rest and trade secretly with you, though it will cost many more of your precious bills than you had anticipated.  Under such circumstances, your precious hoard will not last long.

In short, you have no money, no wealth, no property, no exclusive control of resources, unless the other people in your society agree that you do.  And the more of them that agree that you have such resources, the more your wealth is worth.  Property, then, is an opinion—a shared opinion—a social fiction.  You will have to convince the others around you that you have a preeminent right over the resources you claim to command.  At bottom, your property requires the consent of your neighbors.

So property is not a natural right.  The universe knows nothing of it.  It is not an objective state of being.  It is an opinion, a product of the imagination.  If it is a widely-shared social opinion, then the private control of resources becomes useful property—recognized and enforced by law and custom.  So it is not so much that law is obliged to respect property, but that property must bow before the law.

Property is at best a temporary and conditional agreement among members of an established community to recognize and protect the unequal distribution or control of community resources.  In any discussion of civil society, we will have to bear in mind that the private holding of property is an agreement among the members of a community, never the absolute right of one member over the others.  As such, it must be seen to serve the greater interests of the community.  If it does not appear to do so, it will never be secure, no matter the fine print.  And as an agreed-upon and temporary right, it is necessarily a revocable right.

Elites (at least those who wish to remain so) will not want the rest of us to be reminded of such social niceties, because it is not to their advantage for society-at-large to ponder such realities, either thoughtfully or often.  Thus, they will devote some portion of their present resources to rationalizing and justifying their perpetual control of the resources they happen to hold in the moment.  Or else they will try to distract the wider public with slogans and identity concerns.  This is accomplished primarily through the hiring of malleable politicians to favor their privileged and unequal claims with the force of magistracy and rhetoric.

If it were the primary purpose of government to protect the sacrosanctity of existing property assertions (as established elites would prefer), then the state would have little to offer the poor and the disadvantaged—those who, by definition, are excluded from the present control of resources.  And those poor and disadvantaged would in such case have little reason to support or obey the present regime.  Innumerable acts of rebellion, large and small, criminal and civil, would be the inevitable consequence.  Ultimately, revolution would be their last reasonable option.  Indeed, they would come to realize that they had little to lose by overthrowing the present state of affairs.  So give a thought to the many, many who are excluded from the present use of common resources before they take a moment to work it out for themselves.  They will.

But we need not be motivated by fear of unpleasant consequences to rethink our attitudes toward property.  We might consider instead how strange our modern notions of justice have become.  Slavery—an extreme assertion of property—has existed through most of civilized history and is not entirely vanquished today.  The lawfulness of it was taken for granted, almost universally, until just two-and-a-half centuries ago.  Some apologists claimed it was a natural institution.  But more recent slaveholders defended the practice by appealing to familiar notions of property.  Many slaveholders, magistrates and preachers in the American south cited the Christian Bible in support.  We moderns had to think our way out of those established attitudes before we could conceive of ending the practice.  But slavery is merely the most extreme form of social inequality.  The notion of equality between the sexes, let alone the practice of it, is very recent.  (Notions of gender diversity and rights are more recent still.)  The history of civilization, which tracks closely with public justifications for the unequal distribution and control of property, has generally gone poorly for women.  In unequal societies, notions of female morality tend to focus on a woman’s self-control and sexual fidelity (pudicitia in Latin).  Men of property want to be sure of their genetic offspring so that they can pass their control of resources to blood kin rather than strangers.  (Females have their own interests in guarding sexual access, considering the high cost of bearing and raising a child.)  If we are to value our modern notions of justice and protect the hard-won gains of equality made thus far, we must also reconsider such inherited social supports for the unequal domination of resources.

The ancient Romans had a saying: All slaves are enemies.  They regarded the owning of other human beings as not only just but respectable—little different from owning livestock and hardly worth the trouble of defending.  But they understood that the slaves themselves did not necessarily care for such respectable justifications, nor consent to their enslaved condition apart from the threat of official violence.  Neither would we if we were similarly owned.  So with property in general.  Private control of resources, when grossly unequal, will inevitably create enmity.  We civilized Moderns think owning private property is so obvious and natural as to be hardly worth defending, as Romans assumed with their slaves.  We should think again.  We need not panic that all private forms of ownership are thereby in peril, but we should not assume that all forms of private control of resources are equally defensible.  At the very least we will have to reconsider the public utility arguments for private ownership, and decide which sorts of private control are worthwhile, defensible and fair—that is, beneficial to the members of society at large.  Some present notions of private ownership may not survive in their familiar form.

Now it may turn out that some forms of private ownership are well suited to promoting the general interests and shared prosperity of a free and prosperous civil society.  We won’t be able to see all the possibilities from where we are now.  We have the capacity to reshape our inherited prejudices to a degree, but we can’t easily imagine ourselves as entirely different beings.  Some changes will only be possible in slow degrees, and we may not be able to anticipate what new arrangements will become feasible a few degrees further on.  But we are not perpetually bound to our present property-holding arrangements or to the degree of inequality that our familiar notions permit.  If we are to rethink our existing notions of property, we will have to do it openly and together as a society of equals—at least we must if we are to claim to be a democracy.  And whatever arrangements we agree upon will have to be made acceptable to nearly all of us and operate for the collective well-being of every member.

Defenders of the sacrosanctity of property generally conflate several distinct arguments together.  They will argue that property is natural or that it is divinely-sanctioned—sometimes both at once.  They will often claim that their property is entirely the product of their own merit and hard work, therefore justly deserved.  They will declare that inherited property is as rightfully owned as any other.  They will sometimes argue that private property is the essence of civic freedom, a fundamental bulwark against oppressive government.  They will occasionally assert that the sanctity of private property maximizes prosperity for everyone.  Some of these claims will likely prove false (in that they cannot all be true at the same time—however appealing each one may be to listeners in a particular moment) and some may prove to have some merit, though not as much as their most ardent defenders would like.  But all too often, modern notions of property confuse the usefulness of private rights of ownership within a well-functioning civil society with the unlimited and unfettered rights of private control of resources.  If private property is sacrosanct, they think, then no limits can be placed on the scope of such property holding.  In other word, these defenders of unlimited property are really defenders of the sacrosanctity of inequality.

So perhaps simplistic slogans about property are really meant to perpetuate something else entirely—social inequality.  It is not hard to see that inequality among citizens has become the enduring, unresolved obstacle to the peaceful functioning of our modern practice of civil society.  Inequality is itself a very modern idea, a recently-arrived public concern, perhaps a reflection that we have begun to think that equality itself is a worthy goal of civil society.