The Myth of Private Property

[ParanoiA]

Paranoia: When you say that 'the more government is influences to confiscate property outside the private property rule structure,' the problem is that the government always acts within the rule structure that it legislates, which is an easy thing to do as long as you are making your own rules. Once you allow progressive taxation in principle, which is nothing other than permitting government to decide what percentage of whose income it wants to take by law unto itself, where can you draw a logical limit as to how progressive that can be? Norway at one time had such a steeply progressive tax curve that certain extremely rich people would have to pay a tax equal to the total value of the money they were setting in motion every time their money moved and thus became visible to the tax man.

 

So if all these seizures of wealth can be made legal, given the models of taxation already accepted and legally established, how do we define 'coercive' taking of contributions from the public to the state or seizures outside the 'rule structure'?

 

By private property rule structure, I was referring to the rules created to facilitate honest voluntary trade, like laws against false advertising, upholding contacts..etc. Not the rules that allow the government to take property by exception logic, like taxes or eminent domain. Only voluntary taxation is consistent with private property design.

 

Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panthers, as offensive as he is, made a splendid observation that bothers some people: You aren't free if you have to ask permission. He's absolutely right. And that logic applies here as well. It isn't your private property if you only own it by permission. If the government, read the majority of the people, decide they want your property and can take it by force then it's in direct conflict with the philosophy of private property. It is antithetical to that entire philosophy.

 

Of course, even without taxes and other forms of confiscated property, one could make the argument it's still a permission based design. But in that case, the honor of the social agreement is not in question. With the presence of state exceptions to confiscate your property, that honor is constantly in question.

 

Imagine if say, eminent domain got so far out of hand that all it took was an expensive lunch, on your dime, with a congressman and he'd get you whatever real estate you wanted. At what point do people stop buying real estate - voluntary trade - and start taking congressmen out to lunch instead? That's corruption.

 

The more exceptions you make to the private property concept, the more you invalidate the concept, which undermines the purpose of the concept.

 

If I am to accept that taxation is not inconsistent, then we don't have private property, we have something else instead. And I guess that speaks to the myth of private property, as you opened this thread with. The part I take issue with is the notion that I should accept this as legitimate, and that it's inconsistent for me to resist more state confiscation rationalized by the citizenry - particularly when it's generally aimed at a minority. I resist it in defense of private property integrity.

 

Instead, I believe it is dangerous to personal freedom, innovation and the competitive spirit that drives humans. Private property only works because people believe their property really is theirs and can't be taken from them, but rather must be persuaded, usually in the form of trade for other resources.

 

 

 

And for the record, I do not believe that voluntary taxation is adequate to fund our government. As Skeptic said, we're too greedy to fund it fairly. But just like the survival pragmatics that could justify killing and eating people out of necessity, to then blur the moral line and then kill and eat people just for snack food would threaten everyone. We may confiscate property to pay for the government, but to blur the moral line created by private property threatens everyone.

[Marat]

Only a few countries actually have a 'private property right' which is constitutionally anchored so that it can't be overturned and property can't be seized by the government whenever it wants as long as there is an ordinary majority vote of the legislators approving this. In England, for example, there is a rule that courts will interpret as narrowly as the statutory language allows any law allowing the government to take away private property. But still, under this system, a clearly-worded statute which says that 'Paranoia's property as of today immediately goes to support funding the national park system or his next door neighbor' would be enforced to do just that, and that would be legal in the so-called 'cradle of liberties,' England. Similarly, Canada also has no private property right, so the Canadian Parliament could at any time pass a law to take all private property away and dispose of it as it saw fit. America with its fifth and fourteenth amendments protecting private property is an exception among the democratic states of the world in this regard.

 

Legal scholars usually divide up law into two basic categories, public, describing what the government may do, and private, describing how citizens can interact with each other. These two branches of law operate under distinct conceptual regimes and one is not usually thought of as having any implications for what is just or fair in the other. So if public law is socialistic and private law is not, then that is not theoretically impossible or even unusual, since countries like the Nordic states operate under such a composite system.

 

But even if you want to set up the private system, where all transfers of money are voluntary, as the paradigm of what should be allowed throughout the legal system, then there is the still the problem that even the private system has large public and socialistic elements. So for example, if you don't work but you are extremely wealthy and own a gigantic estate with lots of buildings which have to be protected against vandals and thieves, then you might use up far more than your fair share of police and fire protection, which is paid for out of general taxation, so we could argue that your private property is only being preserved intact because it survives protected within the matrix of a socialistic system -- that is, one which supplies police and fire protection services without limit according to need, but which collects taxes only according to income without regard to the extent of one's demands on the free police services. In this sense all private property is socialistic in nature, since unless the majority of society agreed to fund the institutions and consented to obey the rules which keep the system of private transactions going, private property would quickly evaporate in a universal anarchy of theft and lawlessness without this unpaid social cooperation. As the collapse of regimes like Iran in 1979 or the Communist countries starting in 1989 demonstrated, no matter how much police power there is, no social system can continue functioning unless there is tacit consent from the people to keep it going, so the wealth of Bill Gates is ultimately not just 'his,' but is reproduced and reconfirmed anew every day by the silent agreement of everyone else in society to abide by the rules which sustain it.

[CaptainPanic]

That's what I was wondering, thank you (sorry I wasn't more clear). So this money is permanent, yes? The receiver doesn't have to, for example, show that they are looking for a better job, or improving their education, or anything like that?

That is (and always will be) a topic for discussion...

If you lose a job, at first the government pays you for a certain amount of time, 70% of your last earned income as an unemployment wage. To receive that, a person must prove that they try to find a new job.

 

After a certain amount of time (and still no job), the person will fall back to the levels of income that I mentioned before... and they still must search for a job. (That never stops).

 

It sounds like the government is (and by proxy, the people are) subsidizing low-end labor. Like saying "we need trash collectors and fast-food servers, so we'll subsidize them from tax income". And I guess there are people who are willing to settle for that kind of life, and the dole makes that a little more acceptable, so it becomes more or less permanent. That may well work for the Dutch -- I've read that quality of life there is very high in general.

It's a funny example you choose. Trash collectors earn quite a decent living. It's a dirty and hard job, so they get decent money. It's paid by the government.

Fast-food chains don't receive any government support as far as I know.

Quality of life is - well, let's put it like this: I haven't been to any place in the world so far that seemed significantly richer than the Netherlands.

 

That was the situation in American in 1996, but that low-end workers had such a low quality of life that it was considered repugnant enough that change was desired. So change was achieved through ending the welfare program, which directly lead to the 96% employment, realized within just a few years.

 

How's unemployment in the Netherlands these days? I'm guessing it must be pretty low if folks are happy with the system.

Unemployment is at 5.7% now. It went up because of the crisis. It was less than 4% for many years.

[iNow]

Netherlands also has strong social support networks and universal healthcare, so lack of a job there is not quite equivalent to a lack of job in the US. Sure, US has a few social support programs and unemployment insurance and the like, but it pales in comparison to what is offered by the Netherlands. That's an area where I find the comparison lacking... Not to mention the much lower unemployment rate mentioned by CP above.

[Pangloss]

The above two posts suggest (or at least support the concept) that a more "socialistic" approach, e.g. stronger safety nets and government-run infrastructure, would lead to a less dramatic shift when the economy turns. I think that's a reasonable suggestion, and perfectly consistent with the idea of a managed economy that bridges the gap between socialism and capitalism. It's not about human suffering, or freedoms spoken of in absolute terms. It's much more practical than that.

 

Personally I've never really had a problem with moving that line back and forth as needed. I'm sure there are people in the Netherlands who would like to push the line to the left or to the right, but it sounds like they make their decision on a fairly apolitical basis -- measuring the benefits against the costs. It should be made on a practical basis, not a political one -- ideology should not be a factor, except to the extent that it seems reasonably clear that a more prosperous society can afford larger safety nets and smoother transitions between economic "bumps", so long as that economy is well-managed.

 

I'm not sure my country is capable of acting in such a level-headed manner at the moment. Everything has to be so extreme.

[CaptainPanic]

The above two posts suggest (or at least support the concept) that a more "socialistic" approach, e.g. stronger safety nets and government-run infrastructure, would lead to a less dramatic shift when the economy turns. I think that's a reasonable suggestion, and perfectly consistent with the idea of a managed economy that bridges the gap between socialism and capitalism. It's not about human suffering, or freedoms spoken of in absolute terms. It's much more practical than that.

That was the original idea behind it.

Personally I've never really had a problem with moving that line back and forth as needed. I'm sure there are people in the Netherlands who would like to push the line to the left or to the right, but it sounds like they make their decision on a fairly apolitical basis -- measuring the benefits against the costs. It should be made on a practical basis, not a political one -- ideology should not be a factor, except to the extent that it seems reasonably clear that a more prosperous society can afford larger safety nets and smoother transitions between economic "bumps", so long as that economy is well-managed.

 

I'm not sure my country is capable of acting in such a level-headed manner at the moment. Everything has to be so extreme.

It's not apolitical. The problem is that the economy is no hard science. The theories of economy don't always apply. How our economy works and progresses often depends on the mood of the population. Therefore, both the left and the right can argue that they're the best way forward, and it's in both cases nearly impossible to refute that... It's more political, and less utilistic or practical than you seem to think.

 

Politicians and voters choose a side, and dig in. Arguments and predictions regarding the economy can always just as easily be refuted by the other side. And obviously, since this is politics, arguments are also exaggerated, and made emotional. And of course, most politicians excel in avoiding a straight answer anyway.

 

And then finally, the left and right disagree on some other topics as well and there are many voters who vote on a party because of topics such as immigration, rather than their personal financial safety, which confuses everything even more.

 

(This reply is just to show that we may have a safety net for unemployed people - our political system is still as crappy as most others).

[Marat]

I think the issue is irreducibly political rather than just pragmatic. We could, after all, adopt a Mathusian model for the economy and let the starvation of the poor solve the unemployment problem. Economics just describes what will happen if you do x, y, or z in your public policy choices, not how much of a burden in human suffering you should permit to fall on the poor. How far we let the pressure of economic downturns be absorbed by the human suffering involved in unemployment, lack of access to health care, lack of access to education, lack of housing, etc., and how far we shift the pressure of economic stresses to reductions in the surplus material goods of the wealthy is more or less a reflection of how much we value poor people over rich people. I say 'more or less' because certain laws of economics, like the need to allow some wealth to become concentrated so it can provide rationally directed investment capital to fuel economic growth, restrict our options.