How do things not created by humans come to be property, to belong to someone? While the problem is commonly discussed in the context of land it is broader than that. Everything humans make starts with materials not made by humans. Iron ore was not made by humans. If nobody owns the iron ore, nobody owns the steel it is made into, nobody owns the car the steel is made into.
Common property is not private property, but it is still property. So if property needs a justification, common property needs one as badly as private property does.
A commons is distinct from private property, but both are subject to the same objection. Both of these, and any other imaginable form of property, depend on someone needing consent from someone else to use something, on exclusion. If we try to eliminate this role, and try to regulate use by principle, then whoever disputes an improper use or interprets cloudy cases has the role of owner by default. Consenting to some uses, and disputing and excluding others is what owners do. When someone says “you can’t use that,” they do so either as the owner or as the agent of the owner.
Locke's proviso is an obvious form of exclusion applicable to the commons, but even if we abandon that, others will remain. I can’t build a house on the commons, even if more land remains and is as good. I can’t cultivate crops there and exclude others from harvesting them. My use is excluded if it is the wrong kind, or if I am. Different and perhaps fewer exclusions, but exclusions still. If I attempt to ignore the custom, others can dispute me in court, or in arbitration before the village headman, and win. Or if they lose, it has become private property, hasn’t it?
The solution seems trivial. If something is truly unowned, there is no one with the right to dispute its use. If only one person wants to use something, no one will dispute it. If multiple persons want to use an “unowned” thing, or if one wishes to prevent the other's use, this gives cause for a dispute. The proper owner should win the dispute by showing evidence of ownership, a reason that this use should or should not be excluded.
What counts as evidence of ownership? It is not obvious that different cultures must use the same standards. Libertarians are fond of first possession or first use, and that certainly works. But so long as everyone in a region knows what counts locally as evidence of ownership, there is no obvious reason not to use something else. (Or perhaps the convoluted discussion this has inspired is a reason to think that is the best approach.)
On the other hand, almost no land ownership can be found that is not based on conquest. This doesn’t make private property less useful, but casts some shade on its historical relationship to justice. War not only kills people, but destroys the social basis of custom. It is an injustice, but one of a different scale. Theft is a dispute between persons, with the customary basis of property taken as static. War is a dispute between communities, and unjustly changes the entire basis of property.
On a practical level, an ownership dispute can be settled without reference to original acquisition, if all parties at least agree on some more recent relevant fact of ownership. If farmers Smith and Jones are disputing over the use of a gully, it doesn’t matter whether it once belonged to the the king of England, of Spain, or an indigenous tribe, so long as both Smith and Jones both stipulate that 100 years ago it was definitely owned by farmer Williams. If their dispute is about more recent events, Williams can provide their foundation.
What really is the basis of the criticism of private property? Philosophers love abstract principles. Property is socially significant, but hard to shape into a neat philosophy, either deontological or consequential. It seems too arbitrary.
A commons, as I was using the term in the essay, is unowned. Anyone can use it, no one can exclude other users. I can plant wheat, you can trample my wheat sprouts.
That doesn't correspond to the historical English commons but I believe it is how the term is commonly used in discussions of the economics of property.
Or more briefly, if “ no one can exclude other users,” there is no basis for disputing its acquisition by someone. We can’t say that the acquirers are introducing exclusion, unless they were not excluded from doing so.
The person arguing this point would need to justify excluding exclusion, if exclusion generally needs justification. If that is a special kind of exclusion, showing how this is so would amount to justifying exclusion, though perhaps only in that special case. But my impressions is that this has been ignored.
As was pointed out in the OP, use is pointless if it is interrupted before the goal is achieved, so exclusion during use seems justified. The question is whether requiring other forms of exclusion to have additional justification is itself a form of unjustified exclusion. So it is not that no one could ever prohibit others from acquiring unused, as yet specifically unclaimed resources, but that if they do they act as the owners or the agents of the owners of the disputed resource, by claiming authority over all unclaimed resources. To be owned is to be within the scope of the social institutions of justice, and to be unowned is to be outside of them.
This would be a purely terminological issue if it didn’t put asymmetric burdens on claims that have the same social basis. Some people act as if they can demand a justification for private property, but alternatives require no justification. I think either both sides need a justification, or neither does.
Which should we suppose Locke had in mind? His proviso excludes some uses, in effect.
A commons like that can’t function as the basis of a critique of private property, since it is not a real alternative. If we say that an instance of acquisition is illegitimate, we must show some superior claim. Even if that claim is only a broad and vague appeal to fairness, it still has the effect of excluding some uses. Whoever disputes the use acts on behalf of some imagined owner, if not necessarily consciously.
If something is truly unowned, there is no basis for a dispute over it, as no one would think they had standing. The real problem of property is the opposite, that everyone thinks they have at least some small claim to everything, and they could dispute anything if they thought it was worth the bother.
So I seem to have defined non-ownership out of existence, which might appear rhetorical. How should we redefine non-ownership in a way that allows it to apply here? Vague or confused ownership seems to work, but also seems distinct from non-ownership. It is just disputed ownership. If the community is prohibiting a use of something, their ability to prohibit needs as much explanation as would the owner's ability to use it in defiance of their prohibition. If they do not prohibit any use, there is no basis for claiming an unjust use purely on the basis of use, without reference to other effects of the use. (If I use something to kill someone, we don’t worry about whether or not I owned the thing. My crime is murder, not theft.) Perhaps unowned means that no one cares about it enough to dispute its use. But that still is too weak to accomplish what critics of private property want. And it is inefficient too, as you can’t be sure what is and isn't owned without trying to grab it.
If someone can trespass on unowned property, that seems like a contradiction. When people criticize an acquisition of unowned property, they are complaining about trespass without using the word. Perhaps the owner is purely imaginary, or ownership is dispersed among a large number of persons in a confusing and unspecified way. But it still needs the same sort of justification, if one is needed for private property. The alternative to private property can’t be non-property, because non-property doesn’t prohibit anything.
Excellent comment. I have a few quibbles based on antho/archeo examples of ownership but they are all "deep-time" examples and of limited application.
"On a practical level, an ownership dispute can be settled without reference to original acquisition, if all parties at least agree on some more recent relevant fact of ownership."
Totally agree with you on this point.
"What really is the basis of the criticism of private property? Philosophers love abstract principles. Property is socially significant, but hard to shape into a neat philosophy, either deontological or consequential. It seems too arbitrary."
I also thought your conclusion was sound and practical.
By coincidence I found myself getting to a digression relating to Georgism on Matt Yglesias's substack yesterday and found myself facing the following conundrum, which I wonder if Dr. Friedman or anyone else can opine on:
Specifically, the nominal goal of Georgism is to tax the unimproved value of land ("site value" as used in this post) and leave improvements untaxed. It seems to me, however, that this is conceptually almost without content: the site value is generally agreed to reflect local demand conditions rather than being solely intrinsic to the site in the state of nature. However, the site value of land is clearly also a function of its capacity for improvement: land that a hotel can be built on is worth more than similar land that's prone to subsidence, and technology allowing denser, higher, or cheaper construction raises the value of any individual parcel because it can be more intensively exploited.
This, in turn, indicates that the site value (and the corollary tax basis) should reflect the *as-improved potential* of the land as maximally exploited, not merely, which accords with the general principle that the income flows extractable from real estate are typically the basis on which it is priced.
But if we grant the above, this turns the idea of "not taxing improvements" into essentially a nullity except in rare cares where the site value is demonstrably an internalized value-add rather than the function of latent external demand (e.g., Disneyworld) or in the case that some entity has an exclusive market advantage in their capacity to build cheaply so that the site has higher value to builder A than to builder B, which so far as I know is generally not characteristic of the building trades -- contracting is more of a commodity labor and materials exchange than one that's, say, characterized by ubiquitous patent disputes. In the general case, we expect site value to encompass essentially all of the economic potential of a given parcel, less only the capital costs attributable to building the infrastructure (e.g., an office building, a mine, whatever) that maximally exploits said site value.
I'm not sure that this necessarily poses an insurmountable pragmatic hurdle to the implementation of Georgism, but it does rather seem like it renders the idea of "tax land but not improvements" as have little, if any, content.
I may well be making an error in the above reasoning but, if so, I'm not sure where it lies.
All this is theoretical mind gymnastics. In practice property rights ( lands or otherwise) are decided by systematic consensus among those who hold power.
If consensus changes - property rights change. There are many ways power consensus change - military, political ( coups, revolutions, reforms), economical.
There is not one sacred principle of property from which "just" laws could be derived .
In communist USSR there was one principle, today its another.
For Georgist land value tax to work power consensus must adopt it. Right now its in no interest of power structures. Because it would violate established order without bringing any net benefits to them. To change property rights has to begin with changing who holds power
In practice, the usual method involves violence or threats of violence. Most land has changed hands in this way several times.
To be clear, I'm using the libertarian concept of threats of violence here. If "the government" exercises "eminent domain", for a price at which the prior owner would not sell voluntarily, that's "threat of violence". I'm not only referring to every time the territory was conquered, creating new ownership by blatant violence. But you don't need the libertarian concept.
Usually the violence or threats are perpetrated by a political organization (tribe, state) on behalf of its elite members, at the expense either of outsiders or less elite members. Sometimes non-elites also benefit, particularly when the previous owners were outsiders.
Late to the party, ... but, when it comes to how things are initially appropriated, I'm tempted by a view like Brody's, though mine is motivated by David Gauthier's 1986 book, Morals by Agreement, at VII.4.1.
Agreed, it is a mistake to require humanity's unanimous consent (since that is impractical), or to say that no-one owns anything (since, as you point out, the labor you put into your wheat does give you /some/ rights over it), or for georgists to say that some collective (our democratic government, or humanity as a whole) owns the land (since, as you also point out, it did not make the land any more than you did).
Not (completely) agreed about your own solution. True, your right to your own body implies that I may not purposely use or abuse it in any way—eg, I may not shove you off your spot, or take pot shots at you with my rifle. But does that imply that I may not impose negative externalities ("damage") on you, purely as a side-effect of my actions?—eg, I smoke right next to you, not to annoy you, but just because that is what I would have done anyway, and you just happened to be next to me, a fact about which I am completely indifferent. It is very implausible to suppose that, in the state of nature, we must /never/ impose negative externalities on others. True, this right over your body extends to the products of your labor—eg, I may not wait until they ripen and then reap your harvest for myself. But does that imply that I may not impose negative externalities on your products, again, purely as a side-effect?—yes, I can see that I cannot make my way to the other side of the field without stomping on (some of) your wheat, but your crop is in the way, and, since you do not own the land, you have no right to impede the motion of others through it (which applies, in spades, to the fence you propose to put up). In short, if I directly use or abuse your person or products then I exploit you for my benefit, and this is wrong, but if I am going about my own business, indifferently to the side-effects I am having on you and your products, then in no sense do I take any advantage of you (indeed, I might prefer that you were not around, with your whining about my smoking and your blocking my way), and I do nothing wrong. (A caveat—Like Locke and even Nozick, I do think we have a Duty to Rescue, but this applies only in extreme cases, so, no, the owner of flagpole may not refuse to allow you to use it to save your life.)
So, if you want to exclude me from stomping on your crops, then you need to compensate me for inconvenience caused by having to walk around the long way. And, if you do, if I am no worse off after this compensated exclusion, then I can have no moral complaint. True, exclusion by itself would be a rights violation, but exclusion-with-compensation would not be. And this is close to Brody's view, except that I do not say that your excluding me is a rights violation, so long as it is accompanied by compensation, and so I do not feel the need to provide some explanation of why the "violated" party deserves more than that. This presumes that, in the state of nature, we are obliged not to take advantage of others (which I understand as the claim that we make our selves better off /by/ making others worse off, as you propose to do by purposely excluding me from the land you have planted), but that we pretty much have no further obligations to them. If my actions make you no worse off, then I am not taking advantage of you.
Quoting you back, here is how I would put it: "All land owners are /restricting/ [not "violating"] the rights of everyone, including other land owners, to go on their property. Hence each land owner owes some unspecified amount to everyone who could trespass on his property. While Brody does not carry the argument quite that far, it looks like an argument for Henry George’s social dividend funded by a tax on the site value of land, /to amount determined by the costs of the restriction on all those affected/ [not likely to be "fifty percent", however]. We are [indeed] back with a modified version of the geolibertarian conclusion". So, in my view, the georgists were basically right, except that the justification for their land tax is not that the collective owns the land (which, to repeat, it doesn't), but because it is compensation to the collective for its now being excluded from that parcel.
One thing missing from this account of “property rights arising as a consequence of ownership of labour” is: who defines what counts as “labour”, and how labour is related to value? Suppose that, rather than planting and growing wheat, I rake an area of ground into a pattern that pleases me (e.g. a zen garden). Do I own that ground for now and evermore, because it embodies my labour? If others see value in my labour (they like the pattern I’ve made) they might avoid walking on “my” land - not because it’s mine, but because of the value of the resulting pattern. On the other hand, suppose I work hard arranging pebbles in an area of ground into some pattern I like but no-one else can even see. Do I now own the ground I’ve been working on? I doubt it: while my labour has added value from my perspective, it hasn’t added value (isn’t even visible) to anyone else.
This was actually interesting. I had no idea that Libertarian's tied themselves up in such knots philosophically. I suppose, that when your entire worldview is built around the worship of property and it's ownership, it naturally follows that a philosophy and theology must be constructed to rationalize that position.
I respect your effort. Even if I find the whole discussion to be conceptually torturous.
Perhaps it's due to my focus on anthropology and archeology. I examine ways that real human beings who have existed in the past, assigned value and ownership to the actual land. You are engaged in a more theoretical, abstract series of thought experiments. As one would expect from an economist.
Still, we do agree on many common points of reference. Property, ownership, and property "rights" are fundamental aspects of how we as the SELF interact with SOCIETY. It is foundational to the creation of SOCIETY beyond the familial level.
I seems to me that you and the Libertarians are trying to "prove" that your view of property and property rights is the TRUE view. Looking at human history and prehistory my view on "property" is that the human relationship to it is very fluid.
You also didn't open up the can of worms that comes with the ownership of biological organisms that are capable of reproduction. Do you "own" your children? Should you be able to sell them into slavery if they are your "property"?
The discussion is never ending and important. I think, that for it to be productive, requires humility from all who want to join the great discussion. It's one of those areas where Great Conviction is a form of hubris.
"when your entire worldview is built around the worship of property and it's ownership"
The economic arguments for libertarianism include the explanation of private property and exchange as a mechanism for decentralized coordination. The moral arguments mostly center on the individual's ownership of himself.
The puzzle is how to make the two consistent, to deduce from the individual's ownership of himself a moral justification for rules of private property. It may not be doable — I'm not very optimistic about constructing moral arguments for libertarianism or anything else, which is part of why I prefer to use consequentialist arguments — but it is an interesting exercise.
Perhaps "worship" is a prejudicial term. In anthrospeak things that are "central" to identify and the structure of a society are often objects of worship. What individuals revere and devote time to, reveals more about them and their culture than their "mythology".
In simpler terms, actions speak louder than words or "follow the money".
I am trained to look for patterns of actions. In Libertarianism, there is an admirable centrality in its insistence on the ownership of self and the consequent freedom of choice that implies.
But, we are social beings. No man is an island. We must live and work together. There's the rub.
The title of my first book, "The Machinery of Freedom," is a reference to a point I make at the beginning:
"The purpose of this book is to persuade you that a libertarian society would be both free and attractive, that the institutions of private property are the machinery of freedom, making it possible, in a complicated and interdependent world, for each person to pursue his life as he sees fit."
For an explanation of that, see the pdf of the book:
From the third edition of _The Machinery of Freedom_:
The Cure
“In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
[Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan]
Hobbes had a vision, certain, crystal clear,
Through logic’s lens alone he clearly saw
The state of nature, red in tooth and claw
And sword and axe, where each man lives in fear,
A nightmare world unless a king appear
Equipped with force enough to overawe
All powers else and bend them to his law,
A monarch absolute, without a peer.
One question yet remains: In many lands
Men lived and fathered children, planted grain,
Slept soundly through the night, worked with their hands,
Together or apart, for love or gain.
How is it that the human race survived
Through the long years before the king arrived?
A doctor synthesized the perfect cure
For a disease that he was certain sure
Mankind without his aid could not endure.
His flawless logic with no doubt implied
That the disease existed, so he tried,
To offer up the cure on every side.
And many patients took the cure
And died.
“In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170,000,000 men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; or buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens or foreigners.” R.J. Rummel, Death by Government.
"Sneer"? Hardly, I thought this was interesting and David's presentation of it was well done. I also have common ground with David here. I agree that "property" both as a concept and as a physical reality is worthy of discussion.
I am making an honest comment in response to what I read. I perceive this as an exercise similar to that of Kant and his "categorical imperatives". A desire to construct a set of universal moral principles that apply to all human beings, regardless of context or situation as applied to property and property rights.
I am skeptical that this can be done. I found Kant's categorical imperatives about as convincing as the Ten Commandments.
Maybe it is the famous internet power to alter tone, but it sure looks like sneering to me. The importance of property in the operation of the legal system might not seem obvious. Perhaps we can trust the lawyers to get it right.
Do you know where the phrase "first we kill all the lawyers" comes from?
It's from Shakespeare. Lawyers were hated in the aftermath of the Black Plague. Because so many people died that the lawsuits around estates and the ownership of property were endless. They went on for decades.
I read a book where someone went into great detail on the consequences of the Black Plague in terms of ownership of property. It was surprisingly interesting. Did you know that the great monasteries were the equivalent of today's Apple and Google?
Their valuations were in the billions in today's terms.
I was surprised at how robust and developed the legal profession was at that time.
I don't know if you are correct about the origin of hostility to lawyers — I would expect it to go back much further — but Shakespeare was writing two and a half centuries after the plague hit Europe, so if that is the reason the effect lasted centuries, not just decades.
Experts in the law play a major role in the Icelandic sagas, set and written well before the plague.
No one ever loves lawyers. Yet we revere the great "law givers". The Code of Hammurabi, the Code of Justinian, even Napoleonic Law are regarded as great achievements.
“the land may, morally speaking, be a commons,”
Common property is not private property, but it is still property. So if property needs a justification, common property needs one as badly as private property does.
A commons is distinct from private property, but both are subject to the same objection. Both of these, and any other imaginable form of property, depend on someone needing consent from someone else to use something, on exclusion. If we try to eliminate this role, and try to regulate use by principle, then whoever disputes an improper use or interprets cloudy cases has the role of owner by default. Consenting to some uses, and disputing and excluding others is what owners do. When someone says “you can’t use that,” they do so either as the owner or as the agent of the owner.
Locke's proviso is an obvious form of exclusion applicable to the commons, but even if we abandon that, others will remain. I can’t build a house on the commons, even if more land remains and is as good. I can’t cultivate crops there and exclude others from harvesting them. My use is excluded if it is the wrong kind, or if I am. Different and perhaps fewer exclusions, but exclusions still. If I attempt to ignore the custom, others can dispute me in court, or in arbitration before the village headman, and win. Or if they lose, it has become private property, hasn’t it?
The solution seems trivial. If something is truly unowned, there is no one with the right to dispute its use. If only one person wants to use something, no one will dispute it. If multiple persons want to use an “unowned” thing, or if one wishes to prevent the other's use, this gives cause for a dispute. The proper owner should win the dispute by showing evidence of ownership, a reason that this use should or should not be excluded.
What counts as evidence of ownership? It is not obvious that different cultures must use the same standards. Libertarians are fond of first possession or first use, and that certainly works. But so long as everyone in a region knows what counts locally as evidence of ownership, there is no obvious reason not to use something else. (Or perhaps the convoluted discussion this has inspired is a reason to think that is the best approach.)
On the other hand, almost no land ownership can be found that is not based on conquest. This doesn’t make private property less useful, but casts some shade on its historical relationship to justice. War not only kills people, but destroys the social basis of custom. It is an injustice, but one of a different scale. Theft is a dispute between persons, with the customary basis of property taken as static. War is a dispute between communities, and unjustly changes the entire basis of property.
On a practical level, an ownership dispute can be settled without reference to original acquisition, if all parties at least agree on some more recent relevant fact of ownership. If farmers Smith and Jones are disputing over the use of a gully, it doesn’t matter whether it once belonged to the the king of England, of Spain, or an indigenous tribe, so long as both Smith and Jones both stipulate that 100 years ago it was definitely owned by farmer Williams. If their dispute is about more recent events, Williams can provide their foundation.
What really is the basis of the criticism of private property? Philosophers love abstract principles. Property is socially significant, but hard to shape into a neat philosophy, either deontological or consequential. It seems too arbitrary.
A commons, as I was using the term in the essay, is unowned. Anyone can use it, no one can exclude other users. I can plant wheat, you can trample my wheat sprouts.
That doesn't correspond to the historical English commons but I believe it is how the term is commonly used in discussions of the economics of property.
Or more briefly, if “ no one can exclude other users,” there is no basis for disputing its acquisition by someone. We can’t say that the acquirers are introducing exclusion, unless they were not excluded from doing so.
The person arguing this point would need to justify excluding exclusion, if exclusion generally needs justification. If that is a special kind of exclusion, showing how this is so would amount to justifying exclusion, though perhaps only in that special case. But my impressions is that this has been ignored.
As was pointed out in the OP, use is pointless if it is interrupted before the goal is achieved, so exclusion during use seems justified. The question is whether requiring other forms of exclusion to have additional justification is itself a form of unjustified exclusion. So it is not that no one could ever prohibit others from acquiring unused, as yet specifically unclaimed resources, but that if they do they act as the owners or the agents of the owners of the disputed resource, by claiming authority over all unclaimed resources. To be owned is to be within the scope of the social institutions of justice, and to be unowned is to be outside of them.
This would be a purely terminological issue if it didn’t put asymmetric burdens on claims that have the same social basis. Some people act as if they can demand a justification for private property, but alternatives require no justification. I think either both sides need a justification, or neither does.
Which should we suppose Locke had in mind? His proviso excludes some uses, in effect.
A commons like that can’t function as the basis of a critique of private property, since it is not a real alternative. If we say that an instance of acquisition is illegitimate, we must show some superior claim. Even if that claim is only a broad and vague appeal to fairness, it still has the effect of excluding some uses. Whoever disputes the use acts on behalf of some imagined owner, if not necessarily consciously.
If something is truly unowned, there is no basis for a dispute over it, as no one would think they had standing. The real problem of property is the opposite, that everyone thinks they have at least some small claim to everything, and they could dispute anything if they thought it was worth the bother.
So I seem to have defined non-ownership out of existence, which might appear rhetorical. How should we redefine non-ownership in a way that allows it to apply here? Vague or confused ownership seems to work, but also seems distinct from non-ownership. It is just disputed ownership. If the community is prohibiting a use of something, their ability to prohibit needs as much explanation as would the owner's ability to use it in defiance of their prohibition. If they do not prohibit any use, there is no basis for claiming an unjust use purely on the basis of use, without reference to other effects of the use. (If I use something to kill someone, we don’t worry about whether or not I owned the thing. My crime is murder, not theft.) Perhaps unowned means that no one cares about it enough to dispute its use. But that still is too weak to accomplish what critics of private property want. And it is inefficient too, as you can’t be sure what is and isn't owned without trying to grab it.
If someone can trespass on unowned property, that seems like a contradiction. When people criticize an acquisition of unowned property, they are complaining about trespass without using the word. Perhaps the owner is purely imaginary, or ownership is dispersed among a large number of persons in a confusing and unspecified way. But it still needs the same sort of justification, if one is needed for private property. The alternative to private property can’t be non-property, because non-property doesn’t prohibit anything.
Excellent comment. I have a few quibbles based on antho/archeo examples of ownership but they are all "deep-time" examples and of limited application.
"On a practical level, an ownership dispute can be settled without reference to original acquisition, if all parties at least agree on some more recent relevant fact of ownership."
Totally agree with you on this point.
"What really is the basis of the criticism of private property? Philosophers love abstract principles. Property is socially significant, but hard to shape into a neat philosophy, either deontological or consequential. It seems too arbitrary."
I also thought your conclusion was sound and practical.
By coincidence I found myself getting to a digression relating to Georgism on Matt Yglesias's substack yesterday and found myself facing the following conundrum, which I wonder if Dr. Friedman or anyone else can opine on:
Specifically, the nominal goal of Georgism is to tax the unimproved value of land ("site value" as used in this post) and leave improvements untaxed. It seems to me, however, that this is conceptually almost without content: the site value is generally agreed to reflect local demand conditions rather than being solely intrinsic to the site in the state of nature. However, the site value of land is clearly also a function of its capacity for improvement: land that a hotel can be built on is worth more than similar land that's prone to subsidence, and technology allowing denser, higher, or cheaper construction raises the value of any individual parcel because it can be more intensively exploited.
This, in turn, indicates that the site value (and the corollary tax basis) should reflect the *as-improved potential* of the land as maximally exploited, not merely, which accords with the general principle that the income flows extractable from real estate are typically the basis on which it is priced.
But if we grant the above, this turns the idea of "not taxing improvements" into essentially a nullity except in rare cares where the site value is demonstrably an internalized value-add rather than the function of latent external demand (e.g., Disneyworld) or in the case that some entity has an exclusive market advantage in their capacity to build cheaply so that the site has higher value to builder A than to builder B, which so far as I know is generally not characteristic of the building trades -- contracting is more of a commodity labor and materials exchange than one that's, say, characterized by ubiquitous patent disputes. In the general case, we expect site value to encompass essentially all of the economic potential of a given parcel, less only the capital costs attributable to building the infrastructure (e.g., an office building, a mine, whatever) that maximally exploits said site value.
I'm not sure that this necessarily poses an insurmountable pragmatic hurdle to the implementation of Georgism, but it does rather seem like it renders the idea of "tax land but not improvements" as have little, if any, content.
I may well be making an error in the above reasoning but, if so, I'm not sure where it lies.
All this is theoretical mind gymnastics. In practice property rights ( lands or otherwise) are decided by systematic consensus among those who hold power.
If consensus changes - property rights change. There are many ways power consensus change - military, political ( coups, revolutions, reforms), economical.
There is not one sacred principle of property from which "just" laws could be derived .
In communist USSR there was one principle, today its another.
For Georgist land value tax to work power consensus must adopt it. Right now its in no interest of power structures. Because it would violate established order without bringing any net benefits to them. To change property rights has to begin with changing who holds power
In practice, the usual method involves violence or threats of violence. Most land has changed hands in this way several times.
To be clear, I'm using the libertarian concept of threats of violence here. If "the government" exercises "eminent domain", for a price at which the prior owner would not sell voluntarily, that's "threat of violence". I'm not only referring to every time the territory was conquered, creating new ownership by blatant violence. But you don't need the libertarian concept.
Usually the violence or threats are perpetrated by a political organization (tribe, state) on behalf of its elite members, at the expense either of outsiders or less elite members. Sometimes non-elites also benefit, particularly when the previous owners were outsiders.
Late to the party, ... but, when it comes to how things are initially appropriated, I'm tempted by a view like Brody's, though mine is motivated by David Gauthier's 1986 book, Morals by Agreement, at VII.4.1.
Agreed, it is a mistake to require humanity's unanimous consent (since that is impractical), or to say that no-one owns anything (since, as you point out, the labor you put into your wheat does give you /some/ rights over it), or for georgists to say that some collective (our democratic government, or humanity as a whole) owns the land (since, as you also point out, it did not make the land any more than you did).
Not (completely) agreed about your own solution. True, your right to your own body implies that I may not purposely use or abuse it in any way—eg, I may not shove you off your spot, or take pot shots at you with my rifle. But does that imply that I may not impose negative externalities ("damage") on you, purely as a side-effect of my actions?—eg, I smoke right next to you, not to annoy you, but just because that is what I would have done anyway, and you just happened to be next to me, a fact about which I am completely indifferent. It is very implausible to suppose that, in the state of nature, we must /never/ impose negative externalities on others. True, this right over your body extends to the products of your labor—eg, I may not wait until they ripen and then reap your harvest for myself. But does that imply that I may not impose negative externalities on your products, again, purely as a side-effect?—yes, I can see that I cannot make my way to the other side of the field without stomping on (some of) your wheat, but your crop is in the way, and, since you do not own the land, you have no right to impede the motion of others through it (which applies, in spades, to the fence you propose to put up). In short, if I directly use or abuse your person or products then I exploit you for my benefit, and this is wrong, but if I am going about my own business, indifferently to the side-effects I am having on you and your products, then in no sense do I take any advantage of you (indeed, I might prefer that you were not around, with your whining about my smoking and your blocking my way), and I do nothing wrong. (A caveat—Like Locke and even Nozick, I do think we have a Duty to Rescue, but this applies only in extreme cases, so, no, the owner of flagpole may not refuse to allow you to use it to save your life.)
So, if you want to exclude me from stomping on your crops, then you need to compensate me for inconvenience caused by having to walk around the long way. And, if you do, if I am no worse off after this compensated exclusion, then I can have no moral complaint. True, exclusion by itself would be a rights violation, but exclusion-with-compensation would not be. And this is close to Brody's view, except that I do not say that your excluding me is a rights violation, so long as it is accompanied by compensation, and so I do not feel the need to provide some explanation of why the "violated" party deserves more than that. This presumes that, in the state of nature, we are obliged not to take advantage of others (which I understand as the claim that we make our selves better off /by/ making others worse off, as you propose to do by purposely excluding me from the land you have planted), but that we pretty much have no further obligations to them. If my actions make you no worse off, then I am not taking advantage of you.
Quoting you back, here is how I would put it: "All land owners are /restricting/ [not "violating"] the rights of everyone, including other land owners, to go on their property. Hence each land owner owes some unspecified amount to everyone who could trespass on his property. While Brody does not carry the argument quite that far, it looks like an argument for Henry George’s social dividend funded by a tax on the site value of land, /to amount determined by the costs of the restriction on all those affected/ [not likely to be "fifty percent", however]. We are [indeed] back with a modified version of the geolibertarian conclusion". So, in my view, the georgists were basically right, except that the justification for their land tax is not that the collective owns the land (which, to repeat, it doesn't), but because it is compensation to the collective for its now being excluded from that parcel.
There is a practical way to get consent from everyone, at any scale: auction the resource and pay the proceeds as dividend.
One thing missing from this account of “property rights arising as a consequence of ownership of labour” is: who defines what counts as “labour”, and how labour is related to value? Suppose that, rather than planting and growing wheat, I rake an area of ground into a pattern that pleases me (e.g. a zen garden). Do I own that ground for now and evermore, because it embodies my labour? If others see value in my labour (they like the pattern I’ve made) they might avoid walking on “my” land - not because it’s mine, but because of the value of the resulting pattern. On the other hand, suppose I work hard arranging pebbles in an area of ground into some pattern I like but no-one else can even see. Do I now own the ground I’ve been working on? I doubt it: while my labour has added value from my perspective, it hasn’t added value (isn’t even visible) to anyone else.
This was actually interesting. I had no idea that Libertarian's tied themselves up in such knots philosophically. I suppose, that when your entire worldview is built around the worship of property and it's ownership, it naturally follows that a philosophy and theology must be constructed to rationalize that position.
I respect your effort. Even if I find the whole discussion to be conceptually torturous.
Perhaps it's due to my focus on anthropology and archeology. I examine ways that real human beings who have existed in the past, assigned value and ownership to the actual land. You are engaged in a more theoretical, abstract series of thought experiments. As one would expect from an economist.
Still, we do agree on many common points of reference. Property, ownership, and property "rights" are fundamental aspects of how we as the SELF interact with SOCIETY. It is foundational to the creation of SOCIETY beyond the familial level.
I seems to me that you and the Libertarians are trying to "prove" that your view of property and property rights is the TRUE view. Looking at human history and prehistory my view on "property" is that the human relationship to it is very fluid.
You also didn't open up the can of worms that comes with the ownership of biological organisms that are capable of reproduction. Do you "own" your children? Should you be able to sell them into slavery if they are your "property"?
The discussion is never ending and important. I think, that for it to be productive, requires humility from all who want to join the great discussion. It's one of those areas where Great Conviction is a form of hubris.
"when your entire worldview is built around the worship of property and it's ownership"
The economic arguments for libertarianism include the explanation of private property and exchange as a mechanism for decentralized coordination. The moral arguments mostly center on the individual's ownership of himself.
The puzzle is how to make the two consistent, to deduce from the individual's ownership of himself a moral justification for rules of private property. It may not be doable — I'm not very optimistic about constructing moral arguments for libertarianism or anything else, which is part of why I prefer to use consequentialist arguments — but it is an interesting exercise.
Perhaps "worship" is a prejudicial term. In anthrospeak things that are "central" to identify and the structure of a society are often objects of worship. What individuals revere and devote time to, reveals more about them and their culture than their "mythology".
In simpler terms, actions speak louder than words or "follow the money".
I am trained to look for patterns of actions. In Libertarianism, there is an admirable centrality in its insistence on the ownership of self and the consequent freedom of choice that implies.
But, we are social beings. No man is an island. We must live and work together. There's the rub.
You mentioned Locke, how do you regard Hobbes?
"But, we are social beings. No man is an island."
The title of my first book, "The Machinery of Freedom," is a reference to a point I make at the beginning:
"The purpose of this book is to persuade you that a libertarian society would be both free and attractive, that the institutions of private property are the machinery of freedom, making it possible, in a complicated and interdependent world, for each person to pursue his life as he sees fit."
For an explanation of that, see the pdf of the book:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery%203rd%20Edn.pdf
From the third edition of _The Machinery of Freedom_:
The Cure
“In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
[Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan]
Hobbes had a vision, certain, crystal clear,
Through logic’s lens alone he clearly saw
The state of nature, red in tooth and claw
And sword and axe, where each man lives in fear,
A nightmare world unless a king appear
Equipped with force enough to overawe
All powers else and bend them to his law,
A monarch absolute, without a peer.
One question yet remains: In many lands
Men lived and fathered children, planted grain,
Slept soundly through the night, worked with their hands,
Together or apart, for love or gain.
How is it that the human race survived
Through the long years before the king arrived?
A doctor synthesized the perfect cure
For a disease that he was certain sure
Mankind without his aid could not endure.
His flawless logic with no doubt implied
That the disease existed, so he tried,
To offer up the cure on every side.
And many patients took the cure
And died.
“In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170,000,000 men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; or buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens or foreigners.” R.J. Rummel, Death by Government.
Since you asked.
The culprits are philosophers more than economists. And if you find *e discussion important, why sneer at those conducting it?
"Sneer"? Hardly, I thought this was interesting and David's presentation of it was well done. I also have common ground with David here. I agree that "property" both as a concept and as a physical reality is worthy of discussion.
I am making an honest comment in response to what I read. I perceive this as an exercise similar to that of Kant and his "categorical imperatives". A desire to construct a set of universal moral principles that apply to all human beings, regardless of context or situation as applied to property and property rights.
I am skeptical that this can be done. I found Kant's categorical imperatives about as convincing as the Ten Commandments.
Maybe it is the famous internet power to alter tone, but it sure looks like sneering to me. The importance of property in the operation of the legal system might not seem obvious. Perhaps we can trust the lawyers to get it right.
Do you know where the phrase "first we kill all the lawyers" comes from?
It's from Shakespeare. Lawyers were hated in the aftermath of the Black Plague. Because so many people died that the lawsuits around estates and the ownership of property were endless. They went on for decades.
I read a book where someone went into great detail on the consequences of the Black Plague in terms of ownership of property. It was surprisingly interesting. Did you know that the great monasteries were the equivalent of today's Apple and Google?
Their valuations were in the billions in today's terms.
I was surprised at how robust and developed the legal profession was at that time.
I don't know if you are correct about the origin of hostility to lawyers — I would expect it to go back much further — but Shakespeare was writing two and a half centuries after the plague hit Europe, so if that is the reason the effect lasted centuries, not just decades.
Experts in the law play a major role in the Icelandic sagas, set and written well before the plague.
No one ever loves lawyers. Yet we revere the great "law givers". The Code of Hammurabi, the Code of Justinian, even Napoleonic Law are regarded as great achievements.
So few lawyers are remembered that way.