Property rights may seem like a dry legal issue, but it goes to the very heart of our relationships with one another. It’s a matter of a social justice – not to mention being an age-old political battleground, notably including the deep partisan division in this country these days. We’ll need to get into the weeds a bit with this one, but there’s a resolution at the other end.
“Property” means something of value that can be used to satisfy our personal needs and wants. Although there is a category of “common property” that a group of people, or a society may share, for the most part the concept of property connotes a “possession” that is at the disposal of an “owner”. By definition, then, “private” property excludes everyone but the owner(s) from access to it, or enjoying the benefits, without their permission.
So far as we know, the institution of excludable private property traces back at least to the dawn of civilization, but it is likely to be much older even than that. Suggestive research in the field of child development has shown that children, even at a very young age, understand that an object can “belong” to another person, and they behave accordingly. Personal property is also a cultural universal in the modern-day hunter-gatherer societies that are presumed to resemble the way our own remote ancestors lived.
The liberal idea that property is somehow a “natural right” – along with life and liberty — goes back at least to the philosopher John Locke in his famous Second Treatise of Government (1690). Locke claimed that “The reason men enter into society is the preservation of their property.” Life, liberty, and property “existed beforehand,” in Locke’s words. Many modern liberal theorists embrace this argument and make the additional claim that private control of property will lead to its highest value and most efficient use, and that any forcible “taking” (including taxes, in the view of some theorists) is equivalent to “stealing”.
The opposing view about property and property rights originated with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) and The Social Contract (1762). Rousseau argued that men lived independently in the state of nature and joined into civil societies to enjoy the benefits of cooperation and a division of labor, but that the institution of private property has resulted in extreme economic inequality and social conflict. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau proclaimed. According to Rousseau, private property is not a natural right but a “social contract” that has been corrupted because it mainly serves the rich and powerful. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the founding father of modern anarchism, went even further: “Property is theft…. Property is despotism.”
It may come as a surprise to learn that the founding father of the modern discipline of economics, Adam Smith, agreed with Rousseau. In the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith wrote: “Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality…Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
This is certainly how the private property system has worked in practice. Extremes of wealth and poverty have been the rule in ancient and modern societies alike, as documented extensively by economist Thomas Piketty in his acclaimed study, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (2014). In 2017, for example, it was reported that the top 1% of the world’s population now controls over 50% of the total global wealth, while the bottom half (some 3.5 billion people) account for just 2.7%. According to an analysis from the Credit Suisse Research Institute, since 2000 some 23.9 million new millionaires have been created, including 2.3 million in the past year alone. Meanwhile, wages for most workers have been stagnant, or worse. Nearly half of the world’s population live on less than $2.50 per day, with some 1.3 billion people living in severe poverty. Even in or own rich country, 5.3 million people are deemed “absolutely poor” by global standards, according to a new World Bank estimate.
Whatever the rationale or justification for this extreme economic disparity, the fact is that private property exists only insofar as everyone else voluntarily respects a person’s claim to it, or is coerced into doing so. And this is the key point – the lynch pin. A “social contract,” by definition, implies a voluntary arrangement that is of mutual benefit to all parties. Any other alternative is tyranny. So, property rights are conditional. They are not ordained by some law of nature. The rules of the game can be changed if there is some compelling reason for doing so – along with the will (and the means, of course). As the economic statistics cited above clearly show, the need for changing the rules has become increasingly urgent.
Let’s go back to “the state of nature,” where the great philosophers liked to ground their arguments. In fact, we now know that humankind evolved over several million years in tightly cooperating, egalitarian small groups. Every human society was, and remains even today, fundamentally a “collective survival enterprise” – a joint undertaking to secure our basic, biological survival needs. So, the implicit “social contract” between us is, at heart, a mutual commitment to provide for everyone’s basic needs. (There are some 14 distinct categories, all told. They’re discussed in detail elsewhere.) But when this commitment is betrayed by an extreme concentration of wealth (i.e., property) coupled with deep poverty, the social contract has broken down. It has, in effect, become void.
When will we learn? The likely result over time will be a spike in property crimes, civil unrest, violent protests, and even revolutions. The long sad history of failed societies can be traced, in most cases, directly to betrayals by the rich and powerful of the social contract. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes rightly observed: “Seeing every man… is supposed to endeavor all he can to obtain all that is necessary for his conservation, he that shall oppose himself against it, for things superfluous, is guilty of the war that there-upon is to follow.”
The remedy is obvious. There must be a universal “basic needs guarantee” that is strictly adhered to. In fact, it has a higher moral claim than property rights. In contrast with socialism or various forms of radical egalitarianism, however, a basic needs guarantee only sets a cap, or limit, and requires reciprocity from the rich, rather than confiscating property rights claims. It’s ultimately a matter of enlightened self-interest for the propertied classes — buying peace and voluntary compliance by honoring the basic needs of the rest of us. As Plato concluded in the Republic, “any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are [forever] at war with one another.” It doesn’t need to be this way – as the welfare capitalism model in the Nordic countries has clearly demonstrated. (The Nordic model has been described in other recent blog posts.) It’s ultimately a matter of social choice – and it’s a choice with life and death consequences.