I finally got some time to scan the Blogverse today, and found a gem over at Matthew Yglesias <irony> although Matthew seems to mistakenly feel that putting blogs in alphabetical order on blogrolls is a Bad Thing </irony>
All together, it’s worth taking note of a certainly historical naivete that undergirds a lot of libertarian approaches to property rights. The patterns of ownership and wealth that currently exist in the US have been profoundly shaped by the government’s decision over a period of about 100 years to recognize and enforce property holdings that took the form of ownership of other human beings. One might want to add that the wholesale expropriation of North America’s indigenous inhabitants played a significant role as well. The point is that it’s not as if whatever property folks own nowadays came down to them through a series of morally pure transactions that would be desperately tainted by government interference. The state and coercive appropriations are the roots of property ownership all the way down.
The conservatives share the libertarians worship of property rights as-they-are, and somehow take them as handed down on stone tablets, rather than as evolving social constructs (which they are).
(Note: Ill have more to say on containing contradictory positions sometime soon)
Having said that, Ill switch sides and note that while property is an evolving social construct, a respect for property rights is nonetheless a critical part of what I would see as a just society. Because its mutable doesnt mean its anything we want it to be.
“Having said that, Ill switch sides and note that while property is an evolving social construct, a respect for property rights is nonetheless a critical part of what I would see as a just society.”
Not to mention the only known route to a prosperous one.
And if you think about it, I wouldn’t have been able to buy my own home in my own name until something like 1972. I need to double check the date, but I think that’s right — at least for California.
I hope that you, like all too many, don’t confuse “evolving social concepts” (query: are there any that don’t evolve? If not, why the redundancy?) with “subject to forced experimentation at the hands of whoever has their hands on the levers of state power.”
We can all “evolve” our own personal “property” via contract – a nice, empower-the-people, bottom-up, decentralized way to “evolve”, no? If you feel like a property owner has too many rights, feel free to give away some of your rights to your own property first, just to test it out. I suspect that you are not interested in evolving property rights in a way that gives the individual more dominion over their own property, but feel free to prove me wrong on this one.
Just how would you “evolve” the social concept of (other people’s) property, eh? So far, the grand experiments along these lines lately have all turned out pretty disastrously.
For more on this whole “evolving social construct” business, check out de Soto’s Mystery of Capital. He covers the evolution of proprty rights in the American west. It was a bottom up procedure; the courts simply codified what people were already doing. Descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, the way law ought to be.
Check out Tom Bethell’s “The Nobelest Triumph” in addition to de Soto’s books. Its subtitled “Property and Prosperity through the Ages”. It tracks property rights from the Romans on.
WIthout question, the concept of property rights to land have evolved over time. They’ve had to.
But an awful lot of evidence suggests that the very concept of property is as old as civilization itself.
Without question, some — not all, please — land in the US was expropriated from others. But you’ll have to do a lot to convince me that the system we have now is based on slavery.
Dean:
Just because a number of cultures have a common concept – “property” – doesn’t mean that the concept contains the same thing n each case.
I’m pretty sure IP wasn’t really considered too widely in the 14th century…
Again, I’m not arguing that it’s totally mutable, just that we ought to be careful about asserting that these concepts of property and property relations are somehow divine.
A.L.
Of course individual property rights (among many others) are evolving, and thank goodness for it. It was not so very long ago that most people were property in effect, whether called serfs or slaves: the serf did have a few rights slaves did not, but that the “masses” could own land is a fairly new idea. On the side of slavery, on the other hand, slaves (including in the US, not just the Roman Empire) could own slaves, which serfs could not.
As to the native Americans, I think (with the possible exception of The Five Nations in the northeast) land ownership, even collectively, was initially such a strange concept that when newcomers (Euros) wanted to buy it the interpretation was sharing-of-hunting-rights without exclusivity. When immigrants kicked locals off the land, trouble naturally followed and worsened.
Still evolving? Yes indeed. The classic capital-c Communism, large-f Fascism, and big-s Socialism all proclaim that the state should return to being the holder of property and that citizens must effectively be the property of the State. Others feel that the state, having allowed individuals to “own” land (and themselves), should progress further in this regard rather than reverting.