Property is Aggression, Coercion, and Threats

An excellent analysis by Matt Bruenig who is now being added to my blog roll.  He describes property as "violence vouchers" provided by the state.

American Libertarians (also known as propertarians and glibertarians by people I like) have long claimed that a society based on property and the ability to make money from it is non-coercive.  Nothing could be further from the truth, which Matt Bruenig explains.

Matt further links to his previous essays on the failed philosophies of property rights, including those of libertarians, which are also worth reading.

I discovered Matt while starting to read excellent commentary on Property and Government at Crooked Timber.  This starts from Quiggen's point that property rights, often seen as antagonistic to government, actually come from government, and are best enforced by government, and you can't have property rights without government.

Certainly it's true that Property Rights are not part of any real natural law (actually the very concept of Natural Law, as Jeremy Bentham quipped, is nonsense on stilts).  The natural state of affairs for independent actors in nature is the Rule of the Jungle, aka Might Makes Right.  Under Might Makes Right, anyone's "property" is fair game to be taken by someone else more powerful, and so on without end.  So at minimum, property requires collectivism, as Sasha Clarkson says in comment 30:

Any “non might” based private property right requires social organisation and protection of that that right/privilege by collective recognition and enforcement: whether you choose to call that organisation a “state” or not is a matter of choice.

That's definitely too strong.  Many informed later commenters would say this was well put except instead of "state" she should have said "society."  Then it would be unequivocally correct, as many commenters note, all "rights" come from society.

I'd argue this: If they're not coming from society, they're not rights, they're obligations.

Locally, at some times and places in the distant past, a mutualism might have been sufficient.  That's unimaginable now.  But at the scale of bands, in which humans existed for most of their time on earth, up to the past 10,000 years, property generally doesn't exist either, but rather a sort of communism.  So something like modern property (with strong powers to exclude all others) appears at a fairly large scale of organization…certainly state-like if not state, and not in all of them even.  Native Americans had very sophisticated civilizations without it.

An excellent comment to Bruenig's blog points out that propertarian arguments were debunked long ago by Proudhon.   And that the commenter sees property as a government regulation, at least alleged if not believed to produce a better society.  Breunig said he agreed with this view of property as a government regulation (he describes property as "violence vouchers" provided by the government).  But then it would be entirely up to government to decide how it worked, including how much of the proceeds an owner could take, and how much for the government to take.  Or how much one person could have.  In that regards, taxation of property is not a taking, rather what the individual takes  beyond their immediate needs, as in a wonderful letter by Benjamin Franklin, is the people's prerogative to dispose of first.

Many lists of authoritative books on the very subject are listed.  David Woodruff lists some authoritative books in comment 43.  One of the best of the best books is Jeremy Waldron's The Right To Private Property, according to Harry in comment 54.

Scholars and lawyers can whine on and on, but many many in the general public don't get it, they believe in the idea of property as natural, god given, or something like that, laments one commenter.  We should be talking about how to get the message out, that property is a social regulation implemented through laws by governments.  At least one commenter noted there would be better alternatives in many circumstances.

Jake comments that property as stuff you carry on you is very old.  Property as land only came about after the agricultural revolution, and then the State came into existence to defend it.

My take on feminism

Posted to this blog at Crooked Timber.

I would mandatorily self-describe as "feminist."  On my own terms, which includes an absolute right for a woman to choose abortion.  I would take it as until natural childbirth, but Roe v Wade is a fine compromise.  Strangely, I suspect a lot of the feminists with whom I disagree on other matters might disagree on this also.

I'm a fan of Ellen Willis, and her notion of pro sex feminism, as compared with very common in USA anti porn feminism.  An anti porn stance in the broadest sense (which many well known feminists subscribe to, and some of my friends) is that any female image that men find erotic should be banned--could be a completely clothed model lounging on her own website, no matter.  This is not unlike how Islam bans human images.  I argue that objectification is the essence of human though, not some evil process, and anti porn feminists are simply using a rhetorical curse to selectively roll back liberty where in the historic traditional sexual compromise women were given absolute power.  Masturbation, and sexual images that were lewd, were prohibited.  But there were a lot of things where women gave up power--involvement in politics, participation in many careers, and, arguably, they were prompted to submit to men.

My second, and further out objection to a lot of feminism is how it essentially rejections the old traditional marriage model for all people.  Call it serfdom, but I think something like a traditional marriage model fits many people better than total subjection to wage slavery.  Perhaps even a majority if done on an appropriate basis (I suggest a very liberal basis, which actually is open to either sex as 'breadwinner', and unconditioned and guaranteed support for the homemaker, but there are also endless traditional models, and conservatism is very common in my country).  This was the norm until the 1970's, and what has happened since?  Not entirely coincidentally, median wage growth plummeted compared with earlier periods.  Doubling the potential labor force was not at coincidental--it helped make it possible.

In my vision, there are fewer wage slaves, but nobody lives in poverty, there is more time to devote to things other than work, activism is more sustainable, there is lots more sex and  more fun.  The downside is a loss in investment products and possibly some loss in consumer products.

Many women it seems, including my best friend, are dedicated to work as sort of self-proof.  No matter how much suffering and/or how little reward it delivers, it is worth it, to be free and independent of any single man.  Instead, the capitalist boss become the new ultimate boss, and he demands endlessly increasingly sacrifices in today's neoliberal wage slavery, ultimately leading to the death of all other relationships, each person with only a job and an a video screen.

My mother was actually a pioneer in this movement, despite being a lifelong conservative who had been an early admirer of Ronald Reagan, later a fan of Limbaugh.  She took advantage of the availability of work during WWII, and ended up spending far more time living away from my father than with him.  My sister opined how much materially better off she might have lived as a housewife of the time, and how much more she might have ended up with when my father, a senior manager, died.  Not even counting the possibility he might have been more successful or lived longer to make wiser investments.  She had lousy jobs--some of which probably long-term poisoned her--but economic freedom.

I don't understand it myself.  A life married to someone far richer than myself, in which I could pursue art, politics, and technology on my own terms, and get a healthy stipend so I have no material concerns, sounds like paradise to me.  And I have a great and successful career doing stuff I love doing, so I'm actually fine right now, not slaving away under a totally unreasonable boss demanding more and more time as I hear so many women complaining about.

The neoliberal capitalist disorder has been fine to me directly.  I have no complaints about how much material is available to me, or how hard it is to get.  The number one concern of my life is how little time I am able to spend with my love partner, and how most of my life I couldn't find one.  I trace that limited amount of time exactly to the neoliberalism enabling aspect of feminism that essentially abolished anything like traditional marriage in the the segment of society (not the most elite) I inhabit.

I don't want to say this as a curse, and I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that until there is a great improvement (and in part, a restoration) of our social and sexual lives, there is little hope, I believe, in any sort of social revolution of the kind needed, which would be back toward and increasing social democracy.  We face a spiral into global collapse of all kinds which cannot be stopped.  I continue to live as much as I can as if this is not true, I join movements, including many feminist ones.  But I fear that sexual neoliberalism, which is a core part of feminism for many feminists, has destroyed the future.  If people have no time to spend together, the bonds that it needs for social cohesion are never formed.  I feel that many in the Crooked Timber crown are protected from the lower social reality which I face--the one that exists for liberals and leftists who self identify as feminist, but aren't university professors or rock stars or hedge fund managers.

But this reality isn't necessarily so for many extreme religious conservatives.   Even the less than elite have with traditional models of marriage and sexual roles.  Not surprisingly, their influence on geopolitics has been increasing--in particular since the 1970's.