Income redistribution: Where should we start ?

I’m enjoying your process.

Moving the starting point up from zero can change many of the definitions and political considerations. An unconditional, universal dividend has a real claim at being distribution and not redistribution. Each of your examples (increased property rights, lower taxes, freer college, minimum wage) become to some extent narrow interests against which political opposition can be organized around envy. All can be argued for from a societal point of view but each leaves the majority asking “where’s my issue.”

The equal dividend can be combined with a flat tax and the result is a continuously graduated net effect. The average person is a net zero.

It also challenges the notion that the only access to money must be through “employment”.

The starting point is now poverty. This is what gives the employer the power advantage in wage negotiations.

The “opportunity cost” of leaving the majority of the world in poverty dwarfs all other “opportunity costs.” Our value to each other in the network known as the economy is yuge, to borrow from Mr. Trump. It is an inverse form of insurance.

You write:

To finance increased expenditure on some goal or to reduce the taxes paid by one group, the government must find offsetting cuts in expenditure or increased taxes elsewhere, or else accept a larger deficit, incurring a debt that will have to be serviced in the future. The least unattractive of these options, as evidenced by the choices of policymakers, will constitute the opportunity cost of providing the benefit.

I’m not sure that this level of generality regarding “debt that will have to be serviced” is warranted. I think there are plenty of examples of public expenditures that have a calculable, clearly positive NPV, which are nevertheless rejected by many strains of conservative thought.

I’m thinking here of energy generation (dams) and use reduction (insulation/conservation) initiatives, public health measures that reduce long-term expenditures and improve earnings (numerous early childhood health & nutrition programs have shown ROIs far above market rates: see http://www.impact.upenn.edu/early-childhood-toolkit/why-invest/what-is-the-return-on-investment/), and probably even newer, less causally proven programs to increase broadband availability and therefore business growth.

I guess I’m referring to the general philosophical thread (like self-proclaimed libertarian Penn Jillette who wrote of Bernie Sanders on CNN: “He thinks central planning can solve problems and I think even if central planning could solve problems, I’m against it.” http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/11/opinions/jillette-presidential-candidate-videos/index.html

I don’t see you accounting for this financial all-upside sufficiently in the cited paragraph; “larger debt” seems to be burying the lede.

@John “In any society, people have views about what property rights are legitimate and, in particular, what they themselves are entitled to. These views may or may not match the property rights that actually prevail in that society.”

Do you intend “actually prevail” in a legal or a sociological sense?

Other constraints on how owners of freehold title can use their land are regulations pertaining to the sale and rental of land and buildings, taxes and other duties on land and the sale thereof, the compulsory acquisition of land and buildings by the government, etc.

“Going even further back, property rights in land and in ordinary goods (chattels, in legal parlance) are mostly taken for granted, even though they are all derived, in the final analysis, from a socially-created legal framework.”

I think you would be better using the words “culturally constructed” here in place of “socially constructed” this is due to it fitting the classical idiom and anthropological idiom where culture versus nature as I think this is part of the legal and political discourse about natural law and natural rights.

I think the idea that all property rights are derived from a culturally created legal framework is disputable.

Firstly, this is because theoretically if you assert this position you will be obliged to accept some sort of theoretical orientation to social constructivism and ultimately relativism — which I think is going to be at odds with the normative prescriptions I expect you will advance in your book.

Secondly, historically if we go back that far into the Roman times which I understand to be when the basis of contemporary European and therefore colonial legal property regimes were developed — these being re-adopted in the Middle Ages after Roman laws fell into relative disuse in the Dark Ages — we see that there is quite a distinction between the idea of laws chosen by people and laws chosen in accordance to what is just — the idea of Justice was both abstract and a deity personified, which we still see in the decorations on our court buildings and the government logos etc. From my reading I have formed the opinion Roman law was a very orderly and categorical sort of thing and they had many categories for all different sorts of forms of ownership and possession and use of land and things.

Thirdly, you might want to discuss the natural law conception of property. This goes to conceptions of natural law in Rome — these being laws that were not culturally of one type of people — but were seen as widespread in all types of people. I believe this idea was taken by European natural law theorists — but of course with ethnographic evidence and the evidence given by indigenous peoples themselves we can see that what these natural law proponents proposed as being natural laws of property were not in fact common to all types of people at all like they ought to have been to be called “natural law” — and they just used this as a rhetorical device to steal other peoples’ land like in your example in previous excerpts of John Locke and the colonisation of North America.

We see with the Mabo decision that Indigenous people in Australia have legal rights of use in the lands they occupied — while on the one hand you could argue that the Mabo development was due to social change in Australia and not to do with what is right and just — I think you would be better off maintaining a consistent approach that laws relating to property should be in accordance with what is right and just.

Is there something missing from this (maybe a cut and paste problem?):

“”An example can be seen in the mass privatisations that followed the end of Communism in Russia and other countries in the former Soviet bloc., These processes greatly enriched a handful of oligarchs and greatly impoverished everyone else, leading to the loss of the little .””

I am curious about how the commons fit into this. Are all propertarians opposed to the
idea of the commons? There are some who seem to think that all property should be “private.” They certainly oppose any idea that “created wealth” should be considered part of the commons. We see this playing out most strongly in intellectual rights arguments and and discussions of taxing wealth.
I certainly don’t follow these discussions all that closely. What is the propertarian view of
how freehold land, etc. was transferred from the commons to private ownership? I do know they get offended when one claims it was stolen.

“, These processes greatly enriched a handful of oligarchs and greatly impoverished everyone else, leading to the loss of the little .”

Sentence fragment, needs a noun/noun phrase after the adjective “little.”

In discussing capitalist restoration, no matter how blatant the evidence for an overall decrease in human welfare, it is unacceptable to acknowledge this. Not even a sentence or two is useful to the goals of mainstream economics.

It is not clear how property rights connect to income redistribution. In your list of examples only B directly addresses property rights, which seems odd.

I think the argument you mean to confront is more or less the claims the state cannot violate the property rights of private persons without just cause and the only just cause is defense of property, along with the tacit assumption that private markets are just and economically optimal. I don’t see how you can argue against this effectively if you share the tacit assumption, which I expect you do or otherwise you’d be a socialist?

And, of course, in America, all too many don’t get that if someone is rich, a lot of someones must be poor. The rich person gains their wealth through making many, many others poor, through the suppression of their wages, primarily, through squeezing them of as much unpaid labor as they possibly can, which is where they derive that wealth. Americans tend to think, strangely enough, that money multiplies itself, rather than its actual state of exchange. They don’t get that if person X adds more money, a whole lot of others must give it to them, thereby, obviously losing it.

And this is the case with property too. Every case of private property is also a case of exclusion. It can never be both/and. It is always, either/or. Either I own this or you do. We both can’t own this land, this house, and so on at the same time. As is the case with money. It can’t exist in the same wallet at the same time, though pretty much every propertarian or conservative completely misses this fact.

So what to do? Make the economy distribute and allocate compensation and wealth in as equal and equitable a manner as possible up front, so there is no need for the government to come in later and tweak this maldistribution a bit. As in, instead of having someone sit out in the sun for 12 hours, and tending to their lobster red skin later . . . . prevent the 12 hour burn session in the first place.

This seems like an excessively ahistorical view of property. To take a strong but common example, imagine a dictator invades a country and takes a lot of houses from wealthy members of an ethnic minority and distributes them to poor members of his minority. To make this simpler but still realistic, imagine those houses were on land that had been owned by those families for generations without alternative claimants, and that the houses had been built by the owners with wood felled from their own land.

Now suppose the dictator is defeated in battle three years later, and the new government proposes to redistribute the houses to their original owners. It’s strongly against our intuitions to say, “well, these homes are owned by these people now. They are poor, the former owners were rich, so this redistribution is not a good idea.”

We all believe that the historical chain of ownership matters – not to obviate the moral claims of property owners but instead to validate them.

A comment on language choice. Again, I think this applies especially to America, but may be widespread in other nations as well.

The term “income redistribution” is already problematic for many. Think of Joe the Plumber, in his initial encounter with Obama during his first campaign. For far too many Americans, the term implies theft of some sort. Usually, “theft from me, from my hard work, for those who don’t deserve it!!” And for these same people, it implies government theft. Only government theft.

In reality, the first sin of “redistribution” is always committed by the employer, against the employee. The employer “redistributes” a fraction of the wealth generated by the employee — back to them — after appropriating 100% of their production, their surplus value. He or she collects that revenue and then redistributes a pittance of that value back to the people who are responsible for creating it. No government “tax” can possibly come close to the massive deduction from a worker’s wages, up front, by the employer. In some industries, the worker produces enough for his or her day’s wages in their first hour, and from that time on is literally working for free.

When government comes along later and does something to offset this initial theft, this initial “redistribution,” it shouldn’t be called “income redistribution.” That already happened when the employer stole the collective production of the workforce and returned a small fraction of it back to them. And “income re-redistribution” is kinda clumsy. I’m not sure what the proper language should be for after-the-fact balancing should be, but I think “income redistribution” is far too loaded a term.

“Justice” seems far closer to the mark. But, again, I’d prefer that we didn’t allow the original sin in the first place.

Going back to basics: one assumption here is that redistribution is always from undeserving rich to deserving poor.

In the real world of occasional kleptocracies, it is sometimes from poor to rich. (I realise that Plume will insist that any employment of anybody, by by anybody, is a form of kleptocracy, but there you are.)

Outside kleptocracies, we should perhaps ask: how far does redistribution benefit the undeserving poor? If there are none such, how is that to be shown? How far does redistribution transfer resources from the not-particularly-undeserving not-rich-not poor to the poor?

Plume @17

Every case of private property is also a case of exclusion. It can never be both/and. It is always, either/or. Either I own this or you do. We both can’t own this land, this house, and so on at the same time. As is the case with money. It can’t exist in the same wallet at the same time, though pretty much every propertarian or conservative completely misses this fact.

One difference, though, is that there is a roughly fixed amount of privately-owned land in a country, but there is not a fixed amount of money over time. Government controls the money supply and it can print more (or ‘create’ more electronically, amounting to the same thing) within certain limits imposed by the need to avoid excessive inflation (not a a big problem right now in most developed economies, at least not in the U.S.). I know you want to get to certain political conclusions, but treating money as a permanently fixed quantity, such that every five-dollar bill in my wallet is a five-dollar bill not in your wallet, is somewhat misleading, istm. It’s true that at any given moment there is a certain fixed amount of cash in circulation, but that amount changes whenever the govt decides to adjust the money supply. (‘Quantitative easing’, when the Fed bought tons of US Treasury bonds etc. every month, had a similar effect, though I don’t pretend to understand it at any granular level of detail.)

Stephen @23
one assumption here is that redistribution is always from undeserving rich to deserving poor

I think the assumption is rather that the whole notion of ‘deservingness’ is an archaic idea that is basically invalid; to bring it back is to resurrect wrong and discredited ideas about poverty.

I was reminded in reading something a couple of months ago that under the 1834 New Poor Law, which controlled provision for the poor in Britain for almost a century, govt. cash support to poor women with children was ruled out b.c it was thought to be ‘demoralizing’ or ‘pauperizing’ (whatever that meant exactly). If a male wage-earner died leaving a widow unable to support her children, the family was usu. split up and the children were removed from her custody to an orphanage school (even though they weren’t orphaned). Behind this policy was the notion that poverty is an individual failing, that if someone is poor it’s b.c. of his/her character flaws, that anyone who works hard can ‘succeed’ regardless of social and economic circumstances etc. and that govt therefore shd not provide even minimal support. The rhetoric of ‘deservingness’ is linked to this worldview.

LFC @25,

I don’t mean to suggest that money is “finite” in the sense that supply is never increased. Obviously it does increase, per the government’s decree. But given the level of concentration of money, additional dollars seldom flow toward the bottom 99% – 90%, and in recent times, never below that level. When the richest 1% pushes past the 50% mark of total wealth control, as it will next year, holding more wealth than the bottom 99% combined, it’s not really much of a consolation to talk in terms of overall increased money supply.

But more importantly: On the level of wages, it is finite. It is zero sum. Because individual businesses don’t increase their payroll allocations simply because the government sends more money into the river of the economy. On the individual business level, where the vast majority of us receive our paychecks, an addition for executives and shareholders means a corresponding subtraction for the rank and file — if not in the immediate sense, then a loss of a potential raise. It has to work that way, unless that company borrows the money from somewhere else, in which case that, too, is lost to a different business/workforce. You can’t go beyond 100% of something at that level, at the business or corporate level.

Again, the government can arbitrarily (or desperately) increase the money flow, but that doesn’t change any individual payroll accounts. For individual Americans, it’s meaningless if the government mainlines 16 trillion dollars into the economy. That actually happened in 2009-2010, and rank and file wages didn’t go up at all.

Question, JQ:

Do you ever look at the “redistribution” that follows any top down process? Isn’t it logical to assume that pretty much all top down money flow goes right back up again, so that government re-redistribution to the poor and the working class pretty much always ends up back at the top?

I don’t see many economists discuss this, but it seems pretty obvious to me. Where do the poor and the working poor spend their money? Even in the form of food stamps and so on? If they’re buying food at Walmart, for example, that becomes government subsidies for a family which currently holds more wealth than the bottom 40% of the nation combined.

I’d be interested in reading your take on that, one where the money winds up, who benefits, etc. etc.

Plume,
I agree w the pt at @32.

I build a chair with my own two hands. I sweat over the work. I pour my time, my skills, my efforts into building the best chair I can, and then I sell that chair directly to others. I’m paid for my efforts — my direct efforts. This is good and just. If a person does this and becomes “wealthy” in the process, given our current system, given our current way of doing things, this is about as close to “deserving” as we can get in the modern world.

However, if a person pays others to do that work, the same work they’d do if they built their own chairs, on their own, and that person becomes wealthy on their labor, not his or hers, then, no. It’s never, ever going to be “deserving.” Because it means they must pay each individual worker far, far less than they pay themselves for not building any chairs at all — or far less than they’d take if they did this on their own. They pay themselves from the revenues generated by their workforce, which they’ve stolen as if they had done the work themselves. They don’t “deserve” to get rich off the sweat and tears of others. They don’t deserve to get rich by generating as much unpaid labor as they can to accrue that wealth.

The first case is not “capitalism.” The second is. No capitalist can possibly be “deserving” of their wealth. They didn’t make it happen on their own. They made it happen by collecting the labor value of their workforce and arbitrarily, selfishly, wrongfully, appropriating it and keeping the lion’s share for themselves. And governments all around the globe support this, buttress this, protect this and make the capitalist even richer by externalizing most of his or her business costs, making tax payers pay for that. So the capitalist not only is undeserving of the wealth they strip from their workforce; they are undeserving of the wealth they strip from taxpayers. Throw in all the inherited wealth, directly, indirectly, the white, male, Christian privilege, the blood money from empire, conquest, slavery and so on . . . . and “deserving” is about the last word that should apply here.

JQ @36,

Well said. Not to spin things out even further, but “equality of opportunity” is yet another loaded, endlessly misapplied term. It’s usually used as a counter to “equality of income,” and often by liberals who don’t want to be accused of being too far to the left.

. . . But also by conservatives who actually believe that a system drowning in inequality already provides this, that America always has. It’s just the “undeserving” poor who are too lazy to take advantage of all this supposed incredible opportunity.

As in, “We’re for equal opportunity, not equal results.” Uh, not really. Deep, persistent structural inequality of access blocks this, and that’s pretty obvious. Massive divergence in the quality of education, health care, nutrition, cultural venues, fitness, transport, networking, contacts, not to mention cash, etc. etc. . . . . render that “equality” impossible to achieve. And all too often it seems to be a matter of faith that it’s an already existing reality.

So, to me, equality of access is the most important change we need to make. And because America has such monstrous gaps in wealth and income, the only way to even up access (even a little) is to remove the barrier of price. The only way to open the essentials up to everyone is to remove the cost, make these things free, let everyone through the door without needing to open up their tattered wallet.

We can’t provide equality of opportunity, given existing class differences. But we can provide equality of access to key essentials . . . . thus leveling the playing field significantly. And we then get to say, so as to prevent the usual red-scare/hysteria . . . . We’re not talking equal results. We’re talking equal access.

@40,

I fully realize that a sole proprietor, craftsman, artisan, etc. is also a link in a long chain, surrounding by a host of others who contribute as well — as well as a society, spatially, through time, etc.. However, he or she has no employees to set wages for. He or she can only set their own valuation. He or she can’t control the previous links in that long chain, but they can control their own valuation of their own time — at least in a relative sense.

An employer, on the other hand, sets wages and time valuations for others, and gains directly from keeping them as low as possible. He or she makes more money by paying them less than they’re worth. He or she can’t make their fortune if they pay them as much as they’ve contributed to the company. It’s mathematically impossible.

That same dynamic does not exist with the maker of the chair.

And why do you think it’s a bad argument to say a worker deserves to be paid for their own work? Value for value? How is that a bad argument? I think it’s self-evidently the case that they do. If they are in a collective setting, and various other costs are included (overhead, in general), then this assumes the owner subtracts those costs and then pays the worker for their labor. Subtracts what the owner actually invests, but not a recurring rent that goes beyond that investment.

It’s not a bad argument at all. It simply counters the fiction we’ve all grown up with. That someone can actually own another human being, their work, dictate how much their time is worth, and that the worker must sell their labor at a major discount . . . in order to have a job under the capitalist mode of production. I’m saying the worker should never have to sell at a discount, ever, and that ownership should never be compensated through the accumulation of those discounts.

Can you demonstrate why this is a “bad argument,” rather than merely asserting that it is?

“If I hold a piece of land or capital or some other item of value, and can use it as I please, without anyone being able to stop me, than I would say that my property right over that item actually prevails, over any claim that others might make.”

There are very few such items. Almost all socially-significant property is a bundle of rights and obligations, reinforced, weakened or negated by constant reiteration and negotiation, mediated by various institutional processes. Which is a restatement of your point, but directing attention to the ongoing politics behind all property.

Given the way it was deployed historically, the distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor is so drenched in hypocrisy, unctuousness, bad faith, pompous moralizing, and blame-the-victim sermonizing that to try to consider it as some kind of neutral, analytic sort of distributive criterion is hopeless. The phrases “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor” are too wrapped in retrograde historical associations, summoning up as they do a whole library of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books full of social-Darwinist, laissez-faire crap, to be rehabilitated. Even if some kind of case cd made for their rehabilitation, and I don’t think it can.

No one deserves to be deprived of minimally decent conditions of existence, as those conditions are defined by reasonable and in some cases evolving societal standards. When the UN this week adopted the new set of goals on poverty (the Millennium Development Goals having ‘expired’), the member states didn’t say they were going to work to eliminate the extreme poverty only of the “deserving” poor. If a rep of a UN member state had proposed such a criterion, he or she wd have been laughed out of the hall.

@46
any other concept has to deal with the free rider problem.

The free rider problem as usu. defined involves X benefiting from a good or service, typically one available to all or to a large group, that he or she does not contribute to paying the cost of. It really has no application here. In U.S. politics, some conservatives sometimes stigmatized welfare recipients as “freeloaders”; that particular phrase is not heard much any more, I think, though the sentiment is still expressed in other ways. But in this context, as long as one is filing a tax return one isn’t a free rider; if one’s income is low enough that one doesn’t owe taxes (or, in the U.S., low enough that one qualifies for the earned-income tax credit), there’s also no free riding.

Sebastian H @ 34

But they do not actually produce much of anything all by themselves. They rely on the labor and services of many other people who actually contribute at least as much and often far more than the capitalist. As such, they have an equal claim to the rewards.

Chris Bertram,

We had the 1992 Mabo High Court case here in Australia about that. Eddie Mabo was a Torres Strait Islander who fought for land rights for many years. The High Court found that indigenous people had Native Title rights to the land they had occupied, if they could demonstrate an enduring connection to that land in court.

It is quite an interesting case I think, even for people in other countries. This is a basic summary, but other people might know more. It is quite relevant for John Quiggin’s book when it discusses territory and property and so on.

The ideas of people like Hobbes and Locke about indigenous people living int he state of nature held sway during the invasion/settlement of Australia by the UK.

Of course as philosophy does not govern what is allowed, the legal doctrine to allow the settlement was called Terra Nullius — land that belongs to no one. This legal doctrine is what allowed the British Empire to legally settle Australia . England did not come up with the legal doctrine of Terra Nullius itself, it was one of the laws it took from Roman jurisprudence.

By the time of the Mabo case there was a great amount of evidence that contra to this declaration of Terra Nullius the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands did have cultures of their own rather than living in the state of nature, and also evidence about their relationship to land which was divided into areas occupied by different language groups.

So the High Court found that the doctrine of Terra Nullius was wrongly applied in the settlement of Australia.

Subsequently the Parliament passed the Native Title Act to regulate claims to land.

Native title gives “the right to live on the land; access the area for traditional purposes; visit and protect important places and sites; hunt, fish or gather traditional food or resources on the land; or teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander laws and customs on the land. In some cases, native title can include the right to own and occupy an area of land or water to the exclusion of all others.”

This is not without its problems. In Victoria we had the case of the Yorta Yorta people who were denied Native Title since the court found they could not demonstrate an enduring connection to the land. This was very unfair of the court considering the colonial government rounded indigenous people up and sent them to live in protectorates and later tried to force indigenous people to assimilate and stole children if they spoke in their mother tongue and so on.

So, as you can see Chris Bertram, even from my brief summary, it is inaccurate to say that “the government decides what property is” because if it was left to the government the Mabo case would not have succeeded.

This is the benefit of us inheriting so many laws from England which borrowed some from Rome — our governments have a whole lot of laws they have to abide by too and if people go to the bother they can take the government to court when they fail to abide by the laws.

In Australia the High Court oversees the government, thanks the foresight of the founding fathers of our federation — whereas I think that your Parliament in the UK does not have oversight by a high court — being that I understand your high court is part of the Parliament itself and the Blair government also sneakily abolished the high office of the Lord Chancellor and the Queen never dismisses a government for you either, leaving you with a Prime Minister who is like an absolute monarch except for having to be elected and also the EU which you are fortunate to be in to stop your Prime Minister since nothing else can.

Layman @52,

As mentioned before, I see “the markets” as a totally arbitrary construct, that, over time, seem to operate according to a real set of rules. They actually don’t. It’s really all a fiction. Or, as Marianne Moore said, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

But within this fiction, something very real does happen. A very tiny percentage of the population sets those fictional rules that everyone else has to live by. They decide how much our times is valued. They decide whether or not we have jobs. They decide for us to ship them overseas, etc. etc. Again, I find this immoral and it’s resulted in what anyone could have predicted at the outset:

The benefits of this fiction accrue to that tiny percentage.

Logically, a better fiction, a better social construction, is to bring in the entire population to set those fictional rules. All of us, together. Let our imaginary gardens with real toads in them be built by 100% of the population, rather than 1% or less than 1%.

In short, we, as an actual democracy, including the economy for the first time in history, would set prices and wages together — for everyone’s benefit.

I know this isn’t a popular idea, even among “liberals,” but I think the economy should function for no other reason than to make sure everyone has what they need, at least. For starters. I don’t think its raison d’etre should be what it is now: the vehicle used to obtain great personal wealth, no matter the costs to others or the earth. IMO, this is a fiction we’ve grown used to, and all too many assume it’s some “naturally” derived and logical process. It’s not. It’s absolutely arbitrary, fictional and can be replaced.

Btw, just finished the intro to what already seems a great and important book: Steve Fraser’s The Age of Acquiescence. I wish CT would try to organize a book forum on it . . . . He makes the point in the intro that even in America we used to fight against this tide. We don’t anymore, with rare exceptions.

Plume @ 53 “In short, we, as an actual democracy, including the economy for the first time in history, would set prices and wages together…”

This not an entirely clear answer, but I take to mean our chairmaker doesn’t determine the value of his own labor; that value is instead determined by the majority in some fashion. This being the case, because chairs are not in constant demand, there will be times when the maker can’t sell any chairs at all at the standard price. Now what? Can the chairmaker opt to sell chairs below the established price – so that there will at least be some compensation for his labor?

Alternatively, if the demand for chairs exceeds his capacity to make them, what happens? Can he recruit more chairmakers? Teach them to make chairs? Loan them the use of his tools and workshop? Or, more to the point, charge a fee for these services?

“To me, I honestly can’t see why we even have to have this debate.”

If you’ll forgive me the honesty, it’s because you don’t bother to describe your solutions very clearly.

Originally, you wrote:

“I build a chair with my own two hands. I sweat over the work. I pour my time, my skills, my efforts into building the best chair I can, and then I sell that chair directly to others. I’m paid for my efforts — my direct efforts.”

And speaking of such chairmakers, you said:

“He or she can only set their own valuation. He or she can’t control the previous links in that long chain, but they can control their own valuation of their own time — at least in a relative sense.”

I think you can understand why I took this to mean that the chairmaker is the one who sets the price for her or his labor.

Then you wrote:

“I’m saying the worker should never have to sell at a discount, ever, and that ownership should never be compensated through the accumulation of those discounts.”

…which let me to ask questions about the obvious circumstances where the chairmaker might choose to cut his price, and make the obvious point that the discount is still being ‘taken’ by someone else, in this case the consumer.

But it turns out now that what you really mean is the worker doesn’t set the price of his or her labor at all. That price is set by the community, which is essentially taking the place of the capitalist. If the chairmaker and the community disagree on the value of chair making, the community can set a price which amounts to a discount in the chairmaker’s view – after all, they all need chairs, and chairs can be expensive! – and the only thing the chairmaker can do is sell at at that discounted price, or refuse to make chairs. Now you’re back to the original problem. How is your world improved if the chairmaker’s labor is exploited by the community rather than by the capitalist?

John Quiggin,

Provisions for the welfare of the public are not necessarily either entitlements and probably not “property” in law I think. This is as I suspect the duty of making provisions for the welfare of the public is a trust held by the government rather than a property of the public.

You might say this is much of a muchness, but it isn’t.

This is as property can be sold or given up etc – trusts cannot. Also because the Trust comes from the Medieval “Use” – I had never heard of the Use until I saw Chief Justice French talk on the topic earlier this year. Anyway, the pertinent bit is that when you have a Use the feoffer has a duty to the feofee but the feofee has no such duty to the feoffer. So this is why the government is obligated to provide for the welfare of the public whether they are “deserving” or not, since the public is the feoffee and the government is the feoffer.

Or maybe I got the feoffer and feoffee around the wrong way. The feofee is like the trustee who has the duty to the feoffer who is the beneficiary of the trust. So the government is the feoffee or trustee and the public is the feoffer or beneficiary.

“Communism is a world without money, without value, without the state, without social classes, without domination and without hierarchy”

Without humans too, apparently…

Layman,

Yes, I fully admit I may often fall short of clear responses. But, to be honest, I really don’t think you’re interested at all in a real discussion about this. If you were, you’d be able to find at least a little to praise, a little to support, or offer some of your own ideas to fix what you see as problematic. Instead, you’ve worked overtime to tear it all down, and, as with the last time, I can’t help but get the sense that you’re skimming over a few words of my posts, instead of reading them with any care.

Not that you have to. Not that this is required. It’s your right to skip over all of it, ignore all of it. But I think if you’re going to take the time to respond, you really should respond to what I’ve actually said, instead of what you’ve projected onto that space, etc. etc.

Again, it’s probably best if we don’t continue.

People who provide a lot of something good for a lot of people really do deserve to be wealthy to some degree.

Why? This is a totally serious question: why do they deserve to be wealthy?

Again, it’s probably best if we don’t continue.

I know that I, at least, would be very glad if every thread even remotely related to economics didn’t devolve into an extended discussion of Plumism, or Pluminomics, or whatever it is we keep getting long dissertations on. There are lots of good topics here to be discussed, but I don’t see this as one of them. I’m almost certain that I’m not alone. I believe that it’s still free to start a blog, and perhaps starting a new one devoted just to Plumism would be a good choice for those interested in the subject.

What about beneficiaries of the redistribution who had made great improvements … bought … in good faith?

Is there a country where this isn’t the case? There are very few actual “first people” still around who have any real control over their government, let alone to the point where it could be argued that they are “the original owners”. I explicitly include Africa and Europe in that statement, in case there’s doubt. Possibly some of the Pacific Islands would qualify.

Land is also bound with a lot more restrictions than most people care to think about. The libertarian fantasy falls apart even in the USA when too many “sovereign landowners” fail to accept theft by the government to pay for roads and bridges, to give one example. If enforced, that leads inevitably to forfeiture to the government when the bills aren’t paid, as is happening in Chicago (one example!).

My experience of most communities is that even “freehold” property has community restrictions on it, and one quick way to become alienated from the surrounding community is to do things that are lawful but not socially accepted (exerting your legal right to close community access tracks, for example). Even in the disconnected rich there are social ties, and even without those few people can actually look someone in the eye and let them starve to death – that’s the reality underlying the “burn a fifty pound note in front of a homeless person” ritual David Cameron has recently brought to our attention. What that’s supposed to help enable, of course, is habitually doing the same thing indirectly. As one of the current memes says “Starve a thousand people to death and do they call me Dave the Murderer?”

Again, real property comes with a social context. Anything of value will have that socially rather than financially – any mug can spend money (and many do). So the joke about “two new handles and a new head but it’s my grandfather’s axe” is about the social value of the object. It’s why so few people care that you can buy an asteroid or a PhD… the social value of those things is low and sometimes negative. That’s why some people buy stupid houses in England, so they can be “So’n’so of Brambly Brook Manor” and get the social respect that comes with owning it… and why those things have financial value even though they’re usually worse money pits than a yacht.

> You can always just ignore him.

Suppose I get about a kilogram of well-washed quartz river gravel, ten to fifteen mm, and dumped it into the salad bar, mixing well.

I mean. It’s quartz. It’s inert and non-toxic, and it’s of a size that’s easy to spot and remove. And there’s not going to be much waste, because salad vegetables don’t tend to stick very strongly to quartz gravel, after all: maybe some of the dressing, but that’s good for you anyway to have less. So there’s no technical problem with eating around it, is there? And thus no reason to object to my venture, if there’s no harm done.

Sebastian H.
Yes, but there is more (and maybe some that needs to be emphasized more). It is not just about backward looking “rights”, but forward looking “opportunities” (in the positive sense). There is a sense in which a particular arrangement of rights may impede future positive developments. That giving up some of those rights may be of universal benefit.

John Quiggin @79,

That’s fine, and I’ll adhere to that and go a few steps further. Will be taking a long, long break from CT, perhaps to the trailing sound of applause:

;>)

But please consider the following: When I make a comment, and it’s met with a lot of direct questions for more info, it’s not just me taking things in another direction. There are others involved, and you’re not limiting them. And when I respond to those questions and comments, correcting the frequent misreadings, arguing against the silly hyperbole, as exemplified by Sebastian H at 78, it’s not just me “derailing” the thread. And you’re not limiting folks like Sebastian.

Or, when someone like Matt @73 chimes in, after I’ve already asked another poster to consider the subject closed, he reopens the topic, and you don’t limit him.

In short, when posters complain about other posters “derailing” the conservation, they derail the conversation. And when they complain about a topic being discussed too often, they’re extending that topic — and they’re doing that without me.

It’s not just the old “it takes two to tango,” JQ. The school marms and hall monitors here extend and multiply the effects of the very comments they claim to find so tiresome. And they’re doing so, I strongly suspect, for no other reason than to feel superior. At least in this case, they’re operating under serious delusions.

Take care, all. Enjoy your fall, winter and beyond.

I think I’ve said before, I’m not bothered by off-topic comments or digressions. They’re sometimes interesting, and when they’re not, they’re easy enough to skip. Comments complaining about off-topic comments, on the other hand, are never interesting.

So I’ll save my apology for Plume: Sorry to see you go.

Sebastian H –

While there is certainly a degree to which there is an innate sense of “mine”, which is found in chimpanzees and bonobos, but there is no innate “right to mine” and among apes you have no rights that you cannot forcibly defend. Among humans, this right (and all other rights) is always culturally defined and highly variable.

Comments complaining about off-topic comments, on the other hand, are never interesting.

This too, of course, is a complaint about off-topic comments……..

Val,

As Plume has said on numerous occasions, it’s not a question of whether people agree or disagree with you. It’s fine to disagree on logical or empirical grounds. What is hard to deal with is the lack of open-mindedness by some CT commenters, the tendency to react to ideas that they don’t understand with ridicule./i>

This really begs the question. Much of my criticism of Plumism is based on logical grounds, because, to me, at least, it makes no sense whatsoever. To argue that this shows no “open-mindedness” is silly. In the past – not this time- I read Plume’s comments carefully before responding. That’s open-mindedness. Concluding that his theories are nonsense is logic, not close-mindedness.

js @ 92 –

The larger issue, which gets hidden in this construction, is exactly how much has any individual actually contributed to something? One can certainly justify a lone craftsman who sources his materials and markets his products making a prosperous living, though such a person is highly unlikely to become wealthy. By contrast, the usual cases put forth to support the claim (Bill, Gates, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, etc.), have relied heavily on the work of others, without whom they could not have produced anything. Do not all these others deserve a substantial, if not equal, share in the rewards from their joint endeavor?

“That seems to me somewhat similar to what happens to Plume often, and specifically somewhat similar to the conversation between Plume and Layman above. ”

I’m open to the idea that I don’t understand Plume. I’m less open to the idea that the problem is entirely the result of my supposedly closed mind. There’s a material difference between the worker establishing the value of his or her labor, and society democratically establishing the value of the worker’s labor; and that difference is not a figment of my hidebound imagination. The one is not the same as the other.

I hope I’m also polite. I endeavor to be.

“I’m fine with someone getting more compensation if what they do is something that society can less afford to have them stop doing”

“But I was wondering about Sebastian H’s claim that people who make positive contributions to society (or above some threshold or whatever) *deserve* wealth.”

The quote which triggered the query was “People who provide a lot of something good for a lot of people really do deserve to be wealthy to some degree. The problem is that ‘to some degree’ isn’t the same as ‘ to any degree they can get away with’, and that the number of wealthy who really are deservedly wealthy in that sense is very low compared to those who aren’t.”

You might be putting more moral weight on ‘deserve’ than I intended. Wealth has a few positive functions and some negative effects, and any good discussion of redistribution should be about helping the positive functions and decreasing the negative effects.

The concept of ‘mine’ may come from things or wealth created in laudable endeavours (like creating more food than you and your family need, creating things that bring enjoyment to people, making people’s lives better, or being paid to do things that bring enjoyment to people) or from things that aren’t laudable (like killing someone to get their stuff). To the extent that they are doing the former, I would tend to think of them as ‘deserving’ at least some of the income/wealth earned from that.

Buying a piece of property which later happens to gain value because it is in a more desirable location than when you bought it may get you wealth or income (and it may be a bad idea to try to mess with the price signal to interfere with that for other reasons), but I wouldn’t think that you ‘deserve’ it *AS MUCH* as someone who was providing happiness for people.

Now from a political perspective I can also see all sorts of dangers in trying too hard to divide things into deserving and undeserving categories (just because someone is your political enemy doesn’t mean they are undeserving in the sense I’m talking about for instance). But that means we should be careful, not that we already found the perfect balance.

JQ @99
Some of your Jacobin piece on Locke, which I just read, was familiar from your posts here, but it’s nice to see the whole argument laid out as it is there. The one sentence that bothered me was your statement that Locke was not read much in England. Maybe that’s true for the Locke works you’re discussing, but ch.1 of H. May’s The Enlightenment in America (1976) makes it sound as if Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding was pretty widely read in England. Might be worth looking into and/or clarifying this point if this material is going to appear in your ‘Economics in Two Lessons’ book (or in another book…)

to the satisfaction of the authority”, and that’s the entire rule: working out how to satisfy the authority is your problem.

I disagree with this approach when it is applied to solutions that don’t have a concrete test. Even in engineering “the authority has to like it” is a huge source of cost and delay for even simple engineering, let alone completely subjective things like “the Heritage Trust has to agree that this building fits the historic feel of the neighbourhood”.

But when it comes to “company is paying their workers fairly” is so subjective and such a site of active disagreement that anyone using that scheme is doomed to failure. The only way to pass the test is to stack the judging panel.

In Australia we have tax questions that work along these lines, with the tax office issuing both non-binding opinions and legally enforceable opinions (and judgements). You can subject your scam to them and ask for an opinion, but for the most part that’s only done by people trying to push the envelope. My instinct is that people like that should have to put up a bond that’s forfeit if their scam is not approved of. The existing penalties for having your scam discovered in operation should be unchanged or increased.

wasn’t that the purpose of the Hawke government’s “The Accord” policy?

Yes, but even at the time some people were vigorously unhappy. People on both sides. So describing it as an agreement is to stack the judges. In many ways it was an agreement made between someone formerly representing workers (Hawke) and someone nominally representing capital (Keating), both within one government. I wasn’t there and don’t know a lot about it, so I’m not well placed to dissect it.

Using an elected government as the final arbiter of this stuff is in theory the least awful way, but in practice it degenerates to what we see today in the US (“anything Obama supports we oppose”), Australia (“anything Rudd or Gillard did, we will undo”) and even more democratic countries like Sweden (massive reductions in unemployment benefits, sick pay and pensions to pay for tax reductions, that were implemented by an unstable coalition between right wing parties and far right wing parties).

One issue back then and even more so now, is that labour is restricted in the ways they can mobilise, while capital is much less restricted. At the extreme there is no equivalent to the various government investigations into union “misbehaviour” (variously defined), let alone restrictions on collective behaviour (the way there is for pricing, say).

For references on the so-called “Glorious Revolution” and the Enclosure Movement

“Enclosure continued to be a major source of conflict in Early Modern England, whether for sheep or for increasingly profitable arable farming. Enclosure riots punctuated the 16th and 17th Centuries, and enclosure surfaced as a major grievance in the English Civil War. In its earlier stages the practice was to some extent resisted by the monarchical state, if only because of the threat to public order. But once the landed classes had succeeded in shaping the state to their own changing requirements — a success more or less finally consolidated in 1688 with the so-called “Glorious Revolution” — there was no further state interference, and a new kind of enclosure movement emerged in the 18th century — the so-called “Parliamentary Enclosures”. In this kind of enclosure, the extinction of troublesome property rights that interfered with some landlord’s powers of accumulation took place by Acts of Parliament.”
[then there are a number of paragraphs on John Locke’s work immediately following this]

Source: The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood

“To be sure, the usurpation of peasants’ rights to access to land was neither new nor limited to England; as we have seen the usurpation had also been characteristic of the Roman power holders. Nevertheless the intensity of the process of transforming common land into private property, which began in the late 15th century and was completed by the early 19th century, has no precedent in history. Nor was there a precedent for the complex process of transforming of the law to accommodate the annihilation of customary rights, such as gleaning, collection of wood and other forest products, access to rivers and lakes, and so on.

Scholars are divided on the causes, consequences, and shifting attitudes of power holders towards the fencing of land in England. The Tudor kings and queens, fearing peasant unrest, resisted enclosure and passed legislation against it, in defiance of property owner gentry represented in Parliament. Nevertheless, Acts of Parliament (known as the Parliamentary Enclosures) forced the privatisation and titling of land as private property after the overthrow of King James II in 1688 (known as The Glorious Revolution).

Revolts against enclosures, most famously the Midland Revolt in 1607, were frequent and bloody. Notions of land improvement and scientific agriculture were deployed during 18th century debates about the desirability of enclosures, with agronomists, lawyers, economists, engineers, and even the philosopher John Locke, busy working to transform a brutal class plunder against the poor into a narrative of progress and efficiency. By the early 19th century common lands, accessible to all and governed by ancient customs had been relegated to remote mountain areas.”

Source: The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community
by Fritjof Capra, Ugo Mattei

Layman @ 95
I think you are taking us in to complex areas about individualism vs communalism, which are very complicated. So I will try to reply briefly and apologies if it’s not very clear as a result.

1. The privileging of the individual over the communal is one of the reasons for many of the problems of inequality we have today (it’s also related to patriarchy, the devaluing of care, and treating the natural world as a source of use value). Not saying the individual should be devalued, but neoliberalism over values individuals at the expense of the communal and the common good.

2. In a genuinely egalitarian world, your exceptional skills as a chair maker should be recognised and valued. But so too should the exceptional skills of the orange growers, child carers, musicians, writers, house cleaners, builders, technicians and so on with whom you are potentially exchanging your chairs.

Sebastian H @97:

Well, desert is a moral category—it goes along with things like justice, getting what’s rightfully yours (in a moral sense), etc. That’s what struck me about your original comment: wherefrom this moral claim on wealth? I’m not saying it couldn’t exist, and MofY is giving a kind of proto-argument for it @100 I think, tho I’m not convinced it’ll get one all the way to wealth, as that’s normally construed. In any case, it was—and is—very unclear to me what the argument was supposed to be, which is why I asked.

Now @97, you seem to be presenting a quite different sort of justification for wealth. Again, I’m not entirely sure what you have in mind, but “positive vs. negative functions”, etc., suggests to me an instrumentalist justification: incentives, encouraging socially beneficial behavior, that sort of thing. All of that may be right (or it may not), but either way, it’s a very different sort of argument than a desert-based one. So now I’m even more unclear on what the justification is supposed to be—i.e. the justification for rewarding socially good behavior with wealth.

@ 114

Well if Plume’s ideas are so incoherent that no one can take them seriously it follows that they are so incoherent that I can’t tale them seriously. It is possible that they make sense and describe something truly novel that doesn’t currently exist but is capable of existing and would work better than what we have, but that seems unlikely.

To the extent that I can make sense of them they appear to advocate a command economy of some sort. We have experience of them and they work rather less well than a market economy.

JS, I think the problem is that I believe the moral impulse we are working with in ‘mine’ and from it ‘property’, has elements of both desert which get played out in society through an instrumental way of looking at it. It isn’t either/or.

The problem with JQ’s method is that it tries to look at property as if it were purely a social construct–with the idea that you can therefore construct in almost any other way you find instrumentally useful. But if property is grounded more deeply than that, you can change how it interacts on the borders, but there are certain things you can’t do to it without causing serious problems.

I’m not sure I’ve thought about it deeply enough, but I tend to think that different types of property have intuitively different moral underpinnings. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that many of the disagreements here are caused by trying to ascribe the moral underpinnings of one type of property to some other type of property.

For example, the modern capitalist pose suggests that food you pay workers to grow on land that you rent has all of the property characteristics of food that you grow yourself on your own land. Or even more tenuously, the profit you earn from the food you pay workers to grow on land that you rent has all of the property characteristics of food that you grow yourself on your own land.

Now instrumentally, we may choose to look at the problem and decide that we should treat them as the same. So for purposes of the law they will be the same. But that is an END point, not a beginning point where just labeling them ‘forms of property’ answers the whole question.

It is weird to put it like that, because everyone here who has seen me write knows that I’m very pro-capitalist. But I don’t believe that all endeavors or profits are equally valuable. Getting profits from creating things that people want and/or making them happier are good. We should use the capitalist system to encourage that. Getting profits from threatening people with harm, or with market manipulation tend not to be as good. We should create incentives to discourage that.

However back to JQs post, where should we start? We shouldn’t start with a chain of title back to infinity and work out the most just owners of everything currently in existence. We should try to decide where we want to go, and incentivize the system to get us there. If that means taxing away most of near-useless high frequency trading profits (for example) that’s good. If it means disincentivizing the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, not so good.

(And yes there is a balance between complexity and simplicity, so maybe just “tax the hell out of everything on a personal income basis which is above X” will be better.

@Val: “the problem is you are conflating your individual evaluative judgement”

I’ve resisted this response for 2 days, because I know it won’t help: The problem, Val, is that you’re making broad, general, insulting statements about other people’s cognitive abilities, and then asking them to agree with you. If you think Plume’s proposal is clear and internally consistent, you should articulate it. If you think others have not grasped his statements properly, you should point to specific examples where they’ve gotten it wrong. Doing neither, while judging us as incapable of conceiving ideas outside of our hidebound ways, is just insulting. If you just want to insult, that’s fine, too, but you won’t get much constructive engagement.

JS, I think the problem is that I believe the moral impulse we are working with in ‘mine’ and from it ‘property’, has elements of both desert which get played out in society through an instrumental way of looking at it. It isn’t either/or.

The problem with this is a deficit of empirical evidence to support the extension from the animalistic, conditional assertion of “mine” to a generalized moral right to property. There is a large gap between primate societies where individuals can claim whatever they are strong enough to seize and to hold and societies which recognize strong, generalize property rights. In between are a vast number of societies characterized by morally compulsory generosity and sharing.

I think you and JQ need to push on what property rights we are thinking about. “personal liberty and freedom of speech” are also “limited … subject to compelling claims”. The right to possess your own stuff doesn’t necessarily imply the right to “wealth”, ie “excess”, ie impoverishment of hoi poloi. The ability to be a big man who gives away stuff implies having ownership as the right to give to (someone), ie transfer ownership (giving stuff away is a type of use). Anyway you can argue with Dr. Brown. (I see Steven Pinker is generally responsible for a much expanded list which includes “territoriality” as well as “property”.)

There certainly is a tension between the absolute propertarianistic social facts of our positivist legal culture and a felt regard for the “natural” rights of humans, eg to be secure in your person, to possess adequate means of sustenance, to own the tools of your trade, to manage the affairs of your own family, etc.

Val,

the problem is you are conflating your individual evaluative judgement (‘I find Plume’s theories so illogical and incoherent that I can’t take them seriously) with an objective standard (Plume’s theories are so illogical and incoherent that no one can take them seriously).

I understand that some people take them seriously. I think those people are, objectively, wrong if they believe the scheme is workable.

Some people take creationism seriously. Would it be unfair of me to say that creationism fails to meet objective standards, and that it is not just a subjective judgment on my part that it is inaccurate? Would it be fair for a creationist to accuse me, as you have done, of not understanding his position due to a failure of my imagination, rather than to an honest critical evaluation?

You keep insisting that my objections are subjective, and are due to some failing on my part. I disagree. That you, and others find the theories attractive does not obligate me to treat them as a preference for a different flavor of ice cream.

There’s an inevitable tension between public and private, in any notion of property, just as there is a tension between the power of possession and the power of violence. Property is a first-order social solution to the problem of violence, and property starts when the violent contest over possession ends, by design if you will. That’s the starting point: when bob mcmanus’ proles have finished taking the rich guys’ stuff, or (historically more likely) the (now) rich guys have finished (for the time being) taking the proles’ stuff. Conquest, 1066; Domesday Book, 1086. What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable: that is the real foundation of law and economics.

It is actually more than discriminating between mine and yours: there is also ours, which is just as natural to a social species as the intuitions of the infant’s grasp. As Sebastian H, in his on-going metamorphosis into a flaming liberal (welcome to my club), has discovered to his own surprise, it is possible to think of a property rights regime as having a socially instrumental value: yours, mine and ours. Getting to, and holding onto some ideas of a common wealth and fair dealing, of a state pursuing and safe-guarding a public good in the administration of a system of (public and) private property, foundational to a system of cooperative, distributed choice.

Layman, Brett, Bernard
I can’t speak for Plume but I believe he feels, as I do, that societies such as ours are not sustainable socially or ecologically and that we need to make some radical changes soon. His project, which I support and share, seems to be imagining alternatives. Putting aside issues such as making too many comments, I think the project deserves respect.

I see your response to Plume as unimaginative, or perhaps more precisely, unsympathetic, and at times disrespectful. I know you aren’t necessarily going to like that, but I can’t see that debating it is going to achieve much.

If you’ve got an alternative vision you think will work, well fine, I’m interested. But you probably know that if it’s just a modified version of what we’ve got, I’m not going to agree with you.

js, your distinction between compensation and wealth sounds interesting. Can you elaborate? Is there an example of someone doing something that benefits society receiving compensation that isn’t wealth?

Globally: most workers tout court

@ 129 I don’t have an alternative as I never claimed to haver an alternative that is entirely irrelevant. The question is does Plume have a coherent superior alternative. To which I would answer that I don’t think he does.

I suppose at some point something will replace capitalism. However it the most effective economic system we have come up with to date and rejecting it due to a few problems seem dangerously like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A large proportion of the problems have entirely orthodox solutions such as pricing in externalities. Regulation is necessary when competition isn’t practicable it is however rather inefficient and prone to regulatory capture.

whether some people (those who do particularly beneficial things for society, say) deserve more than others? More what? Wealth, compensation? How are these things different

They’re the same in our society because income (compensation) can be converted into property (wealth) – so if you have a high salary you can eg. invest some of it in a mutual fund or a buy-to-let property – but it’s possible to imagine alternative arrangements where this isn’t the case (eg. incomes are still unequal but private investment in shares and housing does not exist, so income must be consumed or given away). Of course most people do who ‘beneficial things for society’ can not do this either because their income is only just sufficient to meet their own needs or because the ‘beneficial thing’ they are doing doesn’t produce an income at all.

Marshall @ 138 –

Again, this contorts the notion of property rights beyond all recognition in an ill advised and wrong headed effort to make it seem like anything other than a a cultural construction devised to create and maintain social stratification. Property rights in any reasonable sense of the term only exist in societies with hereditary inequality. Elsewhere there are only use rights. and the two should never be conflated, as they differ in very important ways (you cannot alienate use rights, for instance).

“other than a cultural construction devised to create and maintain social stratification.”

To the extent that property rights are a cultural construction, I would tend to think they were devised to keep people from hurting each other over disputes about what is ‘mine’.

(Also notice that any discussions about the ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ or ‘unearned’ property rights just smuggles all the normative questions into those words instead of ‘rights’. So it is weird to talk about ‘property’ as being culturally constructed and then talk about ‘justice’ as if it had real normative value. You don’t create normative value or extinguish cultural construction by just changing the decision making point from one word to another.)

You don’t create normative value or extinguish cultural construction by just changing the decision making point from one word to another.)

Your inability (or willfull refusal) to read what is written has nothing to do with what I actually wrote. I never mentioned “justice”, as my argument is over the notion that property rights are universal, since it is simply not true. I invite you to consult the extensive anthropological literature on the topic. You are the one moving the goal posts here.

Is there an example of someone doing something that benefits society receiving compensation that isn’t wealth?

Lynne, I have admittedly been hedging a bit, but I think the answer to this question is surely yes. If we think about more traditional, non-capitalist societies where money didn’t play an important role, whatever was considered exceptionally socially beneficial might be rewarded with social prestige or status or power, but not really with money or wealth in any normal sense. (I’m sure DrDick knows way more about this than me, so s/he can correct me if they wish.) In any case, I’m not saying that’s a better model—I don’t think it is, in fact in many ways it might it might be worse. But still, it’s true that socially beneficial behavior—however we want to think of that—doesn’t *have* to be rewarded with wealth.

Here’s though where I’d ultimately go with this. (And I realize that this sort of thing is generally considered crazy, but I don’t think it’s crazy at all.) Even in societies like ours, which place a great emphasis on money and wealth, there are plenty of people who do essential and highly socially beneficial work not for the monetary rewards but because, well, they want to or because they find it satisfying. In a lot of cases, such work doesn’t bring in significant monetary rewards at all. I think it’s not at all crazy to think that in a society that valued money and wealth a lot less (or not at all), a lot more people—perhaps most people—would do socially beneficial/essential work for non-monetary reasons. So I don’t think it’s true that we must essentially bribe people, or anyway encourage them, with money to get them to do useful things. Now you might say that the kind of thing I’m describing isn’t really compensation at all. And maybe that’s right—it partly depends on what we mean by compensation. Anyway, that’s a little abstract but it’s what I had in mind.

” I never mentioned “justice”, as my argument is over the notion that property rights are universal, since it is simply not true. I invite you to consult the extensive anthropological literature on the topic.”

I think the concepts of property and rights are culturally specific. But from the anthropological literature I have read usually even groups that live in collective small societies have a territory of the group, and within that they might have shelters that are for specific persons or groups of persons, and also what we think of s personal property like necklaces or cradles or bags, and even s sort of intellectual property which is often delineated by gender.

Of course in these other cultures they do not use the words property or rights, and their words cannot be directly translated into English words without something being lost.

However this is why the Mabo case here is interesting, as traditional occupation and use of territory by language and cultural groups was recognized by the court to be a sort of title that had to be recognized in the English system of law we inherit.

So I think there is a danger both in deploying concepts of property and rights too generally, and also in denying that indigenous people have a similar sort of framework for their relations to land that can give them title in the Western legal frameworks that were applied to their countries in colonialism. It is all a bit of a muddle really.

Brett @124: only a genius would have any prospect of imagining an economic system that might replace capitalism.

I agree it’s hardly a no-brainer, but I don’t think it’s quite as difficult as you suggest. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, Albert and Hahnel’s Looking Forward, and even Skinner’s Walden Two all set out plausible though very different alternative conceptions, though of course only in outline. Schweickart and Roemer have made less utopian but still radical, and wholly plausible, suggestions. The difficulty is not in figuring out a system of production and distribution that doesn’t entail competition, inequality, and radical insecurity but in generating a degree of social solidarity and trust that would, as you say, make coercion unnecessary. In other words, it’s not a technical problem but a moral/psychological/cultural one.

“Importantly, Aboriginal Australians did not “own” their lands, but had use rights and other kinds of claims on them. They could not buy, sell, or otherwise transfer those rights, any more than the Native Americans I work with could.”

They did not own the lands like a householder owns their house and land, but as I mentioned in Australia the householder’s house and land is ultimately owned by the Crown anyhow.

Queen Elizabeth II can not sell Australia and nor did George III buy Australia in 1788 (or more accurately the colony of New South Wales) . And there is no way of transferring the title of Australia from the Crown except as much as is allowed by constitutional convention (and last time we had one of these there was not nearly enough discussion of the full legal ramifications of such a constitutional change – like who will ultimately own all the land if we have no Crown? – and most of the discussion was about the wording of the preamble which is not as important ) or war.

The Indigenous language and culture groups owned their countries in the same way as Queen Elizabeth II ultimately owns all the land in Australia now , except you just think it is like they had a different sort of constitution without a Crown or Parliament.

The Mabo case is interesting as Eddie Mabo was a Torres Strait Islander and I believe that they had land that was handed down patrilineally, which is different from the area of Victoria I live in which is in the country of the Dja Dja Wurrung who I think travelled through their land with the seasons rather than being settled.

As I already mentioned they even had border controls which was the “freedom of the bush” ceremony, that early settlers often performed with them. And sometimes land was held by more than one language group – these shared border lands were often used for corroborees with multiple language groups, a bit like the United Nations, or a bilateral treaty conference or something.

Sometimes people are rewarded with ‘power’. That often works out more painfully for people than ‘wealth’.

Dr. Dick, you seem to want to pretend that everything is obvious but you only preach. I’m sure that works for people when you have power over them. Less well when you don’t. I can see why you like to emphasize power though…

You appear not to have read my comment – as I already said the Queen cannot sell Australia despite being the ultimate owner of all the land and I already said George III did not buy the colony of New South Wales either, and I never said that the freedom of the bush ceremony gave settlers ownership of the land, just that it was like border control.

Calling people mobile foragers is very rude and it also is terribly old fashioned thinking as it is well established in Australia now that indigenous people had forms of land ownership, or moreover forms of sovereignty over the country that was theirs.

If you work with indigenous Americans you should know this sort of thing already so I’m not going to reply to your comments again.

@137
I suppose at some point something will replace capitalism. However it the most effective economic system we have come up with to date and rejecting it due to a few problems seem dangerously like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A large proportion of the problems have entirely orthodox solutions such as pricing in externalities.

It is not a matter of externalities, it is a matter of treating both the natural environment and most other human beings (mainly those who do the caring work) as sources of ‘use values’. I don’t think most economists, including John Quiggin, have really understood that yet.

js: ” Even in societies like ours, which place a great emphasis on money and wealth, there are plenty of people who do essential and highly socially beneficial work not for the monetary rewards but because, well, they want to or because they find it satisfying.”

This is true. In Canada the blood bank gets all its blood from donors. I used to give regularly (they won’t take mine now because I lived in the UK during the mad cow crisis). It didn’t confer status, but it did feel satisfying to donate something so useful.

Dr. Dick, you seem to want to pretend that everything is obvious but you only preach. I’m sure that works for people when you have power over them. Less well when you don’t. I can see why you like to emphasize power though…

Once again, I never mentioned power. Drunk blogging is never advisable. Go sleep it off. I would add that the projection is powerful in this comment, since all you have done is make assertions with no supporting evidence.

Collin Street –

Again, the argument is over the nature of property rights and the distinction between those and use rights. Both you and ZM appear to have no knowledge on the topic, or aboriginal relations to the land, at all. Most Native Americans found the very concept of selling land or alienating it incomprehensible until fairly late in the colonial period, as well documented in treaty negotiation. Even such putative “sales”, such as that of Manhattan, were actually payments for use rights, not ownership. The Lenape, whom the Dutch paid for it, later charged them again, after they had abandoned the settlement there, and yet again to the English when the Dutch ceded the colony to them. Indigenous claims to land are not generally based on notions of property, but rather on enduring relations with it, almost a kinship tie (and no, this is not a “mother earth trope, which is actually quite late and metaphorical).

George the III did not “buy” the land, he stole it

“Stole”?? You mean George usurped the aboriginal rights to the Australian bush? Or what? (Anyway it was more a case of strong-arm robbery.)

Citation for your definition of “property rights” please?

Ok well having kind of accidentally got engaged with this through defending Plume, I have now decided to try again with critique of mainstream economics. I don’t know if JQ is still reading this, but here goes anyway.

I’ve written before about the ecofeminist analysis of how knowledge (particularly mainstream economics in this case) reflects the assumptions of patriarchal, hierarchical societies that arose and became dominant (although not universal) in the last few thousand years.

One example of this is expressed in the Christian religion, obviously very important in the English speaking countries. The key point for this argument is that in the Bible (Genesis) God gave man (humanity) dominion over the land and species. (There is also another separate myth about how he gave women to men for their use, but I won’t go into that here – it’s important but would take too long).

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you (JQ) are a creationist of course! But the thing about discourse and knowledge is that aspects can persist while others change. So while most economists I’m sure aren’t creationists, they still seem to think of the world as a thing that humans own and control, hence notions like use value.

(Market economics, such as discussed by Brett Dunbar above, is of course a subset in which ‘the economy’ consists of only those things that are traded and exchanged. I can’t quite work out where you – JQ – sit on this. Anyway as I’ve discussed before it’s an important subset of knowledge because economics as explicated by the UN, the WTO, and so on, is based on this idea, see Marilyn Waring whom I’ve mentioned before)

The alternative form of knowledge into which we are (possibly) moving is ecology – the world is a system of which we are part. We affect the system of course, but we don’t control it and we don’t own it, so conventional notions of property (as in the idealised notions you refer to above) don’t make sense. You can’t ‘own’ something of which you are part. This – hopefully – new way of seeing and understanding the world does seem similar to the way other societies (eg Neolithic, early Europe farming, Indigenous) may have seen it or see it.

For this reason I think – contrary to what you suggest in the OP – that it is important to critique our basic ideas of property, and try to understand some others that maybe make more sense and are more useful in the era into which we are moving (like it or not).

I think ZM is also talking about some of these ideas in a different (more activist) way. Can I also say that I think the argument between ZM and DrDick is a bit unfortunate, I would be more interested if they clarified their differences rather than had an argument. Perhaps DrDick could get a new user name, that might help (DrDick sounds trollish, at least to Australian ears)

You obviously have problems with reading comprehension, since those links do support my argument and I never said property was Eurocentric, but that it is only characteristic of strongly hierarchical societies.

Bruce wilder, I read this today and for some reason thought you might enjoy it. I, in my peculiarly ignorant manner, have to say I liked it a lot

http://www.drb.ie/essays/'them-poor-irish-lads'-in-pennsylvania

ZM @ 174

Yes I suppose part of the difference between our approaches that you are trying to look at how things stand in law, whereas I am looking at epistemology and discourse – what are the concepts we use, what do they mean to us, did/do others have similar concepts, etc?

It’s interesting you point out that there is a difference between freehold in the US ( closer to the ‘idealised’ concept mentioned by JQ above – my land and I can do what I like with it) and in Australia. Reinforces again the fundamental difference between our cultures, even though superficially alike – the different role of the state (as you will know, the relationship between the ‘Crown’ and the ‘State’ is quite complex in Aus, but I’m putting them together here for simplicity) and the greater emphasis on individualism in the US.

As I mentioned before, what I’m doing – like Plume – is trying to imagine what a different society would be like, if we imagined our relationship with the world differently. From an ecological viewpoint, the concept of belonging to the land, rather than the land belonging to us, that you mentioned in the Yolngu case above, seems quite useful. That concept was mentioned by an environmental officer in a forum during my research project, and people were quite taken with it – it seemed to work for them.

I tend to conceptualise these ideas under care – we have a responsibility to care for the land and each other. That doesn’t specfically deal with the notion of ownership, but could be adapted to various forms of ownership – even if you ‘own’ a piece of land, you have a responsibility to care for it sustainably and share its products with others fairly. It would rule out many current forms of intensive agriculture and factory farming for example ( http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/25/industrial-farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question) as well as profit taking.

I think John Quiggin did address some of these issues in his statement that all property rights are subject to “social decisions”, ie the rights of ownership are socially created, even the idealised form (and therefore could be changed by social decisions, such as legislation).

You might be interested in this article by my former supervisor Marian Quartly http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10314619208595890 . It’s not on this precise topic (although ownership and property are implicit themes, as with most analysis of colonialism) but is a really interesting discussion about the relationship between discourse, imagination and socially constructed reality.

Brett Dunbar,

You are confusing scientific and technological developments with economics. If they had a similar amount of science and technology in the 1300s this would have helped them avoid plagues too. But how we are farming now has problems, such as causing soil degradation and causing an imbalance of the phosphorous and nitrogen cycles, on a twenty-year time frame (due to the shorter life of methane) agriculture presently contributes 54% of greenhouse gas emission forcing, taking too much water from river systems, paying migrants illegally low wages as farm labourers etc.

The enclosure process happened a long time ago and was very unfair and undemocratic and meant lots of people had to go and work in awful factories that were not well regulated. If the parliament had principled reasons to enclose some of the commons they should have done so on a consultative and equitable basis at the time, and the same with migration to the former colonies and the enclosure of the indigenous peoples land. After this the system of private ownership has somewhat settled now after some centuries, but still has problems including those outlined above.

Val,

Farmers markets and the movement to more local and seasonal fruit and vegetables are also good for farmers. And also social media gives farmers the opportunity to communicate directly with customers and also with each other to share information about sustainable farming in a way that is not mediated by agribusiness. Even though farming can have negative impacts often farmers, with ecologists and naturalists and park managers and even recreational hunters and fishers, are the people who know a lot about nature and seasons and things, for instance from a history perspective think of the enormous resource of farmers almanacs to look at how growing seasons have changed with climate change and rainfall and birdlife and so on.

In answer to your last post, when I studied history I looked more at epistemology and discourses and found that interesting. As planning is more of a professional rather than academic discipline I needed to shift my focus to the normative and direction to the future. The planning and environment act in Victoria has objectives and clauses about the sustainable development and use of land, but like most countries this is not really being met at the moment. The federal government just comitted to all Australian cities being sustainable by 2030, so I live in hope…

ZM
Yes I agree about reconciling the policy areas and cross discipline language. At the risk of being a policy imperialist, I think health is a good frame – the healthy people, healthy planet type frame. However I am also trying to think ecologically which somehow should involve not putting people in the primary or central position – it’s very difficult though. There was also a great article about this on The Conversation a while ago, I don’t know if I kept a record somewhere.

I am very interested in this sustainable cities by 2030 business, I can’t see how they are going to achieve it without some drastic measures, but I think I read the other day it will involve buying permits from poorer countries which is all a bit shonky. There is a chilling chapter in Ariel Salleh (ed) ‘Eco-sufficiency & global justice : women write political ecology’ by Ana Isla ‘Who pays for the Kyoto protocol: selling oxygen and selling sex in Costa Rica’ pp 199-217
My notes:
Costa Rica as a poor and indebted country was keen to sell carbon reduction measures to wealthy countries. However locking up forests drove campesinos and campesinas off the land, they were not likely to get work in industry. Many women and children work in the sex trade. This also raises revenue to pay off the national debt [ I presume through taxation of the brothels]. Western or Northern economic thought treats everything in economic terms as capital – human capital and natural or environmental capital (services of nature) – commodifies and monetises everything, hence the arrangements for buying carbon abatement permits under the Kyoto protocol. Isla draws parallels with eco-tourism and sex trade – nature and the natural bodies of women and children are commodified for wealthy tourists.
Economic measures reflect power structures – one result of this is that work done particularly by women [or one could add subordinate groups like slaves] including “nourishment, care, stress recovery, waste assimilation, reproduction and restoration” is “uncounted” p 188.

The point of tradable emission permits is to require polluters to price in the cost of emitting CO2, incentivising them to reduce emissions. The same basic approach worked on SO2 emissions with the result that acid rain has been largely eliminated. Issuing additional permits for activities that absorb excess carbon also act as an incentive to protect thing that are either a carbon store like forest or a carbon sink like peat bog or various marine environments.

The enclosure process took centuries. Some areas had always had private land holding, they even in the middle ages showed a tendency to be more productive than otherwise similar land under the open-field system. Enclosure tended to have the support both of landowners and of the more successful and effective peasants, subsidence farming is a miserable and precarious existence.

“The point of tradable emission permits is to require polluters to price in the cost of emitting CO2, incentivising them to reduce emissions. The same basic approach worked on SO2 emissions with the result that acid rain has been largely eliminated. ”

It’s not the same as greenhouse gasses are emitted in a variety of uses such as energy, livestock, horticulture, land clearing and burning etc so the range of actions needed to reduce emissions in a timely way is much wider. And it is not fair charging carbon prices to companies that will end up being forced to close down as they can’t change and this is also just counter productive in my view as these companies are impediments now for two reasons : not liking being charged a price, and not wanting to close down. If you are going to make a wide range of companies close down or change in big ways they are not especially inclined to without regulation then you should probably be doing change management not charging them prices I think.

“The enclosure process took centuries. Some areas had always had private land holding, they even in the middle ages showed a tendency to be more productive than otherwise similar land under the open-field system. Enclosure tended to have the support both of landowners and of the more successful and effective peasants, subsidence farming is a miserable and precarious existence.”

To a Fallen Elm – John Clare

Old Elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
And into mellow whispering calms would drop
When showers fell on thy many coloured shade
And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
While darkness came as it would strangle light
With the black tempest of a winter night
That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root
How did I love to hear the winds upbraid
Thy strength without while all within was mute
It seasoned comfort to our hearts desire
We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire
Enjoying comforts that was was never penned
Old favourite tree thoust seen times changes lower
But change till now did never come to thee
….
Thine spoke a feeling known in every tongue
Language of pity and the force of wrong
What cant assumes what hypocrites may dare
Speaks home to truth and shows it what they are

I see a picture that thy fate displays
And learn a lesson from thy destiny
Self interest saw thee stand in freedoms ways
So thy old shadow must a tyrant be
Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free
Thoust sheltered hypocrites in many an hour
That when in power would never shelter thee
Thoust heard the knave supply his canting powers
With wrongs illusions when he wanted friends
That bawled for shelter when he lived in showers
And when clouds vanished made thy shade ammends
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom – O I hate that sound

It grows the cant terms of enslaving tools
To wrong another by the name of right
It grows a liscence with oer bearing fools
To cheat plain honesty by force of might
Thus came enclosure- ruin was her guide
But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight
Tho comforts cottage soon was thrust aside
And workhouse prisons raised upon the site
Een natures dwelling far away from men
The common heath became the spoilers prey
The rabbit had not where to make his den
And labours only cow was drove away
No matter- wrong was right and right was wrong
And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song

Such was thy ruin music making Elm
The rights of freedom was to injure thine
As thou wert served so would they overwhelm
In freedoms name the little so would they over whelm
And these are knaves that brawl for better laws
And cant of tyranny in stronger powers
Who glut their vile unsatiated maws
And freedoms birthright from the weak devours