Property and freedom

Frank van Dun has an interesting article on “hostile encirclement” in a libertarian world. His thesis is: when freedom and property rights conflict, the latter should give way to the former.

There may be cases where there is a conflict between claims on behalf of one person’s freedom and claims on behalf of another person’s private property. In such cases, the question arises, which claims should prevail? Unquestionably, the libertarian answer should be freedom before property. Unfortunately, many libertarians are reluctant to give up the conception of “freedom as property” that (1) serves them so well in their critiques of interventionism and collectivism and (2) underpins their notion that the law of a libertarian order is merely the rigorous application of the so-called nonaggression principle.

I believe that his argument is flawed and that it is based on a mistaken view of freedom. The principled case for a libertarian polity—I am not interested in any other—cannot rest on a hierarchical notion of freedom, like the egalitarian ideology of the communists—only when everyone is provided with a bicycle will someone else be allowed to make use of a car. If freedom, man’s right to his life, follows from man’s nature, the right to property necessarily follows from such a right to life. The right to property is not a gift, or an unimportant add-on, but a necessity. What you have in the end is one complete all-or-nothing package, not a bundle of rights from which specific rights can be removed under certain circumstances, but not under others. In Rand’s words, “the right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation.” Further, contradictions cannot exist in a sane world. Admitting that one faces a contradiction is admitting to a mistake in the thinking process. At least that’s how things work in Aristotle’s world; Hegel lives in a universe of his own making. Therefore, if one man’s freedom comes into conflict with another man’s right to his property, it can only be because one of them is, or both of them are, mistaken.

Now, consider Dun’s case of “hostile encirclement.” What would A do if B and his gang control all the property around, above and below him. Dun writes-

Two logical points should be stressed here. The first is that if throwing an innocent person in a cell deprives him of his freedom then so does building a cell around him even on those occasions when one succeeds in doing so without touching him or his property.

A pragmatist argument—if two courses of action produce the same result, then they are the same. So, throwing someone in jail is similar to buying property around him and refusing him the right of way. But the difference should be clear to any non-pragmatist. That one action involves aggression, the other doesn’t.

From the idea that freedom is a “supreme libertarian value,” Dun concludes that judges and law enforcement agencies in a libertarian world should force B to provide a right-of-way. Actually, every property owner should be forced to provide such right-of-way so that A (and others like him) is not isolated.

He also writes-

If, as many libertarians believe, freedom is a natural right then we should be clear about whether it entitles one to destroy the freedom of others if only in ways that do not involve direct interference with their property. If it does then freedom can hardly count as a fundamental value in the sense of political philosophy; if it does not then the nonaggression principle can hardly count as the basic principle of libertarian law. Either way, there seems to be something wrong with equating libertarian law with the rigorous application of the nonaggression principle.

That should not come as a surprise. The principle does not refer to freedom, only to property; it would be adequate as the axiomatic law of freedom only if freedom and property were synonymous — but they are not. To paraphrase Anthony de Jasay, we do not need a theory of “freedom as private property” any more than we need any other theory of “freedom as something else.”

thereby creating a concept of freedom which isn’t anchored to anything and which can be used to chop away at the roots of the freedom of everyone.

This is what I ask. Why should the exception be limited to roads? What if B & Co. corner the market in food grains on the whole planet? Surely A and everyone else cannot live without food; a dead man is not free. The food grains are B’s property. But since A’s “freedom” comes before B’s “freedom as something else,” B should be forced to empty his granaries till the situation improves. If this is an outlandish scenario, consider another one, something similar to what Mukul Sharma used a couple of weeks back. B is an inventor who has invented a vaccine for a killer disease. But he refuses to disclose the formula. Is A’s freedom greater than B’s right to keep the formula a secret? Would the answer be different if the formula was written on a piece of paper and locked in B’s safe instead of B’s mind?

A political philosophy which doesn’t divorce itself from morality will always say no, that A has no right to claim that B is obliged to do something to help him. Its by carving out such exceptions that the foundations of politics are weakened. The disaster that is the modern day United States is proof of that.

State intervention

The White House appointed “car czar” threatened an investment bank that was delaying the US government’s “plans” for Chrysler-

Perella Weinberg Partners, Lauria said, “was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight. That’s how hard it is to stand on this side of the fence.”

This post (via K.M.) compares it to fascism, and I agree. I like the language the author has used, and have no doubt this is how the conversation must have taken place-

Who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with? We’ll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with.

As someone wondered, what are the czars doing in USA.

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A guest post at Cynicus Economicus, by Lord Keynes, discusses the philosophical justification for state intervention. Among other things, he writes-

Natural law as a theory can be traced back to Plato…

Natural law was famously attacked by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham as “nonsense on stilts.”

One of the main weaknesses of natural law theory is that its main historical justification was the belief in a “divine order” and a divinely-created human nature that makes us conform to “natural law.”

[...]

In the early modern period, rationalist European philosophers like Grotius tried to defend natural law theory by removing God and the previous supernatural justification for it.

However, in doing so, they destroyed the only convincing explanation for belief in natural law.

Thus anyone who accepts an atheistic and naturalistic scientific view of the universe, and who rejects all religion, has no reason to believe in natural law or natural rights.

It follows that all modern types of libertarianism or free market economics based simply on a “natural law” or “natural rights” foundation are severely flawed systems (e.g., the systems of Adam Smith or Murray Rothbard).

There is no reason to believe that the “natural law” that justifies placing inviolable property rights at the centre of our modern political or economic systems has any validity whatsoever.

He horribly misstates the case. From “An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law”-

It is significant that Greek thinkers always couple custom and enactment; things which today we contrast. These were the formal bases of legal authority. So Aristotle considers, not natural law and positive law, but what is just in itself—just by nature or just in its idea—and what derives its sole title to be just from convention or enactment. The latter, he says, can be just only with respect to those things which by nature are indifferent.

[...]

It must be borne in mind that that “nature” did not mean to antiquity what it means to us who are under the influence of the idea of evolution. To the Greek, it has been said, the natural apple was not the wild one from which our cultivated apple has been grown, but rather the golden apple of Hesperides. The “natural” object was that which expressed most completely the idea of the thing. It was the perfect object. Hence the natural law was that which expressed perfectly the idea of law, and a rule of natural law was one which expressed perfectly the idea of law applied to the subject in question; the one which gave to the subject its perfect development.

“Natural law” and “natural rights” emerge from the nature of man, and his relationship with society, and are connected to the concept of “justice.” Its a perfectly sound concept. What isn’t sound is Kantian deontological ethics, and (rule) utilitarianism, or the bastard child – “Utilitarian Kantian Principle” – emerging from their marriage. I can see how “rule utilitarianism” and Kantian ethics fit. Both are, to quote Bentham, “nonsense on stilts.”

The pleader-capitalist’s comeuppance

There are many productive people in the world who don’t believe that they have a moral right to their life, property and the fruits of their labor from the very fact that they are human and that they worked and that they earned. They plead before the society and the state; they apologize for their productivity; they beg to be allowed to work because, they say, such work benefits the whole of society – it results in “the common good.” This is how many philosophers and economists have defended capitalism and the free market in the past.

And the mob licks its lips, and listens. These people are going to work, for free, for my benefit, it thinks. Let them, it says, but I can’t let them free – completely – I need to control them, regulate them, so that they don’t defraud me, disappear with my share of the wealth. But the only thing the mob is capable of is destruction. For all its rules, and regulations, and controls, the market cannot be “controlled” – invariably something will go wrong (because the mob is blind to the fact that its “intervention” tilts the scales in favor of the unscrupulous). And the mob won’t get its share of the promised wealth; it will cry “fraud”. It will demand that “capitalists” should commit hara-kiri, that they should be hanged, stoned, jailed etc etc. And the “capitalist”, the pleader-capitalist, will get his comeuppance.

From Reason comes this article by economist Carlota Perez-

The long decades of laissez faire have made a dogma of the ‘free market’. It has been seen not as a rule-guided mechanism there to serve social ends, but as an unrestrained process the consequences of which, however toxic or harmful for the economy and society, must be accepted as right and legitimate. This is the typical -perhaps inevitable- view that prevails during Installation periods. Those are the conditions that enable a technological revolution to really transform the economy and to let the new leaders emerge. But, once Installation has run its course, this view needs to be replaced. Fortunately, bubble collapses and the many revelations of market wrong-doing put the dogma into question. The debate has now moved from whether regulation is necessary or not to what is good or bad regulation. Further still, the notion that the State has a direct responsibility in what happens in the economy has been reinforced in two senses: first, by the widespread recognition that the lack of regulation facilitated the casino and, second, by a general agreement on the need for government to come to the rescue directly and to stimulate the economy well beyond simple monetary policy.

This is not merely a financial crisis; this is the end of a period. As Stephen Roach puts it: leaders must have “the wisdom and the courage to shift the policy debate away from tactics and toward strategy”. To move ahead is not just to restore the previous “normality”, the false prosperity created by the financial boom. What is needed is to facilitate structural change and to create new conditions for a very different sort of prosperity into the future, where market and competition function under well designed rules and with a set of incentives that maximise growth and well being in a socially agreed direction.

[...]

The condition for the necessary switch of leadership to take place is for the State to come back into action and tilt the playing field decisively in favour of real production investment–using market mechanisms in implementation wherever these are fitting– while creating policy instruments to spread the benefits of the new wealth to the widest possible number (which is also a way of widening markets). That is what Bretton Woods and the Welfare State did the previous time around. The legitimacy of capitalism rests on fulfilling its promise of achieving the common good through individual pursuit of wealth and power. Installation periods, and especially bubbles, bring the system to extreme individualism and callousness; bubble collapses and the ensuing Deployment periods tend to bring back the balance and put the accent on the common good.

So socialism, a philosophy adopted by every thief, mass-murderer and plunderer in history is good by itself, but capitalism is good only if it results in “the common good.” And the productive man is just the means to a “social end” – like a donkey or a mule or an ox. This is the philosophy that is at the root of the present crisis.

A “capitalist” who jettisons the “natural rights” theory of ethics and accepts utilitarian ethics is digging his own grave, building his own guillotine. And he deserves all the ridicule and unearned brickbats he gets.