Nobody owned land then, what do landowners owe now?
What does the Stone Age have to do with us?
| While somewhat longer than 800 words, the arguments below are insightful. The author, an America, is Lecturer in Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Reading, UK, and co-founder and leader of the US Basic Income Group. |
by Karl Widerquist
What does the Stone Age have to do with modern justice? According to property rights advocates: everything. They argue: (1) Property began as individual property, then government came along and imposed taxes that interfere with the rights of owners; (2) A market economy with no restrictions on inequality makes everyone better off than they were in the era without private property, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers.Private property advocates never refer to anthropological studies of prehistory. Are modern workers better off than our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Look at Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins, Bronze Age Economics and How Chiefs Come to Power by Timothy Earle, and The Evolution of Political Society by Morton Fried.
Property rights advocates imagine individualistic pioneers first appropriated the wilderness. But that’s not what happened. The transformation from hunting and gathering to a settled agricultural life took the joint act of entire bands. The rights of land tenure in primitive settled communities was extremely varied, but every individual had a right of direct access to the land, which was usually owned (if at all) by villages or large extended families. In slightly more economically advanced societies where property rights have become exclusive, the original owners are not private businessmen but chiefs. Ownership of resources was synonymous with ownership of the government.
Chiefs doubled as owners because the earliest societies were too economically simple to have separate spheres of power -- such as government, religion, and business. All of these powers were vested in one person. The Hawaiian Islands were first settled by human beings around the year 600 and so they provide a very recent example of the first creation of property rights. For the most part by the 1400s, each island was run by a chief who owned the land and the irrigation systems that made everyone’s efforts to farm the land viable. Local lords were employees of the chief. They doled out land to peasants only if the peasants promised the interests of the chief. In short, the chief ran his island as a wholly-owned, for-profit business.
Taxation and regulation of property are not new. Modern governments inherited their regulatory powers from medieval kings, who owned the right to regulate their domain in any way they saw fit. Modern landlords hold titles that derive from the medieval vassals of the king. Government taxation is simply the exercise of property rights that are as old as or older than private holdings of property. Some countries went through a brief laissez faire period in the Nineteenth Century, when governments chose to tax and regulate less than before. But no government signed an enforceable contract to alienate its rights over its domain.
Today’s property rights advocates simply want to interfere with the property rights of kings. That’s not “freedom of property rights against interference” but more like redistribution from condo associations to condo owners or from landlords to tenants. If the property rights system the king set up is unjust, his rights should go to the people, not his lords. If the property rights system the king set up is just, we must respect his rights and not force him to cede power to his lords.
In hunter-gatherer communities that survived into the Twentieth Century, people worked an average of three to four hours per day (including time spent preparing food and commuting). They worked at their own pace and slept more than people do today. They felt extremely secure about their ability to find food and other necessities, and they never had to answer to a boss. When a hunter-gatherer is in the mood to forage for food, she sees if anyone else feels like joining her. If not, she waits or goes out alone.
An open market is a very productive system with great potential to produce goods that could benefit everyone, but capitalism has extreme inequalities. People live on the street and eat out of garbage cans. Others work long hours in sweatshops at the edge of their physical ability and still face the possibility of hunger and malnutrition. Most modern workers have more access to luxuries and better medical care than hunter-gatherers, and on the whole they live longer. But many work longer and harder; they have to follow the orders of a boss; they have less economic security; and some individuals die young (and younger than many hunter-gatherers) because of malnutrition and other complications of poverty.
In short, the transition from hunter-gatherer society to modern capitalism has not been an unequivocal gain for the working class. It has been a tradeoff. But a tradeoff is not good enough to meet the standards that property rights advocates set for themselves.
Property rights advocates chose the standard that the poor must be at least as well off as their Stone Age ancestors because they thought it was easy to meet. It is. A society, as productive as ours, can easily make everyone far better off but we have failed to do so. The minimum we can do to justify our property rights is to make sure that every single human being has more freedom and economic security than our Stone Age ancestors. To make sure the standard is met, we only need to make sure that everyone can have some minimal level basic necessities without having to submit to a boss.
We don’t, I believe, largely because we, the better off, have property and they don’t; therefore, supposedly, we have the right to make them do what we say 40 hours per week. Yet, our property rights are the only thing coming between the poor and their ability to meet their own needs with less effort and without following anyone’s orders. It is we who owe them, not they who owe us. The poor can work for us if they want to share in the luxuries of capitalism, but we have no right -- even by the standards set by property rights advocates -- to force them to work for us just to meet their basic needs.
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Also see: Life Without "Power"
Property and Liberty:
Who Controls Your Land? |
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