Property is not Theft, but Poverty is Coercion

This is a sort of random post, not in response to anything much but rather just the expression of some stuff that's been floating around in my head, largely related to the Classics of Political Economy course I'm taking. It's also, in part, prompted by my having read this Jonathan Chait post detailing the apparent conservative belief that Matt Yglesias, another of my favorite bloggers, is a hypocrite for buying a house. (The relevant part is Yglesias' quoted tweet about the "myth of ownership," the in-his-opinion false idea that the existence of property is prior to the existence of the state.)

So, here's the basic idea. Various political theorists and political economists over time have been known to suggest that private property is theft. I tend to associate the concept with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though obviously it gets picked up in a much more virulent form by Karl Marx and his legions of nominal followers. Rousseau didn't think that property should be abolished, but he did think that the first person who said "this is mine, and that is yours" and got other people to believe him was doing something pretty radical, something that constituted taking the stuff he had just claimed as property away from everyone else. Property is theft, because what is mine is not yours. But there's an interesting assumption buried in this kind of argument, isn't there, namely that if no one owns anything, everyone owns everything? In order for me to steal something from you, you have to have it in the first place. If I hop in a TARDIS and take a trip to a planet no one's ever set foot on before, and say, hey guys, I own this planet now, have I taken anything from anyone? It wasn't anyone's before, ever. If it was a properly lifeless planet, I'm not even taking anything that's ever belonged to, like, any bacteria. Now, what I have done is taken the opportunity to take ownership of that planet from everyone else. Is that theft? It doesn't feel like theft to me.

Now, it's a slightly different case if one can say that a certain plot of land, say, or other physical good is owned in common by society. In some cases that may be literally, de jure, true. For instance, St. Andrews Links is owned and operated by the town of St. Andrews, so if someone came along with a private security force and set up camp in the middle of the Old Course and said, hey guys, this is my private property now, they'd clearly be stealing it from the town. But, well, a town is a corporate entity, so it can own things the way an ordinary person would. What if you just have properly common land, not legally owned by anything but considered to be held in common by all in society? Britain used to have a lot of such land, and still has some, and during the 16th through 18th centuries a lot of it got enclosed. Was this theft? I think it's a defensible claim, although in the English case it is pretty much true that society's agent, i.e. the government, gave its permission for the whole process. (Okay, it wasn't a democracy, but that's a subtly different issue.)

In any event, whether capturing explicitly common lands and turning them into your private property counts as theft, that doesn't establish that all private property is. That would require asserting that the entire earth is, by default, commonly owned by human society. And this strikes me as an incredibly arrogant claim. Human beings are, essentially, conquerors of this planet. Every other species in the world lives under our dominion right now, and we rule over them with virtually no regard for their interests. There is nothing "natural," in the normative sense, about this state of affairs, nor was it always thus. Humans are the rulers of earth because we're stronger, mostly along the various mental dimensions rather than the physical ones, than any other species. We're strong enough, in fact, that collectively we can fight off just about the entire rest of the planet's occupants at once. But at root, our rule is rooted in force, not justice, and to me this makes any claim that the natural order of things is that all the earth is owned in common by mankind pretty laughable. If that is so, it is only so because we stole it from the other animals (okay, and the plants and protozoa and what-have-you, but they're legitimately less important for the story). The idea that one individual human's claiming a part of that stolen bounty for him- or herself constitutes theft above and beyond the original conquest is just kind of silly.

However, while I don't think that for one person to own private property constitutes an act of theft against society, I do think that for a person to own sufficiently little property constitutes an act of coercion by society against that person. An indigent person is desperate. Someone who legitimately cannot be sure of sufficient material provisions for their own survival is living their entire life with a gun to their head. Sure, the gun is held by an Invisible Hand, but it's still there, and so is the demand being made at its point: conform. Do what we want you to do. Work hard. Be willing to work hard at unpleasant tasks. Or else you die. Given how much relatively necessary, extremely unpleasant work there still is in human civilization, we have chosen to maintain a large section of the world's population in pretty dire circumstances, more or less needlessly, so that there are always people desperate enough to do that work in exchange for not dying in the streets. To my mind, this is incredibly exploitative and incredibly violative of those people's basic rights to be treated with respect as people whose interests count. I'm not sure how we would organize society to deal with the problem of necessary unpleasant work if we didn't use this mechanism to coerce people, but I think it's a big big problem that we should be, you know, thinking about. And we should very much welcome any increase in the extent to which we can get non-sentient machines to do this work, as it should in principle reduce the "need" to maintain this underclass of the systemically-exploited. This isn't a violation that we can trace back to any one person, but the fact that it's systemic doesn't make it any less wrong. Private property itself isn't a crime, but the denial to a person of sufficient property for their own sustenance is a pretty massive abuse.