The Property-Owning Democracy: Freedom and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought) by Kerr Gavin

Author:Kerr, Gavin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Are There, Nevertheless, Other Sources of Value Which Are Socially Created and Which Should Therefore Be Socialized?

As we saw in Chapter 2, many contemporary social liberals now argue that most, if not all, property is in some sense ‘socially created’. Proponents of what has been called the ‘knowledge inheritance theory of distributive justice’ argue that a large proportion of wealth in contemporary liberal societies is generated by the hugely productive cumulative knowledge and inherited technology handed down by previous generations, and is in this sense ‘socially created’ (Alperovitz and Daly, 2008, p. 153). If we assume that individuals deserve compensation commensurate with the economic value of their distinctive personal productive contributions, that people do not deserve what they do not create, and that ‘society’ does have a right to benefit from the wealth it does create, then, according to the proponents of the knowledge inheritance view, we should conclude that ‘a substantial portion of current wealth and income should be reallocated to all members of society equally or, at a minimum, to promote greater equality’ (ibid., p. 153). Such a ‘reallocation’ of current wealth and income would involve far more than could be achieved through the socialization of the rental value of land (ibid., pp. 109–125).

The geo-classical response to the knowledge inheritance theory can perhaps best be illustrated by contrasting it with the radical liberalism of Thomas Paine, who may be identified as one of its first proponents. Paine endorsed a form of land value taxation on the basis of considerations relating to what he saw as the unfairness and injustice of private landownership. In his pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1999 [1797]), Paine distinguished between two kinds of property: first, ‘natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe’ – which, prior to the introduction of the system of landed property, had been ‘the common property of the human race’; and, second, ‘artificial or acquired property – the invention of men’ (ibid., p. iii). In respect of the former, Paine argued that ‘[e]very proprietor … of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent … for the land which he holds’ (ibid., p. 8). The ‘national fund’ – distributed as a kind of social dividend or inheritance for all citizens – which would be raised from these ground-rents could be regarded by each citizen ‘as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property’ (ibid., p. 10). In respect of the latter, by contrast, Paine suggested that a person’s ‘right share’ of such property was whatever this person had individually created (ibid., p. iii).

Since what Paine proposed was the payment of ‘ground-rents’ by landowners, rather than the elimination of private property or the regulation of commerce and trade, he could make a plausible claim to be offering a kind of ‘third way’ between, on the one side, the English Poor Law, which provided a minimal, means-tested, and highly stigmatizing ‘safety-net’ for those unable

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