How Capitalism Ends by Steve Paxton;

Author:Steve Paxton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network
Published: 2022-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

6.5 The Origins of Property Rights

If we can see through the haze of these attempts to construct a justification of the status quo, there is actually a serious question to be discussed about just how we should approach the distribution of resources in society. Nozick rejects any attempts to allocate resources according to some kind of pattern – hard work, social good, moral merit and so on, preferring an ‘entitlement’ approach in which resources rightfully belong to those who are entitled to them. (His use of the term ‘entitlement theory’ is disingenuous as almost all approaches attempt to distribute resources according to entitlement – the disagreement is over what creates that entitlement, not whether or not something other than entitlement is the correct criteria.) What Nozick is really opposing is the idea that entitlement is based on some end-state objective or pattern of distribution, such as equality or sufficiency. He considers any assertion that all people should have an equal amount of resources – or even a sufficient amount of resources – to be a threat to the freedom of those whose resources may need to be redistributed in order to achieve such a goal. (Of course, in Nozick’s world, sufficiency – the right to life – for some, should not be considered more important than any infringement on the sacred property rights of others.) We’ve already dispatched the idea that losing property can be treated as an infringement of freedom, by those (such as Nozick) who assert that property ownership isn’t a requirement of freedom. Here we’ll examine Nozick’s approach from a different angle. As we’ve seen, he argues that people are entitled to whatever they can amass by fair means, but this approach brings a whole range of both theoretical and practical problems of its own. The practical problems begin at the beginning – with the original appropriation of the natural world into private property. At some point in pre-history, humans began to take ownership of natural resources. Instead of just using what was available, people began to claim permanent rights over things, then to extend those rights beyond their lifetimes by making their property bequeathable to their heirs. In the late seventeenth century, John Locke developed a theory of acquisition to defend the institution of private property, and to justify the increasing conversion of common land into private pasture under the process of parliamentary enclosure. (A process which by 1850 had seen the people of England deprived of their customary access to around 9 million acres of land – all in the name of freedom.)185

Like Nozick and Hayek’s attempts to give the market a moral justification of ‘benefit to others’ by continually omitting the real details, Locke’s justification of private property is a sleight of hand designed to attribute noble origins to theft and self-interest. Locke begins by noting that the world in its ‘state of nature’ existed for the benefit of all ‘mankind in common’ acknowledging the great difficulty in discerning ‘how any one should ever come to have a Property in any thing’.

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