Property Rights vs. Natural Rights
“All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty; for they had just wit enough to perceive the advantages of political institutions, without experience enough to enable them to foresee the dangers.”
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Given my lifelong passion for liberty, it’s embarrassing to admit that until I stumbled upon this brilliant essay, all I knew about this renowned Swiss philosopher was that he was an inspiration to the French Revolution. I found plenty in this piece that remains relevant to life here in the United States 270 years later, especially as income inequality forces a moral reckoning of public policies.
As indicated by the subtitle’s quote, Rousseau suggests that from the beginning and everywhere in the world, common people were duped into accepting government. These arrangements, regardless of form (monarchy, autocracy, democracy, etc.), gave permanent advantages to those with wealth and made virtually everyone less free and less happy.
The Discourse begins with a claim that man’s nature is good. Early man, in what we might call a state of nature, did not own property. His living was very simple; it consisted of hunting and gathering, differences between individuals’ skills and abilities weren’t consequential, and one man had very little need for another. He had all he needed and all of his time and energy were consumed in living one day at a time. There was no reason to worry about the future or to suffer from want of some imagined better life. Moreover, he said, it is difficult to imagine how a man would be able to subjugate another and extract significant benefits from doing so.
Rousseau’s description of man’s innate compassion is directly opposed to the view expressed by Thomas Hobbes a century earlier that men were miserable and prone to violent competition with one another. Rousseau says that Hobbes’ mistake was assuming the base passions evident in modern society were natural sentiments of man; he did not consider that they may have been created by society and its rules based on reason. Indeed, Rousseau credits our better instincts with making society work despite institutions designed to inflame our passions.
How, then, did society corrupt us?
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”
Of course, this idea did not emerge from nowhere, and it would not have worked without certain conditions that made others honor the claim. Technology (e.g., hook and line, bow and arrow, fire, clothing) brought specialization and opportunities for gains from trade, which included temptation to gain advantages. Tools enabled settlements consisting of huts that encouraged formation of family units with closer relations to one another than to the other members of the community. Further specialization, especially of men as hunters and women as homemakers, brought leisure and additional opportunities.
Development of stronger bonds between the sexes and greater variety in daily life led everyone to notice differences in beauty, strength, and talent, which in turn quickly led to vanity, contempt, shame, and envy. Pride and revenge for affronts created trouble, but such conflicts were very limited and easily resolved through simple common law.
Further technological progress, specifically metallurgy and agriculture, “ruined humanity” by mixing labor with land. Mining and cultivation of specific properties created rights to the fruits of specific contributions of labor, and these combinations were far from equal. Differences in strength, skill, and resource qualities were significant and cumulative.
More importantly, exploiting these resources was not a solo endeavor; mutual dependence created real needs. Unfortunately, “[i]t now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not,” in order to gain at others’ expense. Ownership of land became a zero sum game, and those who did not claim land were left at the mercy of the rich (or tempted to steal from them). The wealthy became quite accustomed to their comforts, gave no thought to the justice of enslaving others, and turned most of their attention to defending their properties or seizing more of it.
Perpetual war is expensive, though. And how does the landowner finance this (not to mention protecting his own family)? By slave labor, of course. He “conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man”: the State.
“Such was, or may well have been, the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness.”
In short order, the whole of Earth was divided into nations, each with civil laws that focused on preservation of national sovereignty. And of course, these nations clashed for the same reasons each was formed in the first place. Murdering others became a duty (to preserve the State).
Rousseau observed that all governments are imperfect, yet their structural defects are almost never repaired. This is especially true regarding the protection of liberty, which is the only reason people willingly submit to rule in the first place. Politicians tend to forget their duty and the conditionality of the exchange. People born into such a system never have a choice in the matter and never really enjoy the liberties that were sacrificed long ago. Their submission is mistaken by the rulers for “a natural propensity for servitude.”
Inevitably, conflicts that can even reach civil war prompt further sacrifices of liberty to maintain the peace. The cycle that began with property rights authorizing the conditions of rich and poor led to administrative institutions that granted power over the weak, and in some cases created master/slave relationships characterized by arbitrary exercise of power.
Loss of liberty occurs because “the flaws which make social institutions necessary are the same as make the abuse of them unavoidable.” Laws created to protect us are abused by ambitious people who love authority more than independence and submit to slavery so they can enslave others. Unchecked, this process leads to despotism; we “see the multitude oppressed from within, in consequence of the very precautions it had taken to guard against foreign tyranny.” Inequality, which was artificially created by property rights, in the end leads back to equality of serfs who obey the arbitrary will of a tyrant.
It follows from this survey that, as there is hardly any inequality in the state of nature, all the inequality which now prevails owes its strength and growth to the development of our faculties and the advance of the human mind, and becomes at last permanent and legitimate by the establishment of property and laws. Secondly, it follows that moral inequality, authorised by positive right alone, clashes with natural right, whenever it is not proportionate to physical inequality; a distinction which sufficiently determines what we ought to think of that species of inequality which prevails in all civilised countries; since it is plainly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that children should command old men, fools wise men, and that the privileged few should gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life.
Is there any question that the US has followed this path, despite this warning that predated formation of our union? We may not have a “starving multitude,” but I would submit that the rest of this general description of inequality applies to our current state of affairs. Indeed, I’ve written extensively about income inequality and proposed a federal basic income guarantee to remedy the situation.
Those who find the status quo acceptable or even praiseworthy have probably stopped reading by now, or may as well. I’m not going to try persuading them otherwise; my other essays and the book they were drawn from make the moral case to the best of my ability. What I do think is worthy of comment is the question of what to do with insights like the one Rousseau so eloquently presented.
The quote I selected as a subtitle for this essay could inspire an entire course in political science. Since Rousseau’s 1754 discourse, other thinkers such as Frederic Bastiat have noted that public policies tend to be shortsighted, and the phenomenon of unintended consequences is quite common in economic analyses.
It’s quite understandable that we have imperfect foresight, and even that we seem chronically vulnerable to the confidence games that pervade policy debates. What’s disturbing, though, is that even when we finally see our mistakes, we fail to correct them. I have said plenty about this, as well, in my book about organization of and behavior in our federal bureaucracy. In short, our system lacks incentives to undo just about anything, so we’ve grown accustomed to contradictions and compounded errors that come with patchwork legislation and its implementation.
We need the humility to admit what is not working and the courage to make difficult choices. In contrasting property rights with natural rights, Rousseau observed that wealth confers unnatural advantages that accumulate over time to create very unequal outcomes. In 1971, American philosopher John Rawls wrote about the unfairness of this phenomenon in A Theory of Justice, which was influential but not sufficient to derail the juggernaut of neoliberalism. Almost fifty years later, economist Thomas Piketty documented the damage in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Taking responsibility for the institutions that perpetuate and exacerbate disadvantages makes it imperative that we take action on two fronts: First, we make amends by providing adequate public assistance to those in need; and second, we repeal elements of policy that will create further inequality.
While some favor expansion of our existing welfare system and some form of wealth tax, I prefer an approach that is more radical and yet simpler. As I argued in my book on Social Security Basic Income, the payroll tax is a major contributor to income inequality and should be eliminated. Legacy Social Security benefits as well as the basic income guarantee that would replace it can be funded from severe cuts to tax expenditures (deductions from income that favor the wealthy) and higher marginal income tax rates.
Direct payments to individuals will enhance liberty for those in need of public assistance by allowing them to bypass demeaning, confusing, and time-consuming administrative barriers and manage funds to meet their unique, changing needs. Raising income taxes (including reduction of tax expenditures) is preferable to taxing wealth, also from the perspective of protecting liberty, because it avoids forced reinvestment or liquidation of assets and creation of a new tax administration regime.
Obviously, this is just a beginning, and it’s just as prone to error as any other policy. But it’s still worth doing because it demonstrates a significant shift in priorities (toward natural rights), may avoid a revolution, and it improves our flexibility (in the amount of the guarantee and the means of funding it). Not all inequality is about income, but it’s an effective equalizer.
