Politics and Ownership

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The below considerations hold great interest to me as they underline the primacy of politics in a free society—a thesis central to my work in progress, especially as it relates to the emerging draft chapter on "Politics" in my contrarian survey of liberty: "Attempts at Liberty". 

Liberty is expensive. Which is why she had to wait for the wealthier days of mankind. 

Liberty divides into benefits—and costs. Those who like to remind us at every turn that there is no such thing as a free lunch, tend to elide that liberty is not a free lunch either; in fact, she is an exceptionally dear lunch—well, gala dinner.

In order to arrive at a satisfactory architecture of freedom, we have to organise some balance of costs and benefits, that is we need to determine who bears the costs of freedom and who benefits from the costly services that provide us with freedom. 

Massive social resources are involved to support this process. Their procurement and utilisation primordially affects the structure of rights and possessions in a society, from which the legal status quo emerges to which we refer in claiming or challenging rights to possessive acts and status. The way in which we marshal the resources that create a possessive order in society is — at least logically — prior to any individual efforts at vindicating rights of disposal. Ownership is contingent upon the social processes and pressures that line the channels through which possessive agency must flow in a community.

As I noted here,

In modern liberal-democratic states, the vast majority of costly human effort needed to support the rights characteristic of a free society are funded by taxes ...

I am not going into the minutiae of why sociogenic freedom cannot be effected by autonomous (selbstbestimmt) funding, where each individual is fully funding all the benefits accruing to her from a system of liberty. For the present purpose, suffice it to point out that to the extent that liberty depends on heteronomous (fremdbestimmt) funding, the use of resources in society and the underlying rights are equally subject to heteronomous determinations. 

That is, first we need to determine what counts as an object of ownership and legitimate use, and on which terms possessive acts may be pursued, before we may proceed to working out any further implications of being a possessor and user of resources, private or otherwise. Property does not have any meaning absent the constraints and directives communally imposed on it.

This is closely related to what I am driving at in my post on the primacy of social justice.

See also my distinction between the monadic and the relational concept of rights which I propose here, here, here, and here:

Classical liberalism tends to misunderstand or ignore the political logic of freedom, owing to a monadic conception of the rights underlying personal freedom. In theory, these rights are absolute, immutable, and monadic, i.e. attached to and owned by the individual in inalienable form. Under feasible freedom, however, people, in exercising their liberty, negotiate and renegotiate these rights, both in politics and in private transactions. Free citizens constantly renegotiate new permutations of feasible freedom, thereby constantly rewriting the social contract.

The source.

Write Murphy and Nagel,

Private property is a legal convention, defined in part by the tax system; therefore the tax system cannot be evaluated by looking at its impact on private property; conceived as something that has independent existence and validity. 

Taxes must be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. 

Justice or injustice in taxation can only mean justice or injustice in the system of property rights and entitlements that result from a particular tax regime.

The conventional nature of property is both perfectly obvious and remarkably easy to forget. We are all born into an elaborately structured legal system governing the acquisition, exchange, and transmission of property rights, and ownership comes to seem the most natural thing in the world.

But the modern economy in which we earn our salaries, own our homes, bank accounts, retirement savings, and personal possessions, and in which we can use our resources to consume or invest, would be impossible without the framework provided by government supported by taxes.

This doesn't mean that taxes are beyond evaluation—only that the target of evaluation must be the system of property rights that they make possible. We cannot start by taking as given, and neither in need of justification nor subject to critical evaluation, some initial allocation of possessions—what people originally own, what is theirs, prior to government interference.

Any convention that is sufficiently pervasive can come to seem like a law of nature—a baseline for evaluation rather than something to be evaluated. Property rights have always had this elusive effect.

Slaveowners in the American South before the Civil War were indignant over the violation of their property rights that was entailed by efforts to prohibit the importation of slaves into the territories—not to mention stronger abolitionist efforts, like helping runaway slaves escape to Canada.

But property in slaves was a legal creation, protected by the U.S. Constitution, and the justice of such forms of interference with it could not be assessed apart from the justice of the institution itself. (p. 8)

Murphy and Nagel oppose 

... the idea that people's pretax income and wealth are theirs in any morally meaningful way.

We have to think of property as what is created by the tax system, rather than what is disturbed or encroached on by the tax system.

Property rights are the rights people have in the resources they are entitled to control after taxes, not before. (p.175)