Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income

A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No

K. Widerquist

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137313096
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income argues that philosophers have focused too much on scalar freedom and proposes a theory of status freedom as effective control self-ownership: the power to have or refuse active cooperation with other willing people, or simply: freedom as the power to say no.

C H A P T E R 1

---

Introduction

We’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.

—Rodney King
in his Can’t-We-All-Get-Along speech
trying to quell the 1992 Los Angeles Riots

The prologue’s representation of the economy as a casino is partly derived Milton and Rose Friedman’s example of “an evening at baccarat.” He concedes that a capitalist economy contains unfairness and leads to inequality, but justifies it on grounds that many such differences follow from choice and people ought to be free to choose what they do.¹ Using the example of the Big Casino, I concede that freedom has the potential to justify a great deal of unfairness and inequality, but I hope to illustrate how a modern economy (both in practice and in the visions of many political theorists of different political views) fails to deliver sufficient freedom to be justified on the grounds of choice or anything else. All economies (that we know how to create) contain what we might call a casino element: they are persistently affected by systemic unfairness, such as nepotism, brute luck, irrelevant requirements, and odds stacked in favor of people with past advantages.

The solution I propose can be put simply. If you can’t make the game fair, you can’t force people to play. By the end, I will go further—even if you can make the game fair, only in extraordinary circumstances can you force someone to play.

Reducing the unfairness of the system is not my most central concern, partly because we simply don’t have the information or the moral certainty to eliminate unfairness. Unless everyone with a dollar spends it according to some universally agreeable principle of fairness, and everyone has the perfect knowledge necessary to make decisions consistently with that theory of fairness, the casino element will remain. Better rules might reduce that casino element, but there is very little hope that society can eliminate the casino element to everyone’s satisfaction. The economy is not fair, and neither you nor I know how to make it fair. This is no reason to be unfair; we must try to make it as fair as we can. But our inability to be fair is a reason to be magnanimous to people who object to what we’ve done. If we force anyone to take part, we force them into an unfair system.

Egalitarian political philosophers have expended a lot of energy on the difficult task of devising the principles and institutions of a just economic system without the casino element. Property rights advocates have responded by asking: What’s wrong with the voluntary exchange of goods and services among free people?² If consenting adults want to play a game with a casino element, forcing them to stop seriously inhibits their freedom. The libertarian ideal (that freedom as the absence of force is important for everyone) is appealing, but capitalism, as offered by right-libertarians, does not deliver that ideal. It is not simply a system of unforced voluntary exchange among free people. An appeal to freedom can’t justify the unfairness of the political system in a world where people assert ownership of natural resources without the consent of or compensation for those without.

The central point of the story is not that the Big Casino is a casino but that it is big—too big to ignore—and its size threatens freedom in two ways. The system of property ownership in most existing and many proposed versions of capitalism, welfare capitalisms, or socialism neither follows from nor preserves liberty. A system that forces people into the position in which they must serve property owners to meet their basic needs cannot be said to preserve freedom. Such a system also can’t be said to follow from freedom, because its most onerous duties are forced onto people, not freely accepted by them. An egalitarian attempt to eliminate the casino element but to retain forced participation misidentifies the problem in the modern economy. We cannot eliminate that casino element, but we can avoid forcing people to participate in an economy with a casino element or with any other features to which they might reasonably object.

Sections 1 and 2 below discuss the arguments that the modern economic system neither follows from nor preserves freedom. But the main goal of this book is not to point out problems, but to propose a solution. Section 3 outlines the theory of freedom that is examined and argued for throughout this book. Section 4 briefly discusses how the solution proposed here relates to other theories of justice. Section 5 includes a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book.

1. FAILURE TO PRESERVE FREEDOM

The claim that modern economies fail to preserve freedom relies on the observation that, in a world where resources are not freely available, those without property must meet conditions set by at least one person who controls access to resources needed to attain even their basic survival, much less a decent life. This observation is not new.³ Although the atmosphere, the oceans, and some lakes and rivers are still freely and unconditionally available to everyone, the land and everything we make out of it is not. Private landowners and governments dominate resources by putting individuals in the position in which they do not have enough access to resources to meet their basic needs, without meeting conditions set by others. For the argument here, it doesn’t matter whether governments or private individuals and institutions dominate resources or whether the group that dominates resources is large or small, coordinated or uncoordinated. It matters only that whichever group dominates resources puts individuals in the position in which they must serve at least one member of the dominating group to meet their basic needs.

It is helpful to define a few terms. “External assets” are all assets external to the human body. External assets include natural resources and everything the current and past generations have made out of them. I usually use “resources” synonymously with natural resources (external to the human body), but the distinction between natural and other resources is not usually important to the argument, because all external assets embody natural resources.

People are “propertyless” if they lack independent access to a sufficient amount of resources to meet their basic needs. It does not mean that they literally own nothing. People who own their own bodies and some external assets but do not own enough to meet their basic needs (either by direct use of those assets or by trading the external assets they hold for the goods they need) are propertyless in this sense. But being free from propertylessness does not necessarily mean that a person owns any property. None of us are propertyless in terms of the atmosphere. Although we don’t own any portion of it, we have sufficient access to the atmosphere to meet the needs it can satisfy. Before landownership developed, no one was propertyless in terms of land. Early hunter-gatherers had no exclusive property rights in land but they had access to a sufficient amount of it to meet their needs.

People who are in the position in which they must toil to meet their needs (as subsistence farmers do) are therefore not propertyless. But people who are in the position in which they must work for someone to meet their needs (as tenant farmers, sharecroppers, peasants, serfs, and proletarian laborers do) are therefore propertyless. Selling one’s labor without force does not make one propertyless. Many people who own substantial amounts of property choose to trade their labor as well.

Propertylessness and resource domination are reciprocal terms. If one person is propertyless, some other person or group dominates resources; if some person or group dominates resources, they force at least one person to be propertyless. However, there are multiple ways to avoid dominating resources: people can leave a sufficient amount of external assets unowned and freely available so that no one else is propertyless. People can divide external asset ownership in such a way that everyone owns a sufficient amount. Or, a group of people who would otherwise dominate resources can pay compensation so that otherwise propertyless individuals can buy what they need.

The effect of propertylessness on freedom is clear. Human beings have needs that can only be satisfied by external assets or the resources with which to produce the needed goods. Human beings who are unfree to meet their needs are unfree to live or to live a decent life. Rules of property regularly put propertyless people in the position in which someone will interfere with any efforts they make to satisfy their needs on their own or with other propertyless people, indirectly forcing them to serve at least one member of the group that dominates resources. Direct force might be only applied to the control of resources, but it is an effective force nevertheless.

2. FAILURE TO FOLLOW FROM FREEDOM

The prologue also illustrates that propertylessness does not follow from voluntary interaction between free people. Supporters of strong private property rights often characterize the market as the embodiment of liberty because people are free to exchange their property rights, once they have them. The exchange of property rights does not often threaten freedom; the threat comes from how property rights are defined, assigned, and enforced. A property right in an external asset is the legal right to interfere with other people who might want to use that external asset. Had the propertyless chosen to grant control of the earth’s natural resources to the propertied in exchange for some benefit, one could fairly say that propertylessness followed from their exercise of the freedom to make that choice. But the decision to enforce property rights in external assets is imposed on the propertyless without their agreement, and therefore cannot follow from their freedom.

Other property rights regimes are possible. For example, external assets could remain in common or be publicly owned; property rights could be defined in a way that entailed a responsibility on the part of owners to compensate nonowners for the duties they impose on them. The freedom of the propertyless is inhibited by the continual decision to enforce a property-rights regime that creates propertylessness, not by the exchange of titles under that regime. The voluntary aspect of trade is merely the exchange of the right to interfere with people who have not chosen the duty to be subject to that interference. The ownership of property and the right to trade property does enhance the freedom of the holder by granting them external assets that they can use without fear of interference by others, but that freedom has to be balanced against the reduction in freedom that property rights imposed on others. That balance is an important subject of the book. The freedom-inhibiting aspect of property rights is an important consideration of justice that has been too often ignored.

The effect of propertylessness on freedom is substantial. As argued in section 1 above it puts individuals in the position where they are effectively forced to enter the marketplace and serve others. If that decision is not voluntary, much of what follows from it cannot be said to follow from freedom either: the wages and working conditions one accepts are forced, not free, if one is unfree to reject them. Their choice is reduced from whether to serve the group that dominates property to which member to serve.

Once one group has no choice but to serve members of another group, the freedom to choose which member to serve is not sufficient to remove an aristocratic, or even feudal, element to that relationship. By feudal, I mean an economy in which one group of people is born in servitude (whether to a person, to a uncoordinated group, or even to an organized democratic collective). When people take loans, they promise to work for someone else’s benefit. As long as they enter the debt voluntarily and have the ability to declare bankruptcy rather than face debtors’ prison, debt does not have to threaten their status as free people. But a person born without individual access to property is as unfree as if she were born in debt without means of default. The feudal period was characterized by rigid class distinctions and with subjects born owing specific duties to specific members of the aristocracy. Today, the aristocracy is somewhat fluid. People are not subject to any one master. Many working people accumulate property throughout their lives. But one critically important element of feudalism remains: some people are born in servitude to another group of people because continually enforced rules put someone else’s property rights between them and the resources they need to survive.

Given this understanding of the cause of propertylessness, freedom is not a constraint on the redistribution proposed in this work but the motivation for it. The problem is not the voluntary aspects of trade but the involuntary aspects of capitalism as currently constituted. Supporters of contemporary capitalism apply the principle of voluntary agreement selectively—to the exchange of property rights but not to the assignment, definition, and enforcement of property rights. One goal of this book is to suggest how to balance the freedom-enhancing and freedom-inhibiting aspects of property rights.

3. A PROPOSED SOLUTION

What shall we do? When I use the term “we,” I mean you and I, two citizens discussing what rules we think we should live under. The solution proposed in this book can be summarized by saying that, as much as possible, we have to make the Big Casino more like the Small Casino. We have a duty to try to stay out of each other’s way. If we can’t stay out of each other’s way, we have to seek accord with others who are affected by what we do. If we can’t reach accord with everyone, we have duties to seek accord with the largest possible number of people and to minimize the negative impact on those who can’t be brought into the accord.

This book contains a very tentative exploration of a theory of justice and more detailed exploration of the corresponding theory of freedom. I will call the wider theory justice as the pursuit of accord (JPA) because it rests on the belief that people have a responsibility to strive for agreement in a world in which unanimous agreement is usually impossible to achieve. Agreement plays a central role in this theory, both in the interaction of individuals and in the creation of the basic structure of society, but the theory neither pretends that agreement has been achieved when it has not (as some contractualist theories do) nor sets up one-sided conditions prior to agreement (as property rights-based theories do). It assumes that the closest approximation of justice that society can reach is to maximize the number of individuals brought into agreement and to minimize the negative impact on those who are disadvantaged by or who dissent from the social agreement.

I hope to explore this theory of justice over a series of at least two books. This first book focuses on the freedom-related aspects of this theory. It culminates in an argument that whoever controls external assets has a strong duty to provide unconditional support to the poor and the disadvantaged. The duty to stay out of each other’s way corresponds to a negative conception of freedom. We might also have a duty to help each other. However for the purpose of this book, I both accept the existence of duty to help each other and refuse to rely on that assumption to support my argument for redistribution. This starting point sets a difficult bar for my argument. I argue for redistribution without relying on a duty to aid, and I argue for unconditional redistribution without denying the existence of a duty to aid.

An entailment of staying out of each other’s way and of minimizing the negative impact on others is to respect each other’s freedom in the most important and substantive way. Beginning with the familiar idea of negative freedom as noninterference, the book builds a theory of the most important freedoms not to interfere with. I call a theory that identifies the most important freedoms a theory of status freedom: the effort to identify the difference between a free person and an unfree person. The book proposes a theory of status freedom that requires personal indepen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Prologue: The Big Casino
• 1   Introduction
• 2   Status Freedom as Effective Control Self-Ownership
• 3   Forty Acres and a Mule? Implications of the Duty to Respect Personal Independence
• 4   The Importance of Independence I: Framing the Issue
• 5   The Importance of Independence II: Freedom and Integrity
• 6   The Importance of Independence III: Market Vulnerability
• 7   What Good Is a Theory of Freedom That Allows Forced Labor? Independence and Modern Theories of Freedom
• 8   If You’re an Egalitarian, Why Do You Want to Be the Boss of the Poor? Independence and Liberal-Egalitarian Theories of Justice
• 9   On Duty
• 10   Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index