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It has been a while since I've read John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, but I've been ruminating on his conception of property in that book. He says:
Basically, whenever you mix your labor with something out of nature, it becomes yours.
This conception was highly influential on the Founding Fathers of the United States, and it is easy to see the advantages of such a conception of private property for a brand new country. Sweeping aside the thorny issue of native Americans, if you have a vast wilderness of unclaimed territory, the idea of allowing citizens to go out, form a homestead somewhere and to recognize their claim on the land feels very intuitive and "fair."
Unfortunately, such an idealized conception of property ownership didn't actually exist in practice. Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow explores some of the things that happened in Appalachia over the history of the United States. Just within this microcosm, we see the way things often played out in practice, and it was far from the Lockean ideal.
It was not unusual for some rich landowner to lay claim to a bunch of land he had never even seen or set foot upon, and then to just sit on the claim without ever doing anything with it. Then squatters would move in, and make homes and farms on the land, before being discovered and kicked out.
It seems to me, if we take John Locke's account of property as our model, the squatters had a better moral claim to owning that land than the de jure owners in many cases. And yet again and again, we see governments recognizing the claims of absentee landlords over those of the people who had worked and improved the lands with their own two hands.
In many ways, property and its justification are core to establishing that society is "fair." So it is troubling to note a discrepancy this big between theory and practice so early in the country's history, at the very foundation of property ownership claims, poisoning everything downstream from them.
I think a toy example will help illustrate why this is such a big deal for the modern United States:
Imagine there's an island that has 10 heterosexual couples on it. This island is abundant in natural resources, and it has the following features:
Now, as we come into the island, 9 of the couples have come together and formed a gang. They claim that because their gang was the first to walk the circumference of the island, they have the best claim to owning the island and they will enforce their property claim against the 10th couple. They do not want the last couple collecting resources on the part of the island that had informally been "theirs" up until a few days ago, in which they had spent years building shelters and tools to improve their hunting and gathering.
The gang is going to imprison the couple in a 10'x10' part of the island unless they agree to recognize their ownership claim. Furthermore, while they're prepared to enjoy a merely good lifestyle for the rest of their lives, they tell the unfortunate couple that after they agree to the gang's ownership claim the gang would be willing to rent "their" part of the island back to them, as long as that couple gives them all a tribute that will take them down to a meager lifestyle, and take the gang up to a decadent lifestyle.
Left with no other choice, the unfortunate couple agrees to recognize the gang's ownership claim, and starts paying tribute.
Is the society on the island described above fair or just? I think most people's intuitions would be that it is not.
Now, imagine that several generations have passed. The islanders have expanded out onto several other islands, but the extra resources from the first island have resulted in a very uneven society. The descendants of the original gang own everything, and the descendants of the original unfortunate couple have never owned anything. They rent wherever they go, despite barely enjoying the fruits of their labor.
Did the passage of time, and inheritance of property down through the generations somehow make the society more fair and just? Would the descendants of the original unfortunate couple be wrong to want to overthrow their society and redistribute the land and other resources of society more fairly and justly?
As I see it, there are three distinct phases when it comes to thinking about property rights:
It seems to me like a lot of people are happy to start at step 3 and call it a day when it comes to how they conceptualize property, and its just distribution through society. A worker who is forced to sell their labor in order to make money to purchase the necessities of life is not being exploited no matter how little they're getting paid, and no matter what happened in steps 1 and 2 to get them to the place where they needed to sell their labor in the first place.
For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?
Locke was wrong.
Yarvin had a great quote: "Property is peace." Possession and the physical power to enforce possession are fundamental properties of reality. "Property rights" are a formalization of possession. "Property" is an agreement to write down and legitimize possession, and say that going forward property can only be transferred according to the rules (which in most cases means according to the consent of the existing owner) and not according to violence.
For someone to say, "these property rights are illegitimate" is fundamentally akin to the person saying, "I renounce the peaceful status quo; I choose war."
When formal property rights are entirely out-of-whack with the reality of possession (the case of an absentee landlord and squatters living on the land for years), that is a recipe for friction and conflict. There is no one way under natural law in which such conflicts must be resolved. Societies just have to muddle through, and usually they develop some sort of concept of adverse possession and statues of limitations.
This would constitute choosing war against the existing legal regime. Can rebellion against authority ever be just? Yes, but only in dire situations. Is it in this case? I don't know, only the people involved have enough information to decide. Here is how one moral guide (the Catechism of the Catholic Church) discusses the criteria for violent opposition to existing political authority:
Pope John XXIII in an encyclical enumerated some of these fundamental rights:
So they might be justified in rebellion. However, the rebellion would be justified not because the property rights were originally illegitimate, but because the current political status quo was depriving them of the means necessary for the proper development of life.
EDIT: if this island example is supposed to be analogy for blacks in America, I would say rebellion in the current year clearly flunks all five of the above tests for legitimacy.
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Coase theorem suggests that provided property rights are clear and transaction costs low enough property will ultimately be put to its highest and best use notwithstanding the initial distribution.
Over hundred+ years, transaction costs are low enough. I think the US bears this out.
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The older I get the more I dislike this first principles thinking based on rights and so forth. I think ultimately there is only one social law in the world, the law of the jungle. Just as any other animal, you get to keep your property if you can physically keep it. You conveniently evaded the issue of natives in USA, but that was precisely the case. Natives could not keep their land so they did not. As easy as that.
Current social and economic arrangement exists because it has legitimacy. Legitimacy is ability to keep powerful individuals from exerting violence to take what they want. You can get legitimacy by naked power, by growing the spoils so there is easier way to get ahead than using violence as well as by creating social structures regulating violent behavior or any number of other means.
This will be a tangent, but I recently watched YouTube discussion of some people from Niger where they reacted to US news reports about recent coup in that country which was described as anti-democratic and authoritarian etc. And they laughed, Niger ranks 189th out of 191 countries in the world in UN Development index, it is as poor as it can get. It does not matter if god himself was ruling that country and he was just unlucky, the result is abject poverty and failure. The regime simply has no legitimacy, it does not work and no number of "first principles" talks about democracy and freedom make any sense in Niger. If society is in ruin and ruled by illegitimate regime, is anti-social behavior really antisocial?
It works. First World now is still arguably the best place and time to live in history of mankind, even now in 2023. The current system has build up some legitimacy, it was able to grow its population along its wealth for centuries now. There may be some reasons to play on the edges and adjust things here and there, but I do not think we are close to anything that should require drastic measures like in Niger.
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If your whole post is applicable anywhere, it is applicable to pre-industrial world, where the rich were rich because they inherited land from their ancestors who arrived with William the Bastard centuries ago.
It has no meaning in industrial civilization, and even less in post-industrial one. How many of today's rich are rich because of unbroken inheritance of land stolen from Indians or Saxons?
Even in country where some of old feudal customs, traditions and wealth still survive you can, at best, justify expropriation of property of Duke of Westminster while not touching the rest of billionaires.
There is a reason why equal distribution of land, most extremely extreme extremist rebel demand for millenia, was quietly dropped back in the 19th century.
Yes, ideas of statute of limitations and adverse possession are universally considered fair and just, given that the alternative is state of eternal vendetta, eternal revenge for ancient slights that were revenge for even more ancient slights.
Land will never be without value as long as humans are entirely living on earth simply because we cannot make more of it. We only have one Earth and once all the land on earth belongs to someone else, you can’t simply get your own. How much wealth is generated by the mere fact that you own land would vary by era, but no scarce resource will ever be without value.
Yes it varies, and in our era pure ownership of land brings less wealth than ever before.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardjchang/2023/04/09/the-path-to-billions-the-industries-with-the-most-billionaires-2023/
Only 7% of world's billionaires have real estate as source of their income (and most of it is from real estate development, not raw ownership of unimproved land).
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All a statute of limitations does, conceptually, is move step 1 up to some more recent date, though. If we say that any claims older than, say, 100 years will not be recognized, then the new "foundation" of the current system of property ownership is just 100 years in the past. I think a statute of limitations can certainly be a procedurally just rule for a society to adopt, but that doesn't mean the outcomes that it produces will be substantially just.
Also, it's awfully convenient for a group in power to say, "Hey, we've gotta let bygones be bygones, alright? You wouldn't want endless vendettas and re-litigation of this whole thing every generation, would you? Good, good, I'm glad you're seeing reason, now go back to your hovel and eat your gruel."
Joe Studwell's How Asia Works makes a case that land reform (AKA "stealing" land from some people and giving it to others) was an important part of the transition to being a middle income country for many Asian countries. And we even have examples of land reform under the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, so the issue of land concentrating into a few hands and leading to issues in society is a well-trodden one. To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?
The US economy is simply not stagnating. We have the highest nominal GDP/capita worldwide among large countries, lead novel research and industries (most recently AI), and our #1 competitor is notorious for stealing our IP. The US's property economy is stagnating for all the usual YIMBY reasons and a lot more construction should be legal, but that's not at all analogous to your OP. Georgism, taken literally, means replacing all taxes with a tax on land, which I don't think is workable because a lot of important capital is entirely intangible in the form of human capital, IP, and organizations and a land tax totally misses that.
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Exactly. These were extremely poor pre-industrial countries completely unlike modern developed world.
Assuming you are in US. You waved your magic wand, expropriated all 1,3 billion acres of privately owned agricultural land and distributed it equally. Every US citizen now owns whole 3.9 acre of land.
Now what? How is poverty alleviated? How are people who "live in hovel and eat gruel" helped, what are they supposed to do with this land?
All pre-industrial, pre-modern ancient civilizations.
Demonstrate that the stagnation we see now (assuming we have stagnation) is due to poor people lacking land of average value about 4000 dollars per acre.
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The island collectively voted to transfer ten percent of the island's economic output to those who are less fortunate, funded by taxes on the more - and that doesn't include infrastructure, education, etc for the general benefit. And the original gang's descendants aren't in power anymore - they invited successive waves of immigrants, and, via free trade, transferred most of their property claims to the smartest and most industrious (or unscrupulous) of them. How many Jews, Asians, or Indians were on the island when the first nine people arrived, compared to how many are rich today?
Yeah, if we were still feudal or WASPs owned 90% of a rentier economy because they got here first, that'd be very unjust and inefficient. But that doesn't resemble the current state of America. A different argument against private ownership of the means of production - that it's exploitative or inefficient for those who come out on top of a fierce competition for profits to dictate much of the economy - at least accurately describes the thing it criticizes.
Because said free exchange has, several times over, redistributed all the capital from the original owners to those who won in a contest of merit (or underhandedness), and to whatever extent the original gang members hold more capital than some other groups, it's mostly because they have e.g. better genes or cultures - and, indeed, more recent arrivals with better genes/cultures have higher average income/wealth than the founding ethnicities.
I'd love some sort of study/analysis of whether you, in terms of current affluence in American society, are better off as the descendant of a member of the top fifth percentile in wealth of 1700's Colonial America or as a first/second-generation immigrant who is the descendant of somebody who was similarly affluent in their country of origin.
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