3.3 Do People Hold a Right to Exist Part 3

“Do people have a right to live?” People ask that question only when they have their answer, usually wrapped in fancy justifications. The blunt conservative answer is, “No!” Filmer and de Maistre demanded obedience to a Catholic God, Burke demanded only that people be Christian. Every dead firstborn Egyptian son and only Noah’s family surviving the Great Flood show Abraham’s God said, “No!” God created people. They are his to kill as he wishes. We can kill them in God’s name. Debates about who holds that authority is quibbling over creeds, doctrines, isms, and schisms.

The Grants Pass v Johnson version of this question addressed the right of people to sleep on public land. That distorted the question. By what justification do we punish people for being too poor to have a place to sleep? We have laws and private property that exist within a social contract. Different country, different laws.

Filmer, Burke, and de Maistre claim God created communities’ rules, but the laws disagree between Christian communities. So to understand the English and American legacies we must begin with the origin of Filmer’s and Burke’s community. By seizing the commons William the Conqueror set the traditions justifying the continued abuse of those without land or titles. Neither had concern about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in a world where forced servitude to the nobility fulfilled God’s Great Chain of Being. De Maistre favored Catholicism, whose demand for obedience supported the Great Chain of Being, and praised executions to enforce obedience. If the Church was homicidal…inquisitions. If a sovereign was homicidal…holocausts.

Hundreds of stable cultures never knew about Abraham’s God. So Hobbes’ claim that the community creates the sovereign and resulting laws is superior to Filmer’s. Advancing beyond Robinson Crusoe survival requires cooperation. How we handle property is part of our social contract, and Hobbes said we create a sovereign to protect that contract. That a sovereign rules by social agreement fades from mind as sovereignty becomes institutionalized. Sovereign authority is still a social contract.

Two key differences separate Filmer and Hobbes. First, people can change the social contract. Second, overthrowing a sovereign is not an attack against God. Both Catholics and Protestants hated him for that. These differences threatened the Great Chain of Being that preserved the privileges nobility enjoyed. Hobbes was the messenger, but the challenge to those privileges came in 1217 from the Charter of the Forest: the contract between crown and commoners.

According to de Glanville, England’s laws were too diverse and fundamental to be reducible to writing. England’s law grew from centuries of past behaviors and judgments. That authority existed above crown or legislature. Locke built on that common law tradition by rejecting the Great Chain of being to recognize individual sovereignty. Each person being God’s creation, no person was subordinate to another. Each person held an equal right to nature’s bounty. Rather than being revolutionary, this drew from the Charter of the Forest that protected commoners from impoverishment by the powerful.If the rich could not seize all the land and resources, certainly a place to sleep was a protected necessity.

Private property, which Rousseau ranted against, complicates individual rights. Where is the balance between protection of property and exploitation of people without wealth? How we answer whether people have a right to exist determines what we find. On the issue of homelessness conservatives focus too much on owners’ “rights” While I am biased against that answer, I think objectively we focus too little on owners’ “obligations”, and fail to understand property ownership as a community investment. Regardless, a place to sleep is a necessity. In the days of the vast frontier, in the days before zoning laws the question of a place to sleep would not make sense.

The Modern Royal Forests

Land in thirteenth century England was shared noble estate, royal forests, privately property, and the commons. Today in the United States we have public and privately held land. Vast public lands in the west are used for  cattle grazing, mimicking the English commons. Those commons will be important for understanding private property. For now, the focus remains Grants Pass and the other urban areas struggling with homelessness issues.

The first consideration is, “How different is the current homelessness problem from William the Conqueror seizing the commons?” Does it matter whether the it’s the king seizes all the land or it’s real estate speculators and rental agencies who collectively raise housing cost artificially? I believe a four percent market share by speculators gives them the power to distort prices. In England, the enclosure of the commons (transferring the land to business that would supply the factories) created massive unemployment, housing and social problems. Some United State cities are now considering forced internment if enclosed shelters.

Private property is a valuable social contract. Private property makes investments and developments which benefit the public viable. What if the use of that property offers no benefit to the community, but preserving it requires the community supporting it? Private property is a complex social contract that includes four elements to consider: the rights of ownership, foregone opportunities, externalized costs, and the Tragedy of the Commons.

Looking forward to the next post, consider these scenarios:

Shipwreck survivors reach a deserted island. The first person ashore yells, “This island is mine!”

A plane crashes in the desert. The fastest person reaches an oasis first and shouts, “This water is mine!”

A person claims a large section of forest in the wilderness, and kills the indigenous natives living there, is the land his? Perhaps he paid the government for the land. Perhaps the government killed the natives. Is that land his?

By what right do those people get to force the others to be their slaves to survive? The land is terra nullius, but none of them created what they claimed. If someone kills them, do they become king? Is any of this theft?