3.7 Do People Hold a Right to Exist? Part 7

I expected to present the constraints on private property in two posts. Although readers may have quickly understood, I prattled on because they identify the obligations that come with the protection and benefits belonging to a community provides those holding private property.

Constraint (4), the destruction of the future, is the mirror image of the Tragedy of the Commons. Both reflect economic self-interest. What changes is where we measure the consequences. Where ranchers calculate their profits by overgrazing, the destruction of the future is measured by the damage to the public when beef disappears. Whether the commons or private property, foregone opportunities prevent sustainable ranchers from using the land. Overgrazing externalizes the costs to the community by distorting the market.

Abusing these constraints is inherent to capitalism, and regulating them essential to preventing monopolies, oligopolies, or cartels. Because of their potential damage Adam Smith considered unregulated capitalism a threat to society. Because of their potential damage Friedrich Hayek accepted the regulation of business and industry while rejecting government planned economies.

Environmental protection and nonrenewable energy typify the destruction of the future. I took university level environmental biology in the mid 70’s and began teaching about its social consequences by 1981. Forty-five additional years of research supported that information. During those years pressure from wealthy political donors has lead to blocking global warming research and cutting federal investment in renewable energy.

While the U.S. supports nonrenewable energy, other nations are installing it with increasing speed. They understand that whoever develops the best technology will dominate future patents and markets. Their research blocked at home, the best U.S. scientists are increasingly being hired by other countries, including China.

The opposition to renewable energy is based on lies. In 1977 Exxon scientists established that gasoline was causing global warming.¹ Exxon knew its product damaged the planet and kept drilling. Its profit depended on ignoring its evidence. What is the cost to the public? Solar and oil/natural gas both require building facilities. The difference is fueling them: sunlight is free, you pay forever for oil and natural gas.

The resistance to renewable energy was because fossil fuels create massive wealth for those controlling oil rights. The Koch brothers² control the world’s largest reserves of dirty oil, which is costly to refine. To profit from it the demand for oil must remain high. So the brothers hired Richard Muller,³ a qualified researcher, to test whether global warming was real. Million dollars to conduct the research and several years later Muller announced, “Global warming is real.”

The brother challenged, “But is human activity the cause?”

More millions and years later,Muller announced, “Human activity, oil being central, is the cause.

The Koch brothers never mentioned the science again as they attacked renewable energy through the political efforts and campaign contributions.

To maximize profits unregulated capitalism will destroy the community that make private property possible. The costs are often hidden in short terms savings and political campaigns. The energy and water demands to bring in an AI system burden the community’s citizens who must pay to expand municipal water and electric services while the AI company get volume discounts.

How does this information defend the right to exist? The right to private property is paid for by the community. To minimize the power of private property to harm the community by shoving people aside, the community must have the power to regulate it. As Rousseau flamboyantly wrote, about the duty to the community:

“Social treaty has for its object the preservation of the contracting parties. Whoever desires this object desires also the means (of accomplishing it), and these means are inseparable from the risks, even losses.” Rousseau Social Contract

Further:

“Whoever desires to preserve his life at the expense of others, must give his life to them as necessary. Now the citizen himself; and when the prince says to him: “it is expedient for the state that you die,” he should die; for it is only upon this condition that he has lived until then in safety, and his life is no longer solely a gift from nature, but a conditional gift to the state.” Rousseau Social Contract

This binding obligation to the community is not some communist credo.

Coming out of WW II and responding to communistic doctrine, Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) became a dominant voice in America conservative economic politics. I remember being given the simplified comic book version of his credo in grade school.

The right to private property has so many social coast, it can shove so many people aside that in exchange for its financial rewards those who profit from it have an obligation to provide a minimum standard of life to everyone in the community. Hayek stated that protection of every person.

“There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”⁴

“In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing.” p 45

The ability of money to turn surplus into a nonperishable resource distorts Locke’s belief that we are all, equally entitled to share God’s bounty. “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”

Wealth passed through generations has privatized property to the point that SCOTUS criminalized poverty. Private property has no meaning without the community to protect it a corresponding obligation to preserve the community. There must be a common, a place for others. Otherwise the world becomes Hobbes’ war of all against all.

…freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of ‘base-line communism’, since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything other than whatever it takes so stay alive.

Next: The U.S. was founded on two rivers

1. Hall, Shannon “Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago” Scientific American October, 26, 2015.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago

2. Charles is the surviving brother leading Koch Industries.

3. Muller led the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project

4 Krugman, Paul “Free to Die” New York Times 15, 2011. Responding to Hayek on Social Insurance in the Washington Post

5 Graeber, David and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2021 p 66