3.5 Do People Hold a Right to Exist Part 5

Returning to Hobbes’ “war of all against all” emphasizes a basic point. Private property is a social invention. Without a community to support and defend private property, everything would belong to whomever is strong enough to seize it. That is the legacy of every invading power that raped, enslaved, killed, looted, and conquered people and lands. The social contract is a mutual agreement protecting its members’ lives and property. In turn communities expect a Return On Investment: that their lives will be made better. Hobbes identified part of the ROI by warning that without the social contract the fruits of labor would be uncertain, there would be no culture, navigation, large construction projects, arts, etc. Hobbes’ concern was an authority to enforce the social contract not to create equality. His absolute monarch could kill anyone.¹ Locke identified private property as the product of each person’s labor. Neither Hobbes nor Locke focused on the reciprocal obligations owed to the community for protecting ownership.

Historically, the social contract has been discriminatory, arguing about who is a member of the contract. William the Conqueror and his dukes excluded commoners when granting rights and dividing the land. The U.S. Constitution excluded indigenous peoples, blacks, and women. Similarly, just as King John annulled the Charter of Rights, individuals often try to reap the benefits of private property without reimbursing the community for the costs of protecting private property. Greed and shortsightedness lead people to dismiss their reciprocal obligations, which appear as four constraints on how private property and its profits can be used.

The four constraints on the rights stemming from of private property are: (1) foregone opportunities, (2) externalized costs, (3) the “Tragedy of the Commons”, and (4) the destruction of the future. Collectively these identify why, to borrow from Justice Sotomayor, “certain rules are ‘so old and venerable’ so rooted in traditions and the consciousness of our people as to be fundamental.” This includes the right to exist.

(1) Foregone opportunities is a complex. Locke wrote that everyone had an equal right to God’s bounty. You plant the wheat or pick the apples, by your labor they become your property. From God’s bounty you are entitled to take enough for you and your family. You can’t claim all the good farm land or pick all the apples. You can’t claim all the land and leave no space for others to sleep. The natural limit Locke saw was that you could claim only as much land as you or your family could farm. No vast royal forests. Pick only the apples you could eat.

What Locke failed to resolve was surplus. Fallow land was open to terra nullius, claim by anyone who would make use of it. Surplus apples would rot. Money upended that natural limitation. If you could hoard apples and force others to buy them you turned a perishable into a nonperishable asset. The more you could hoard, the more your could reduce the apples in the market by letting part of the harvest rot in the fields, the more valuable each apple became. The more land you could buy. The more you could force others to work for you at wages below the actual value of their labor.

It gets more complicated. A vein of gold runs under small mountain. One prospector finds the vein on the north slope and files a claim. Two other miners unknowingly find the same vein on the southern and western slopes. Only the prospector who first filed the claim gets to “own” the vein. The others have to forego the opportunity. Why? None of them created the gold. None of them used the others’ knowledge. There are good reasons for enforcing the claim, but the private ownership costs the community. In this example by two families starve, or two prospectors working as employees for wages less than the “owner’s” share. By the time ownership passes to children then to a publicly traded company there is no work by the stockholders as Locke defined work, merely nonperishable assets (surplus) used to capture more nonperishable assets.

Within the community there must be mechanisms to prevent people from being stripped of their right to share in God’s bounty. The community’s social contract cannot afford to have the wealthy buy all the land to leave the poor with no place to sleep.

(2) Externalized costs: These are costs the community must bear to protect itself from the damage caused by property owners’ actions with land or businesses. Bob’s pig farm sits atop a hill. When it rains the waste washes down, destroys the ground water, and poisons his neighbors’ produce. Bob maximizes his pig farm profit by not eliminating the runoff. Fumes from John’s chemical plant destroy the paint on all the nearby cars and houses. The fumes worsen the health of people with compromised lungs.

Bob and John will use some of their extra profits to lobby against environmental regulations. Their backup argument is that despite profiting from the damage they caused, they should not have to pay more to restore the environment than the people whose cars, houses and lungs they damaged. For example: if the damage in a town of 1,000 costs $100,000 Bob and John want to pay only $100 each while keeping all the profit created by destroying the environment.

That approach repeats with medical expense. Coal companies treated black lung disease as an individual’s health issue. “You want to be a coal miner, that’s the risk.” All of the costs were dumped on the family rather than imposing safety standards on the companies. Externalized costs exist in the muddle of exempting preexisting medical conditions, high deductibles, and valueless health insurance policies that ultimately dump acute cases on emergency rooms. Those emergency room visits, that too often bankrupt people, are ultimately paid for by the community through higher doctor and hospital fees along with higher premiums to reimburse the hospitals for unpaid emergency bills.

Next: the “Tragedy of the Commons” and the destruction of the future.

 1 Private property existed before Hobbes. By the 17th century there were constraints on the King, but the theory of the formation of society begins when monarchs held absolute authority.