“Socialist” Note:
The Morals of Property
1 May 2015
In his column today, Paul Krugman says that “Everyone has an ideology…” This is sloppy. Very few people have ideologies, and those who do have them are all either intellectuals, cranks, or both, ie, economists. What everyone has is an outlook, a “philosophy” — as Krugman goes on to misdefine ideology, “a view about how the world does and should work.” An ideology, in contrast, is a system of beliefs that predicts outcomes, and a true ideologue will not be defeated by facts that contradict his predictions. Ideology is yet another byproduct of the bedazzlement introduced by steam engines and power looms in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It seeks to reduce ideas to mechanisms; like all schemes from the Age of the Machine, its ultimate purpose is to eliminate labor, in this case the effort of thinking. Ideologues may appear to be brilliant, but they have extraordinarily limited minds, and their impatience with muddle and confusion is inhuman.
In an adjacent column, NDB Connolly writes brilliantly (but unideologically) about the true nature of the problem with the poor black enclaves from which so many of the recent victims of police overenthusiasm emerge.
The problem originates in a political culture that has long bound black bodies to questions of property. Yes, I’m referring to slavery.
Slavery was not so much a labor system as it was a property regime, with slaves serving not just as workers, but as commodities. Back in the day, people routinely borrowed against other human beings. They took out mortgages on them. As a commodity, the slave had a value that the state was bound to protect.
Now housing and commercial real estate have come to occupy the heart of America’s property regime, replacing slavery. And damage to real estate, far more than damage to ostensibly free black people, tends to evoke swift responses from the state. What we do not prosecute nearly well enough, however, is the daily assault on black people’s lives through the slow, willful destruction of real estate within black communities. The conditions in West Baltimore today are the direct consequence of speculative real estate practices that have long targeted people with few to no options.
Hear, hear! I hope that Mr Connolly, a black history professor at Johns Hopkins, will write more about those “speculative real estate practices.” I am pretty sure that they will turn out to be evils of Dickensian dimensions.
Bernie Sanders running for president? I don’t much see the point of the exercise, because a Democratic Party challenger who is openly “socialist” will only give the Republicans something to ramp up the hysteria with. Socialism is about as useless a word right now as elite. Just as nobody will admit to belonging to the élite (an inchoate body whose principal characteristic is that no one is elected to belong to it), so nobody knows what socialism means. It’s either very bad or uniquely just. It pertains to the ownership of property. Limits to ownership of any kind are invariably denounced and dismissed (or heralded) as “socialist.” This is a point on which the 1% and most of the 99% agree, and it explains why so many of the latter vote Republican.
In this way, socialism is a very crude ideology. It predicts that limits to ownership (of any kind) will sap commercial energies and inevitably lead to economic collapse.
I am no socialist when it comes to human beings. I’ll even let the gazillionaires hold on to their loot. But I don’t believe that corporations and other business organizations are “natural persons,” and I’m disinclined to allow them own anything — let them lease it from an entity possessed of heart and lungs — other than property that is maintained for public benefit (and not the gain of passive investors). I am turbulently opposed to the corporate ownership of “intellectual property.” Ideology has nothing to do with these ideas of mine. Far from predicting outcomes, they reflect experience. Look around you, and see if you can find an example of a corporation where workers are working harder (or over longer hours) and seeing an increase in compensation that exceeds the return on investment for shareholders.
The possession of capital is not a virtue. It is a stroke of luck. The most self-made man in the world depends on dozens of public services for his success; indeed, in the United States, there are many “public services” that benefit only the self-made. (Consider our needlessly complicated tax code, a gift to accountants and tax lawyers.) Work — industry, labor, diligent attentiveness to production; call it what you will — is a virtue. And virtue, in any well-regulated polity, ought to be rewarded. (Do you disagree?)
It may be imagined that I should like to see a lot of changes in our laws, but, once again, experience tells me that social engineering by means of legislation is effective only in communities that are regulated in order to protect the group from malefactors. (Gee, that sounds like socialism, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of Wall Street and the SEC, however.) In other words, legislation works when it formalizes and ratifies a clear public opinion. The one bad thing about the New Deal, in my view, was that, in acting ahead of public opinion, it encouraged a cynical disregard for public discussion. If the government is going to declare and enforce the right thing to do, then why bother debating it? Only fanatics and opportunists are undeterred by this hurdle.
Besides, isn’t there something ideological about legislating social improvements? If this, then that. We have seen how rarely that works out as intended. We have also seen that laws, unlike morals, lose potency over time. One generation may feel passionate about progressive laws, but the ones that follow are likely to take such laws for granted and then to find them tiresome. Laws, unlike morals, are specific to the times in which they are enacted. Thirty years ago, Kathleen participated in a review of municipal laws that was sponsored by Staten Island separatists. She discovered, among many, many other things, that movie theatres in the city were required to provide white-gloved matrons for the supervision of afternoon matinees. They probably still are. There is nothing quite so bad as a law that no one is obliged to regard.
So, cockeyed optimist that I am, I look forward to increased moral enlightenment. Gimlet-eyed materialist that I am, I think that a robust moral sense is a vital aspect of self-interest. It is the only thing that stands between us and our brutish anxieties. Like Confucius, I believe in few laws, most of them aimed at punishing the untrustworthy.
But I’d be glad indeed to see the laws that enable the speculative exploitation of the poor wiped off the books.