There is something very curious about the abstract notion of property that is at the heart of political liberalism and liberal democracy. But before I get into that let me state my terms first.
Liberalism, I would like to argue, is based on three notions (and I am drawing this from the historian Fernande Roy and her discussion of liberalism in her own work).
1.) Liberty 2.) Equality 3.) Property
Liberty rests in the individual foremost. This means that the individual functions as her own authority. This also means that government must be formed by the consent of the governed.
Equality is subordinate to liberty because it functions as the de facto (and somtimes de jure) recognition that all individuals in a society are equal before the law. But equality is contingent upon individual liberty.
And then there is property. Property, I would like to argue (again following the example of others before me like Roy and Ian McKay) is coupled with liberty. Liberty and property are perhaps inseparable because a person’s right to property is indistinguishable from her role as her own authority. In other words, because my right to work, to own and to acquire wealth is the basis of my own authority to govern myself (and to choose) government requires my consent to act on my behalf. I am an individual and a citizen because of my property in my own person and once upon a time because of my wealth. If you look back at the history of liberal democracies like Canada, Britain and the United States you will find that each one had a property requirement for the franchise.
But this is where the irrationality comes in. In liberal democratic theory we speak of the sanctity of property but we do not speak of the condition of property. So, for instance, I may have a right to own land and that land’s value as a liquid asset may be assigned by its exchange value in the marketplace, but liberal theory is not concerned with the condition of the land itself. In other words, the value of my land is not necessarily determined by how abused it is, how infertile it has become, or how degraded I’ve rendered it. And there is no guarantee that the damage I’ve inflicted on the ecology will show up (at least for a time) in the valuation of lands adjacent or downstream from my own. (See Ted Steinberg’s Slide Mountain for an interesting discussion about this.)
To give an even more specific example that speaks to a contemporary problem unknown even one hundred years ago: I own a farm and it borders a stream that is a tributary of the drainage system in my state. By stripping my property of the trees and brush along the banks of that stream I have made it easier for the fertilizers I am using on my acreage to seep into the stream. One of the chief sources of water pollution and damaging trophic algal blooms is fertilizer which raises the nitrogen content in water acts as a nutrient rich feed for algae.
So, my property might be valuable because of the price-per-acre it commands in the real estate market, but the pollution of water sources (especially downstream) is not taken into the assessment of that property. But what is the actual condition of my property if I have stripped it of trees and allowed the pollutants from my farm to spread through the drainage basin and damage the larger ecosystem? The condition of the property, if you look at the capitalization of my farm, appears to be fine. But the condition of my property so far as my neighbours are concerned and concerning the larger ecology is decidedly poorer than when I purchased it. Perhaps this reality will enter into the real estate market at some point. But the actual condition of the property as it goes to market is, I would argue, artificial and inflated.
Land is but one example. What about the condition of workers? I can make a similar argument. I own a factory that is highly profitable because of the low overhead costs involved in keeping wages and benefits down, but the value of the factory is assessed not on the impact this has on the workers themselves but on the overall profit/loss calculations of my business. This impacts the market value of my business and its stock value because high profits impress investors and boost investor confidence. Interestingly, my business is highly ecological because of its impact on the stock exchange and even the job employment and GDP numbers, but that ecology is measured through statistics and money; it is not measured in bodies and lives.
What about the condition of the workers and their property in their own bodies? If they are overtired, over-stressed and prone to injury or illness because of those conditions then the condition of their property in their own person is surely degraded. Sure, they could invest in my company (if they have disposable income) and thus possibly increase their monetary wealth, but the condition of their bodies and psychology is degraded.
If we use examples like these and then extrapolate this to something we call “society,” or something we could call “ecology” then we begin to see (I believe) the irrationality of a model of property that sees only market exchange value and does not calculate or consider “non-market” values such as health and sustainability unless those issues are re-introduced into the marketplace by the loss of working hours due to ill health, stress leave, injury or through the destruction of lands and resources needed for production. Usually by that point much has already happened and the solution profferred is not systematic but is instead a quick and targeted fix designed to salvage or patch up the visible problem.
I think this is highly irrational. Human beings, for one thing, cannot (and should not) calculate their self-worth on the basis of their exchange value. Surely human beings should not have to subordinate their health and well-being to so-called “market forces.” After all, regulatory laws were designed to curb this practice. And we certainly should not look at the natural world only in terms of exchange value because this allows for widespread abuse and destruction based on profit returns and investor confidence and not on the long-term viability of our enterprises or even the short-term cost to the conditions of the people and animals (and lands and resources) put to work.
The problem with this irrational approach to property is we have developed a constricted and sterile definition of markets and market values. The most valuable parts of markets are the vibrant and living beings and their ideas and expressions that are exchanged there. Our current approach is too statistical, too abstract and too detached from lived and embodied realities to be considered even remotely rational.
Note: See Fernande Roy’s Progrès, harmonie, liberté : le libéralisme des milieux d’affaires francophones de Montréal au tournant du siècle (Montréal: Boréal, 1988) or Ian McKay’s essay on “The Liberal Order Framework” in Jean François Constant and Marcel Ducharme’s Liberalism and Hegemony : Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
Jeremy Nathan Marks
