The Significance of Property - Again

Bruce Web is in debate with me HERE: and we both are stuck in conceptual confusion about the meaning of property – is it purely a legal term, distinguished by its codification by jurists and authors, or was it a quite unintended development by unknown people in the very distant past of pre-history, and to which the codifiers and the great judicial minds came much, much later, long after property-rights were practised and enforced by local violence?

The attempt, below, is to set the scene so that we may move on to the relatively short, six-centuries of struggle for Liberty (since medieval times), which manifested itself in such isolated, though significant events – in the consequences they had eventually – as, in England, Magna Carta (and the declaration of Arbroath in Scotland).

This was followed by a long, slow and gradual process from which liberty took its modern forms in the separation of powers, trial by juries, independence of the judiciary (for life and good behaviour), Habeas Corpus, the executive elected by universal suffrage and subject to an independent parliament, with powers of impeachment of the executive, freedom of speech, separation of Church/Mosque/Temple from the State, and rights of assembly. (I outline these aspects in chapter 16 of my “Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy”, 2005, Palgrave Macmillan.)

Property is a human phenonmenon, which in my view pre-dates legal forms and norms which came to be associated with it in recorded history (c.8,000 ya). In the forest, aeons ago, while Homo sapiens were forming through the speciation of the Hominines (from c. six million years ago, right through to the appearance of the first, fully humans c.200,000 years ago), primates were distinguishable from those that shaped and used stone-tools and those that didn’t (broadly speaking). At some time, some humans discovered the use and management of fire, learned to make covering using animal skins and vegetation, and to select and use natural materials for digging, processing, decorating and, on occasion, protecting themselves (and attacking others).

These skills were spread widely among human groups and for most groups these technologies and the knowledge that enabled learning, while relatively sophisticated compared to other species, were the norm (with languages) for all humans for much of prehistory.

Some tribes actually ‘lost’ some of these skills, examples being the tribes of Fuegans of South America, and those Aborigines cut-off in the island of Tasmania with rising seas levels, which tribes reverted to even more primitive living than their ancestors in the rest of South America and Australia, both of which were described by Europeans who visited them in the 18th–19th century, as the “brutes”.

The important thing is that while racists took the 'brutes' as representative of all tribe cultures, they were in fact the exceptions. But they had no notions of property as a possession and appear to have ‘lost’ the basic knowledge of subsistence-craft too; the majority of the world’s tribes practised early notions of property, albeit of a very primitive quality.

Property, through most of its pre-history, and the first millennia of recorded history, had no connection with its legal forms which came much, much later. Quoting legal ideas – early Roman, Norman, English or French law and such like - is not appropriate.

Our focus should be, for these discussions, on the role that property ‘mine’, ‘ours’, ‘their’s, and ‘yours’ – played in practice, long, long before literate societies recorded even crude details of its manifestations.

We should also not get hung up on later ideas about the lineage of property in its proto-modern forms. Nobody knows which tribes first ‘discovered’, ‘invented’, or ‘conceptualised’ forms of property. We can trace only the slimmest of evidence of the evolution of property (‘meum and tuum’; mine and thine), mainly by archaeological stone remains and clues from folk myths (which may be wildly inaccurate). It is almost certain that no one tribe of humans (or race groups, black, white, yellow, brown) can make a claim to be the originator. Stone tools were common in East Africa from long ago.

We do know that somewhere, sometime, and by somebody, property appeared from human action, not by design, somebody’s genius, or a ‘great leader’. It is the distinguishing characteristic of humanity; in its physical forms, it separates us from all other primates, past and present. It may have been a mixed blessing.

Property enabled the alpha males and females of a tribe to claim and exploit its territory and the people within it (the latter, a long established behaviour set among other primates); similarly within families, with allies, and individuals as the benefits of property (as a resource also to ensure obedience) became manifest.

Access to subsistence was related to the evolution of property (better tools, easily carried, replaced quickly; larger domains, natural obstacles to movement overcome; baskets for carrying food, and babies; heavier clubs and longer wooden poles to deal with predators; and so on).

With better and regular subsistence, life-spans increased, and populations increased too. Of course, all this was net of local losses from bloody conflict. Successful tribes grew larger, more mobile, more dangerous to distant neighbours – and their womenfolk – and the long journey to property in the forms of herding and farming began, not in a straight line, and not always in one direction.

John Locke summed it up in the phrase: “In the beginning, all the world was America”, using North America’s native tribes as the standard mode of subsistence of pre-Mediterranean, Egypt, Babylon, India, China, and Europe (and for non-Roman parts of 17th-century Europe, including the Highlands of Scotland).

Property distinguished the property-less ‘brutes’ from the property-abundant humans, especially after the division of labour and the “propensity to truck, barter, and trade” became established.

The correlation between property and rising total subsistence is manifest. Note, a rising total GDP did not mean, necessarily, a rising per capita GDP for long periods; per capita GDP remained static mostly, including from the 5th to the 15th century following the fall of Rome (except in plague years).

Our ancestor’s rulers diverted considerable subsistence into ‘civilised’ artefacts in stone buildings, walls and roads, and all the trappings of military might, which sometimes, along with plagues and famines, destroyed the very basis of their ‘civilisation’. All that dreary experience of history changed with the sustained rise in per capita incomes and, of course, total GDP from about 1800 onwards.

Should we continue our discussions, the above, very roughly, is where I am coming from conceptually.

Art Carden on Why Capitalism is Unpopular

Art Carden writes in The Market Oracle (HERE):

His article, “Why Is Capitalism So Unpopular?” [abridged drastically below – follow the link] is a tour de force, an imaginative explanation that fits the question with a literate, convincing, and an honest answer. Read the sample and then follow the link.

“Henry Hazlitt once said that good ideas have to be relearned every generation. Among the intellectuals of our time, capitalism is wildly unpopular. This in spite of the fact that it is the only social system that has permitted prosperity and flourishing.

I think there may be a more straightforward explanation that plays a role in their dismissal of capitalism. To a "man of system," to borrow Adam Smith's terminology, capitalism just isn't that exciting. Participants in the market economy are wholly beholden to consumer wants. The academics envision a grand world, where Great Men fight Great Wars, periodically inventing Great Things or developing Great Ideas. Instead, the market provides us with incremental processes, which expend enormous piles of resources, in a quest to make better Triscuits. It is hardly the stuff of high drama, to say nothing of Great History.

The idea that great statesmen are not needed — to say nothing about being wanted — can no doubt be galling to many who decry capitalism for its excesses. For the people who derive their self-worth from being paternalistic, this is a sorry state of affairs indeed.

According to the do-gooders whom Adam Smith called "men of system," the average person is like a piece on a chessboard, to be arranged at the whim of a supervirtuous planner. The planner, who ignores the fact that each of the pieces has (as Smith put it) its own "principles of motion," does his best to orchestrate a game according to his own rules. Dissenters are not tolerated.

Yet people are not chess pieces, to be moved around at will. They are living, breathing, acting, thinking, rational beings with rights and dignity. Respect for their humanity rules out interventions by do-gooders, no matter what their intentions. The result of denying people their fundamental freedoms can be terrible, as the horrors of humanity's 20th-century experiments with collectivism have shown.

Comment
There is much more in Art Carden’s article. I strongly recommend that you read it in full.

Market economies work better than their alternatives and better, in my view than so-called “free markets” where businesses are aided by friends (and, alas, sometimes by clients) in public office. Shutting down state departments of trade and industry, and all lobbying organizations, followed by barring all lobbyists, would be a start towards freer markets.

Of course there is an essential role for government where necessary; defence, justice, public works and public institutions, education and health funding (not always by public provision, but always by voucher schemes), necessary regulation aligned with justice and the separation of powers, and the promotion and defence of personal liberty.

Art Carden’s article deserves the Lost Legacy September Prize, with bar and oak leaf clusters. I for one am truly impressed.

Liberty More Important than Democracy

Samuel Gregg writes in Witherspoon Institute Blog, (Public Discourse, Ethics, Law and the Common Good) HERE

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He authored On Ordered Liberty and The Commercial Society. His Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy, will be published in early 2010.

“Reflecting upon the expression political economy might not be a bad place to start for those interested in rethinking economics’ foundations in a post-crisis era. In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the term acquires three meanings.

The first is the commonly accepted positive sense of political economy as the scientific study of “the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.” More broadly, however, Smith’s political economy also embraces the study of the interrelationship between economic theory and the political ideas and movements of a given time. Lastly, there is the sense in which Smith understood political economy in terms of what we today call economic policy: “a branch of the science of the statesman or legislator” whose objective was “more properly to enable [people] to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and . . . to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient to the public services.”

On one level, the Wealth of Nations does involve abstract analysis of economic life. Smith carefully dissects the claims of prevailing economic thought, presents a fresh theory about how wealth is created, and elaborates on what should be done in policy-terms if wealth creation and society’s overall material enrichment are deemed desirable. But in doing so Smith also attempts to develop a powerful normative argument for an economy based around private property, free competition, and limited government over and against the mercantilist systems that dominated eighteenth-century Europe.

As the economic historian Emma Rothschild reminds us, Smith sees economic liberty as something to be approved and pursued partly because of its capacity to liberate people from many forms of oppression. For Smith, the move from mercantilist to market economies was not only a matter of following the promptings of scientific economic reasoning focused on wealth-creation. Smith also regards market economies as superior to previous economic arrangements on grounds of the greater efficiency and liberty they accorded to ever-widening numbers of people to seek human fulfillment.

Unfortunately, with some notable exceptions, this Smithian conception of political economy did not persist after Smith’s death in 1790. By John Stuart Mill’s time, political economy was being defined as studying the behavior of homo economicus, a creature whose nature is far removed from that of the more complex, not-always rational being found in Smith’s writings. From here, it was only a short step towards the reduction of much economics to a branch of applied mathematics, however valiantly this trend has been resisted by the Austrian and Public Choice schools.”

Comment
I find myself in broad agreement with this part of Samuel Gregg’s analysis and I commend his approach to you. I would add that I think liberty in Smith’s terms is more important than democracy as represented by mere elections which may be held regularly but are often, across the world, well short of being open, transparent, and an accurate reflection of the free choices of independent electors ( see Iran recently, as an example).

Liberty expressed by free speech, an independent judiciary, trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, rights of assembly, policing as a service - not a force of the politics of the government, and personal rights codified in law, is rare enough (as it has always been), and when its lack is covered up by farcical elections it is a disappointment for optimists for the human condition and a comfort for cynics and oppressors.

Adam Smith on What Needed to be Done

‘sposton’, a commentator, responds to Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner, in a column on the recession and when it will end (recovery in the summer, and ending in 2014, says, Krugman), in the Huffington Post HERE.

‘Sposton’ broadens the discussion:

‘My friend, you know very little about moral philosophy and its history. Did you know that Adam Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher? And so were many other early liberal economists. Smith's never reduced himself to a mere economist in your sense of the word. Your statements are the end result of modern reductionism than liberal economists. Our current situation is precisely the result of this kind of thinking where one discipline is utterly divorced from another and all divorced from any moral or ethical anchor. Without such an anchor our knowledge is utterly devoid of any wisdom and that is what our world need now more anything else. This methodology may have brought some good results in science but on the other hand it has diminished us all.

In its own little thought universe all you have said makes some sense. The problem lies in the nature of your universe. It belongs more to the domain of our problems and less so to the domain of solutions.’

Comment

I have no idea who ‘Sposton’ is or what else he/she stands for. Another commentator lists all of Krugman’s impressive awards beside a Nobel Prize, but while I acknowledge them and Krugman’s achievements, I am sceptical of their relevance when precise dates are given for a global event of the current magnitude.

If Krugman is correct, we shall stand in awe; if his precision is wrong, we can expect concurrent explanations from him about ‘surprises’, ‘lags’ and such like. We certainly will not hear his silent retirement from the prediction business.

This partly is why I noted ‘Sposton’s’ comment. Moral philosophy in Smith’s day encompassed many areas of science beyond political economy, or ‘police’ as it was known in the 18th century.

In Smith’s case, it included jurisprudence (how civil societies ‘ought’ to be governed – he wrote but did not publish a book on the subject; it was burned on his order in 1790), but he saved the philosophical method, published posthumously in 1795, and known as his ‘History of Astronomy’). He also wrote on history and the history of politics, and how the range of human behaviour influenced events in all their complexity.

Above all, Adam Smith did not make predictions about the future; his was a backward-looking appreciation of the past and a studied analysis of the present.

He did not say that everybody pursuing their self interest would necessarily produce an outcome beneficial to society; a ludicrous proposition as any acquaintance with history – of the present! – would confirm. It was human intervention, for good or ill intentions, that creates the very situation that policy makers, and individuals following their self interests, try to improve (often making them worse in the process too).

Adam Smith did not recommend sitting back and doing nothing – the logical advice if he had the views attributed to him by modern economists. Wealth Of Nations was a critique of the then political economy of the governments of Britain since the 16th century, know to Smith as mercantile political economy (‘mercantilism’ is a word, also attributed to Smith, first applied in the late 19th century; Smith died in 1790).

If he had believed that self-interest was enough he would have had no need to spend 12 years writing Wealth Of Nations!

Smith’s critique was aimed at the high policy levels of legislators, and those who influenced them, trying to persuade them to desist from policies that slowed down the growth path to the spread of opulence.

In these policies, ‘merchants and manufacturers’, were complicit; indeed, their self interests made them so; by narrowing the competition they widened the market for their goods and raised prices against consumers, many already on the bread line. Their self-interests did not benefit society; Smith knew this and said so, explicitly.

Only modern economists, Krugman included, teach a model of society without humans, who supposedly are rational maximisers, harmoniously creating an optimum output; or, in the sophisticated version (I am being a touch sarcastic) would be doing so if only government did not intervene at all.

It is the moral corruption of the players, legislators and influencers, producers and consumers, alike that leads to a far less sub-optimal outcome, precisely because self-interest, while the powerful driving force behind human endeavour, is best not left completely alone.

If moral teaching is not enough, which was the subject of Adam Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (though its ideas were taught by Smith alongside his lectures on ‘police’ and civil government at Glasgow University in 1751-64), as Smith believed it was not, then a strong system of justice was essential, as well as a culture of Liberty, enforced by law.

Smith was not a utopian. He did not believe that there was a ‘master plan’, which if adopted would change the world towards perfection. Far from it; he denounced such ‘plans’ as the dangerous illusions of ‘men of system’, arrogant in their approach to society.

Smith took human nature as it was, pointed out several major areas where what was going on was deleterious to society (protectionism, monopolies, ‘jealousy of trade’, wars beyond the needs of defence against invasion, legal restraints on labouring people ‘combining' to raise wages or stop them being cut, while employers could ‘combine’ to resist their employees, laws preventing anybody but members of ancient Guild monopolies from exercising applying their labour as they wished, laws preventing working men seeking employment elsewhere than in the parish they lived in, and national policies that failed to educated children in ‘reading, writing, and account’ (girls were not educated at all, except in the middle class and above), and the absence of palliative care for persons afflicted with leprosy and ‘other loathsome diseases’.

In all this, Smith did not expect sweeping changes or any immediate changes. He set out only to persuade; not to impose. He did not believe that international free trade would ever be enacted, nor that slavery would ever be abolished (it’s still operating today in some countries), nor that the world would become full of ‘sweetness and light’. But it could be improved, at the margin, if legislators and those who influenced them were persuaded to do so.

Adam Smith on Liberty

Today’s Tomas Estrada-Palma Message (‘I am the great grandson of Don Tomás Estrada-Palma, the first elected president of Cuba, 1902-06). HERE:

Preface to the Post:

‘Tomás Estrada-Palma: LocaAnnapolis, MD, United States’

‘Let entrepreneurs into Cuba, keep the tax low and watch the economic explosion happen. Whenever there are more jobs than workers the wages and benefits are driven upward. That's because entrepreneurs compete for a limited supply of workers. Those who lose the competition will not be as successful because they can't grow without more laborers. Finally, the first modern society on the planet will be populated by people who are neither slaves to the pharaohs of industry nor government. Cuban workers will have the best job security in the world!'

The Post:

Stock Manipulation (23 April)

‘What's going to happen? Adam Smith wrote that the invisible hand of the marketplace always corrects the price of everything eventually. What the Treasury Department is futilely attempting to do is to re-inflate the stock market bubble. They will fail dramatically and very soon. The bubble is going to pop and the drop will be much more significant than if the government would have just left things alone.’

Comment
I posted the Preface because for its contents, because Tomas Estrada-Palma, deserves to be saluted and respected by all who believe in Liberty.

His later post is less clear. Adam Smith did NOT write that ‘the invisible hand of the marketplace always corrects the price of everything eventually’. Smith wrote that markets determine the ‘the price of everything eventually’.

There were no invisible hands involved in Adam Smith’s writings about markets, as can be seen in Books I and II of Wealth Of Nations.

That is a myth invented in the middle of the 20th century by modern economists (download my paper, ‘Adam Smith and the invisible hand: from metaphor to myth’, from ASLL Home Page: click where invited to do so).

Tomas is correct: ‘the Treasury Department is futilely attempting … to re-inflate the stock market bubble.’ And burdening current and future generations with immense debts that will have to be repaid from taxation.

On Cuba’s future, I am sure it would be in safe hands if its people elect a (small) government to be ‘at peace, introduce easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice’ (Adam Smith, 1755).

The best response to Castroism is not bloody revenge nor mass persecution of his acolytes: let the people create prosperity based on justice and competitive markets. Keep an eye out for monopolistic tendencies and special pleading for privilege; stamp out corruption, fraud and favours.

And above all secure the people with Liberty.

Thought For The Day

‘What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue? All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these. Whatever beauty, therefore, can belong to civil government upon account of its utility, must in a far superior degree belong to these. On the contrary, what civil policy can be so ruinous and destructive as the vices of men? The fatal effects of bad government arise from nothing, but that it does not sufficiently guard against the mischiefs which human wickedness gives occasion to’.
[Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments: TMS IV.2.1: 187; 1872 edition: pp 165-66]

Comment
Adam Smith was quite right. Utopian proposals and plans for reform that do not take account of human nature are prone to derision, if advocated, and to disappointment if implemented, and the unintentional results are obvious for all to see and suffer from.

As neat a description of party politics as could be offered for the many failings of governments. The only barrier to ‘human wickedness’ (which covers a multitude of crimes of commission and omission) is that of the system of justice, separate from government, and safeguarded by Liberty – democracy is a necessary but not sufficient condition (they ‘elect’ cruel dictators don’t they?).

Adam Smith on Liberty

Doug Thorson writes The Freedom factory (‘life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Cash’) Here:

“Adam Smith, who lived in the eighteenth century, provided the philosophical and most systematic arguments for the underpinnings of a laissez-faire economic system in his book “The Wealth of Nations.” Smith makes the argument that it was only the interference of government which disrupted the natural working of economic society and created poverty and decay rather than abundance and harmony.

As Smith explained:
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.

The drive for greater government regulation is the drive toward increased poverty, unemployment and the loss of liberty. With the Obama administration pushing an ever expanding federal government plan to take control of our financial institutions, health care system, the auto industry, and its attack on free speech, the time is now to clearly articulate the differences between free markets and free people, and government administered markets and government control of our lives.”

Comment
Smith was more ‘nuanced’ (as is the fashion in these matters) about the causes of wealth creation (poverty is not ‘caused’; it is a consequence of the absence of wealth). Smith did not ‘underpin’ laissez-faire as an economic system in Wealth Of Nations. That is an ideological myth.

He wrote a critique of the existing political economy of the British state and, by implication, of other European states. He did not dismiss all government actions and interventions; his critique focused on specific government policies, some in place since the 16th century, summarized as mercantile political economy, and which directly hindered the creation of wealth and thereby allowed poverty to continue for a segment of the population.

These mercantile policies included ‘jealousy of trade’ against neighbours (who were Britain’s customers), wars that projected political interferences in continental countries and not to promote legitimate defence interests of an island society, erroneous policies of hoarding gold and silver which led to tariffs and prohibitions on wealth creating trade, laws and statutes than inhibited capital and labour mobility (the Town Guilds, Corporate monopolies of wholesale and retain trades, Apprentices Statutes, and Settlements Acts, all of which were promoted by legislators and those who influenced them, and, the roles of Chartered Trading Monopolies (the East India Company) and the foundation of colonies in North America, which grossly distorted wealth creation through trade monopolies, excess profits, and expensive wars to maintain, well beyond any benefit to Britain.

In response to these inhibitions by government policies, Smith advocated a substantial role for government in funding the infrastructure investment across Britain in project to ‘facilitate commerce’, such as in a national road-building programme, the creation of safe harbours for trade and travel, canals between population centres, the paving of large towns, street lighting, sewage and waste disposal, and the proper administration of ‘police’ (a broader term than modern day usage, which included ensuring the appropriate supply and regular availability of subsistence for town populations.

He also advocated national education facilities in ‘little schools’ in every parish to educate every child to ‘read, write, and do account’, preferably with some geometry in place of Latin because such skills would be more suitable for young adults looking for work. He also made a little noticed case for government palliative care for people suffering leprosy and ‘other loathsome diseases’ (a provision with large future cost implications).

Smith saw competition as the major stimulus for commerce in place of monopoly and regarded many ‘merchants and manufacturers’ as a barrier to the growth of commerce from the attempts to lobby legislators and those who influenced them for trade protection and special privileges.

Doug Thorson may not appreciate the extent to which Adam Smith was not an advocate of laissez-faire as advanced by some the French économistes or Physiocrats. In 17th-18th-century France, local trade markets were highly regulated by central government and the inspectors appointed by Government interfered closely in the day-to-day running of businesses, large and small, to a degree unknown in Britain. Their cry for ‘laissez nous faire’ had a different basis to Smith’s advocacy of commercial markets where possible, government intervention where necessary.

The ‘folly of human laws’ was not advanced by Adam Smith as a case for no, or limited, laws. He insisted on instruments of justice as a foundation for human society, but he knew, as we do, that governments pass laws regularly, some of which are manifest follies in the consequences, and which are the faults of the use of political processes for sectional interests.

That is why Liberty, enshrined in law and practice, is a foundation for the creation of wealth.

A Theorist Writes - Badly

“john joseph jay" posts (14 February) on Summer patriot, winter soldier HERE:

demise of democracy? of the nation state? the demise of the democratic nation state?

“in addition, the nation state required the birth of a man seldom mentioned anymore, let alone studied, which is indeed unfortunate, as his thought was a vital step in establishing the intellectual premises towards creating and understanding the personal and economic freedoms underpinning the democratic state, and the process by which individual decision making powered economies and political groupings. i speak of course, of adam smith. his ideas and analysis are literally, in my view, the underpinnings of the view that individuals may determine their futures without recourse to higher political structures, and that, indeed, for humanity to flourish individuals must follow their own individual paths, guided by their prescriptions and not the notions of others. adam smith coined the concept of “the unseen hand” as guiding the progress of societies, in one bold indefinable stroke obviating the need for paternalistic oversight of human affairs in politics and economics. his is a lesson apparently soon forgotten.”

Comment
An example of uniquely poor use of the English language as she is written.

It has a theatrical and affected prose style too: “the nation state required the birth of a man seldom mentioned anymore, let alone studied, which is indeed unfortunate”.

What is the science involved in a ‘nation state’ ‘requiring’ a specific birth ‘of a man’ to occur and this event occurring?

The answer is mumbo jumbo, mysticism, not science.

Adam Smith was conceived by his parents sometime in October 1722. His father was ill; he died in January 1723 (his Will is dated November 1722). Short of belief in an immaculate conception, that the future of the ‘nation state’ depended on a string of events implausibly linked to the fate of a nation or the world, is wildly improbable, and sheer hyperbole.

His was in inauspicious start; young Adam was a ‘sickly child’, tenderly cared for by his widowed mother.

“his thought was a vital step in establishing the intellectual premises towards creating and understanding the personal and economic freedoms underpinning the democratic state.”

Again ahistorical misunderstanding. Adam Smith wrote of Liberty, not democracy. He didn’t have a vote under the existing franchise in Scotland.

“his ideas and analysis are literally, in my view, the underpinnings of the view that individuals may determine their futures without recourse to higher political structures, and that, indeed, for humanity to flourish individuals must follow their own individual paths, guided by their prescriptions and not the notions of others.”

That may well be the ‘view’ of ‘John Joseph Jay’ about the most ‘mentioned’, discussed and ‘studied’ moral philosopher of all today. Never a day goes by in which Adam Smith is not written about somewhere in the world’s media – I know, I read most of it; sometimes 40 or more articles are published every day across all times zones.

“adam smith coined the concept of “the unseen hand” as guiding the progress of societies”

I won’t bother exposing this myth on this occasion. Down load from Lost Legacy's Home Page my paper 'Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: from metaphor to myth' (clikc on the red print)

John Joseph Jay has a theory; it’s quite long and, if you are interested, you should follow the link; its, er, more than quite long.

Property is a Necessary But Not Sufficient Condition for Liberty

Marc Lombardo, writing in The Public Sphere, 14 September, (HERE):

“Your Government Lied to You. So What?”

“Adam Smith made the economic significance of Locke’s notion of private liberty more explicit, showing that the concepts of property and liberty are fundamentally intertwined. Smith argued that even the public good (i.e., what is best for all) is most effectively and efficiently pursued only when private interests are left unchecked by any external influences whatsoever (most especially, that of the government). The liberals defined private liberty as existing only to the extent that the government did not interfere with it. This in turn required that private liberty could only be protected if and when private individuals came together collectively in order to limit the exercise of governmental power upon their lives. As such, from the liberal viewpoint, the ability to do what one wants in one’s private life depends entirely upon the public and cooperative practice of constantly and diligently surveiling and criticizing everything that the government does. The active public manifestation of the distrust of government is the basis for all other private liberties.”

Comment
Marc Lombardo makes an assertive statement about the role of property in history but misleads about the views of Adam Smith when he ties property to liberty as if one was an essential component of the other.

Property was certainly a decisive break with past when individuals regarded patches of territory as belonging to them and not to others, and enforced their claims with violence. Without property there would have been no civilisation to follow, though, of course the former did not lead to the latter in one, or a few steps, or in a short period of time, nor did it do so everywhere.

Adam Smith saw the origins of civil government in the enforcement of property rights, and in consequence, the denial of property rights to others (the majority) (Lectures in Jurisprudence, 1763). Shepherding and farming could not develop without property in land and the flocks and plants on it (the Cain and Abel parable is one example from written history, many millennia after property first developed in the Near East from 11,000 years ago).

Property came first; liberty in its modern sense came later, much later. But without property there would have been no meaning to liberty, because property created the possibility of surplus over individual needs that could feed much larger populations and employ stone builders that are the familiar indicators of the presence of superior technologies. This was Smith’s point in his comparison of the effects of the division of labour between the ‘savage’ societies of North America and Africa, and those of North-Western Europe in the 18th century.

Liberty evolved in the crises of governments. Turbulence – or politics- features in all governments; competition within and among the elites is endemic. Those further down the hierarchy seek to influence or replace those further up. The tensions among property owners and among governments are the stuff of history. Long periods –even millennia – without other than cyclical change are the norm. Liberty is not a norm, but it is an improvement on what goes without it.

In Britain’s case, the emergence of liberty is documented in Smith’s account in his Lectures in Jurisprudence and to a lesser degree in his Wealth Of Nations. From the struggle with the Barons, a king conceded the provisions of Magna Carta. In the fates of successive monarchs, sovereigns conceded the veto of parliaments over their spending. So, even with highly restricted constitutional changes and restricted franchises, liberty percolated downwards, slowly and gradually, towards the majority – eventually.

That is why Marc Lombardo takes the wrong interpretation of the relationship between property and liberty. Property rights are one, not the sole, manifestation of the prelude to liberty. Property rights emerged in various guises throughout and across the world without developing ideas or practices of liberty, and even in the majority of the most developed of Western European societies, and in China and India (two colossi economies for many millennia) there was hardly any signs of liberty emerging throughout their histories up to Smith’s time.

Transposing the struggle for liberty solely to the rights of property owners against those of civil governments is more an indicator of modern versions of property rights associated to some extent with libertarianism and with far right politics.