What Adam Smith Actually Said

Gary Clausheide writes in The Energy Bulletin HERE

Yes, It’s yet another example of a ‘plan’ to change the world by design, based on an account of history from earliest times written to derive the author’s assertions about what’s wrong with the world, including the unsurprising assertion/assumption that ‘them’ (the men with the power, however defined) consciously did what they did and the rest of ‘us’, or at least our ancestors, put up with whatever ‘they’ inflicted and inflict upon ‘us’. In short, the history of the human species has been a conspiracy of the few against the many.

But worry not, Gary Clausheide, has investigated the past and derived the ‘solution’ in something he calls ‘community’. Hence, his post:

“The Importance of envisioning ‘community” (part 3)

I shall take two examples of his ‘history”, regarding the views of Adam Smith (read his long post at the link for much, much more):

“Adam Smith said that the purpose of government was to protect property. Apparently the property of the wealthy is much more important than the homes, farms, and jobs of ordinary people.”

Comment
Adam Smith did indeed include in his lectures on jurisprudence, of which we have two sets of students’ notes (published in 1978 by Oxford University Press and later in a cheap edition by Liberty Press in 1982 – see Amazon) a discussion on the origins of civil governments, in which he summarized their role to protect the rich from the poor.

In those first ages of the new means of subsistence as some human groups left the old mode of subsistence, derived from the forest and the open plains (scavenging, hunting and gathering) to new modes, such as shepherding and more recently, farming, Smith identified an inescapable necessity, that of protecting the product of the labours of some people (but not those who persisted in the older ways) from the inevitable depredations of people wandering into the feeding areas of the herds and the planted fields of the farmers.

Those families who laboured to catch, coral, and consume from their herds had to prevent their herds wandering away, or being taken away by other families. The first property was that which belonged to the labourer. When a group of families enacted that idea they asserted the first acts of civil government – to protect those with from those without.

Those families who cleared the land of trees, plants, stones, and debris, to plant seeds, to tend them, and to harvest them, had to prevent animals and humans wandering across their lands and eating or destroying growing plants. In less than a day, either trespass could wipe out months of hard labour, from which those dependent on future food stock could starve.

The parable of Cain and Abel in Genesis is a tale of a clash between a farmer and a shepherd that echoes down the ages.

Group-approved conduct and group disapproved breaches of such agreed conduct also bound the members of a hunter-gatherer group. The new forms of subsistence that appeared along today’s Turkey/Syria boarder area 11,000 years ago, which spread from 8,000 years ago into Europe, gradually formed more complex civil codes and the associated apparatus of civil government.

Those families that had adopted the new subsistence modes became wealthier than those that had stayed as hunter-gatherers and those who occupied the fringes of the new modes as occasional labourers, supplementing their reliance and access to both old and new modes (I take account of Diamond's critique. He missed the point that for those early herders and farmers, living at the end of the Ice-Age. it was adapt to new modes or die).

By wealth, Smith, as always, meant the “annual output of the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life”. It had nothing to do with today’s meanings of wealth; in those days of which Smith speaks, wealth was what was created by the labour of those who undertook the work to make the new modes viable.

Gary Clausheide appears not to have understood these points in his assertions. Of course, from these early starts, the spread of the new modes took on different forms and moved away from the original right of labourers to the fruits of their labour to tribal, later national, forms of ‘kingship’, represented by the agrarian societies of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome. But that is another story. And covers the role of civil government to protect the rich from rival rich claimants to another’s property as well as the poorest claimants to the wealth created by others.

“A lot of writers in the “collapse” movement disparage trying to plan out a society in advance. Capitalist economists certainly hate the idea of a “planned society”, believing as they do in Adam Smith’s theory that everyone naturally operates in their own self-interest, and that doing so leads inevitably to social harmony – with the help of an invisible hand. It was and is a pretty wild theory, but it has served the merchant class well these past 230 years.”

Comment
I do not recognize this as a “theory” enunciated by Adam Smith. It is certainly a theory attributed to Adam Smith by modern economists and Gary Clausheide, of which I comment critically upon regularly on Lost Legacy. Briefly, Smith was not naïve about the “rulers of mankind”. His critical approach to feudal lords (and the allodial lords before them), to princes, sovereigns, and legislators, and, above all, to the “merchants and manufacturers” of his day (of whom he scarcely had a word of praise) is well known by all who have read more than a few tit-bit quotations, torn out of context, from his books, Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations (1776).

Gary Clausheide appears to be among the quotation seekers and not among the readers of the works of Adam Smith (a feature, I am sad to say, that is prevalent among too many modern economists, and not just “capitalist” economists).

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.

From the Invention of Property (collective and individual) All Else Followed

Readers will recall that I had an exchange with Bruce on Bruce Web last week (HERE): Here

This is my initial response to where we diverge - the historial significance of the invention of property - if we cannot agree on that issue, I do not see how we might agree on the rest,

Hi Bruce

We appear to be marching in diverging directions, possibly reflecting a difference in our understanding of the pre-history, and more recent history, of humanity. I take the long view; you appear to hold to a shorter horizon; I try to be disengaged, preferring to understand rather than take sides; you are influenced by E. P. Thompson’s history of the English working class, a much more immediate scholarship of a narrower slice of human history, from a particular perspective.

We do not see eye-to-eye on the most important role of the evolution of human property. Apart from the period when the entire human species, dispersed across the landmass and ignorant of each other more than a few hundred miles away in any direction, subsisted from the limited bounties of nature, the late pre-history and history of the human race began, in effect, with the discovery of the novel role of new forms of subsistence encompassed in Herding (possibly 20,000 years ago after the Ice-age, and Farming, sometime around 11,000 years ago in the plains of Eurasia and the ‘fertile crescent, centred on the Middle-East.

Most human groups outside these areas remained based on the hunter-gatherer economies, where the sole form of property was group, later tribal, territory (‘our territory, not theirs’), a notion ‘known’ (because practiced) to primate cousins and to predator animals. The subsistence economies known to Hominids (Homines) or proto-humans species, also evolved stone-technologies (the stone ages) and laid claim to territories by virtue of their ‘occupation’, and abandoned or lost them in the face of violent challenges from other groups.

This subsistence culture was stable overall and almost unchanging – some stone-tool cultures didn’t change their technologies for over a million years - even as Hominid species became extinct. With the greater intelligence of Homo sapiens, from 200,000 years ago, primitive technologies evolved in some areas of the earth, though not in others, as early explorers found from the 16th-18th centuries. Tiny groups survived as hunter-gatherers, with relatively sophisticated cultures, into the 20th-century.
We can debate why some human groups developed notions of property and others didn’t; it had nothing to do with called ‘superiority’ and a lot to do with circumstances. Among the latter was the discovery of “herding” and “domestication” of animals, and later of plant foods, at the end of the last-ice age. We can trace the effects on the human populations. Briefly, population levels reflect the subsistence base (as throughout nature in all species). For populations to grow, gross annual output of subsistence has to rise, and as it rises, new or more intensive subsistence exploitation has to grow as well. Additionally, institutional development promoted by the subsistence technologies has to succeed in transmitting to following generations the necessary disciplines.

It is my contention, following Adam Smith (and others), that one institutional innovation was what we call property, collective and personal. No human groups, so far known, achieved the necessary subsistence growth without the innovation of property. Taking the ‘bigger picture’ across the earth, those groups that relied solely on the forest, rivers and sea shores were bound by the limits imposed by the free bounties of nature. Those groups that discovered appropriate technologies, including property (in herds of animals and specialized in farming), grew in overall sustainable population levels and the necessary higher output of annual subsistence.

Collective property has always existed alongside notions of private property. The former is vaguer and universal; the latter is specific and local. Humans have always lived in social groupings (like our primate cousins), not least for protection from predators and from rival groups. Success in subsistence growth both strengthens group bonds and attracts the attention of rival groups. Issues of inheritance, peace and war, inter-group bonding (women) and alliances, begin to form and eventually take their shape in relationships within and without the group.
Herds wander; they also attract outsiders. Crops are vulnerable to wandering animals and to intrusive herds. Fences, natural and man-made, give form to the institution of property. The fable of Cain and Able in Genesis illustrates the potential of property rights to lead to violence. Tribal and family wanderings across vast stretches of territory is incompatible with farming seasons, which promote settlements close to farmed land.

Jared Diamond writes eloquently about this being humanity’s greatest ‘mistake’, but what was once done cannot be undone (to return to the subsistence of population levels comparable with 11,000 years ago means the elimination of c.6 billion people). The hunter-gatherer cannot last without regular subsistence, the level of which is limited by the available bounty of nature; and neither can the farmer, but if farmers can solve the problem of inter-seasonal gaps in subsistence (storage, foraging, very large herds, and the domestication of the horse), and their new forms of subsistence can produce annually sufficient for per capita consumption, the basis is laid for a survival strategy.

Two things are clear. First, the subsistence problem was ‘solved’ eventually – growing populations at steady, low, levels of per capital consumption – and, Second, the inevitable consequence of growing inequality from growing total subsistence levels, was a siphoning off of a proportion of the annual output for the disposal of whichever sub-group took control of the group, and claimed and held control of its property.

Throughout history right up to the end of the 18th century in parts of Europe, per capita consumption was steady, but total output was slowly rising. From the decades around 1800 onwards, per capita income began and continued to grow without precedent, as did total GDP. Whereas earlier elites diverted much of the economy’s growing surplus into stone-built early examples of ‘civilizations’, the detritus of which can be found in Mediterranean countries, Egypt, Babylon, all across Europe, India and China, parts of Central America and South-east Asia, to show the scale of what became available, net of the huge amounts lost in wars, and reached levels hitherto unknown to humanity. And population numbers grew accordingly.

None of this would have happened without the invention of property. Nothing is implied here about whether people were ‘happier’, better off, ‘properly or fairly treated’, by those who ruled over them. Adam Smith (and many others) took the view that human nature is unchanging. Material change does not necessarily make for more worthy people. The task of the philosopher is to observe, not to take sides; is to learn from history, not to export current ideas to previous generations; and to make modest suggestions (they are the only ones likely to be adopted) for improvements that accord with how humans behave.

The “Man of system,” warned Smith, “is apt to be very wise in his own conceit”, and seems to imagine “that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand can arrange the different pieces upon a chess board”, but “every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislator might chuse to impress upon it” (Moral Sentiments VI.ii.2.17: 233-34).

[Follow Link: http://bruceweb.blogspot.com/]

Property is Civilisation

Fred Bauer writes (24 May) in the Blog, New Majority.com (‘Building a conservatism that can win again’) HERE:

“Republican Equality

Theories of the free market have long concerned themselves with the role of inequality. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously argues that the development of advanced modes of production and commerce undermined the stark inequalities of the feudal world. The thirst of the rich for luxuries such as diamond buckles led to a breakdown of the system of feudal-agricultural dependence, in which wealthy landholders held not merely economic but also political domination of those below them.

Smith's argument has two salient implications for the current political right/classical liberals/conservatives: (1) certain forms of radical economic inequality can result in significant political inequalities (witness the petty tyrannies of medieval nobles), and (2) the functioning of the free market can serve as a way of mitigating these inequalities, of leading to a turnover of wealth, of making differences in levels of income less poisonous for civil liberties. The free market and inequality thus have a quarrelsome relationship: the market helps create inequalities, but it also undercuts the financial inequality of any given moment, allowing the rich to fall and the poor to rise. Inequality in results is a key characteristic of a market economy, and the very operations of a free exchange can prevent these inequalities from hardening into radical caste differences.

However -- and this is a crucial "however" -- the market itself, particularly in the wake of modern industrialization and certain forms of government intervention, can result in inequalities so vast that they begin to undermine a faith in free markets. And the growth of these radical inequalities can lead to a creeping sense of the hardening of financial differences. If one of the promises of the free market as a vehicle for an authentically liberal-democratic politics is in its ability to allow for social and economic mobility, increasing doubts about the existence of these mobilities also increases doubts about the efficacy of the market and its contribution to political equality. Radical inequalities and a sense of economic stagnation can in turn lead to a widespread rejection of the instruments of the free market and, more broadly, the free society.

The early twentieth century, that high tide of income inequality (the top .1% took home about 10 % of the national income in 1916), was also the high-water mark of the Socialist Party of America; Eugene V. Debs won 6% of the national vote in the fractious election of 1912.

Granted, the rise and fall of the SPA cannot be reduced to that single statistic, but wide income disparities perhaps set some of the conditions for this rise.
Aside from questions about social and economic ideals, this hard practical fact endures: in the modern welfare state, if a great majority believes that it can no longer economically advance, it has the political power to legislate the confiscation via taxation of the wealth of the rich. Now, this confiscation may not succeed in reducing inequality -- the grotesque inequalities of so many "workers' paradises" are built upon the failure of this confiscation to equalize -- but it can still be attempted. In addition to ethical objections about such a policy, a kind of economic hope as well as an economic fear serve to restrain this confiscatory enterprise.

The fear is that such governmental power could be turned against the members of a temporary majority; the hope is that the poor could, too, become rich, so they would want to be able to enjoy their wealth. But at a certain point, the fear of the misuse of power can recede before other, more immediate fears (such as starvation or death of exposure). Social mobility, on the other hand, feeds this hope. If one of the free market's benefits is social mobility, this mobility itself helps increase public support for the free market and protects it from overweening government.

The free market and government regulation are, then, both double-edged entities for issues of inequality. The free market can create radical inequalities through allowing a select coterie to dominate and entrench itself as an economic elite, but it can also unsettle entrenched elites and provide the hope of mobility through an open exchange; governmental regulations can prevent monopolies from forming and ensure limitations on the power of the extremely wealthy, but these very regulations can be tools for the hyper-rich to shut down the market and prevent competition.

Comment
When conservative-minded writers put their minds to work they often produce well thought out ideas. If only they translated into practical politics, but that’s another story.

Adam Smith’s writings on the decline of feudal-property relations in Britain shows an outstanding grasp of history and a deft hand at work, explaining the complex inter-actions between the ruling feudal lords and the newer, lower-order and despised trading merchants. Smith confined his remarks to silver buckle buying by some of the Lords (he lived in a man’s world), but we can be sure that much of the trinkets, brooches, rings, rare perfumes, silks and such like were destined for the Lords’ women.

Smith’s point was that the merchant traders brought luxury goods for the Lords to buy, who were increasingly tempted dispose of the main sources of their political power – their armed retainers – which troubled the leading Lord, the King, and those would-be Kings who eyed their throne, and oppressed the landed workers (hardly, incidentally, a ‘petty tyranny’; it served ‘petty’ ends, no doubt, but was brutal to its victims).

This was a long process, but the end result was an enfeebled aristocracy and a more vibrant merchant core, able to extract concessions from the king in parliament which gave them, eventually, an effective veto over the sovereign’s spending, legitimised by the outcome of a civil war. These Liberties constituted the constitutional monarchy that was 18th-century Britain.

Markets only continue what the consequences of the origination of property did way back in pre-history: create wealth (the 'annual output of the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life' and, inevitably, inequality. The great agricultural societies, growing from a long history of hunter-gatherer subsistence economies from 11,000 years ago in a small segment of the earth’s surface, were noticeable by their inequality, which extended way beyond economic inequality to political and religious inequality. Tribal property in territory preceded family and private property.

The great empires of Egypt, Babylon, India and China, were dominated by ruling elites that managed the hydraulic mysteries and seasonal timings of everything about everyday life for the vast majority of their peoples. The stone detritus of these former stone-built civilisations are spread across the Eurasian continents, north Africa, and in parts of central and south America.

Their predecessor stone-age tool detritus is spread all round the world, into modern times too, which was the subsistence mode of every human society that did not grow into shepherding and farming. Those, few, modern, aimlessly discontented, people who have notions of going back to what they call, the ‘simpler’ life of pre-history, seem to have no idea what that would involve, including the mass extermination of about 6 billion people.

For tens of millennia, the inequality of the world’s population remained constant, with a small elite monopolising the power, and almost everybody else living on subsistence and almost static per capita levels. That is until, again in parts of Europe, commercial society from the 14th century began, slowly, to revive after a thousand years of stagnation, Black Death, endless wars, and social strife, since roughly it was after the fall of the Western Roman empire.

And within four centuries, in Britain, economics, technological and social change, and the unprecedented steady, cinpound interest of the albeit minute rise in per capita incomes finally broke through the petty cycles of the 'Malthusian Trap', ironically almost coterminous with its identification by Thomas Malthus.

These events created social inequalities of a new kind – that between societies that developed institutions capable of ensuring the necessary conditions for continuous, though small, growth rates and those societies – the majority – not capable for various reasons of breaking out of their subsistence economies. The unequal poor in the commercial societies were incomparably better off than those in the unequal traditional societies, claimed Smith in Wealth Of Nations.

It is that comparative inequality that is the distinction brought about by the social evolution of early commercial societies into what became known as capitalism from the mid-19th century. It is a phenomenon that the Left do not acknowledge and the conservatives do not yet accept. There is nothing ordained about the existing arrangements of Big State capitalism or Big Welfare States that will ensure their continuation in their present forms.

The task of the philosopher, said Adam Smith, is to observe and seek to understand; it is not to do anything to intervene with panaceas and social engineering. Philosophers must be wary of becoming 'men (and women) of system' (TMS VI.II.2.17-18: 233-4)

Going Back to Tribalism?

Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer writes on “Regaining traditional tribal values and ancestral homelands” on the News for Natives.com Blog HERE [Also; see HERE]:

“The main idea of Adam Smith, the founder of unrestricted capitalism, was the idea that the individual’s pursuit of self-interest should be regarded as the main foundation upon which society benefits as a whole. This is perhaps the central premise of his book, The Wealth of Nations. Prior to the Enlightenment, avarice, or greed, was viewed with contempt as one of the seven deadly sins, but Adam Smith, buttressed with the work of Mandeville, Hume and other avowed atheists, paved the way for greed to be viewed as a natural, and even as a positive thing. This change in values was perhaps one of the most important and profound changes that helped to overthrow Judeo-Christian morality as the foundation of Western civilization.
If our nation’s dominant society, which is a part of Western civilization, would replace its current greedy economic system with a traditional tribal economic system it would be going (in respect to the economy of our nation) back to Judeo-Christian morality.

Comment
It is not for me to comment on a situation that arose from the occupation of a continent by, first Asian, and then, 9-11 millennia later, by European settlers displacing the earlier (not the original!) occupants. This happened all over the earth’s surface 60-100,000 years ago when the first Homo sapiens left Africa for West Asia (and Europe) and then East and South-East Asia, Australia, the Pacific islands and, of course, the Americas.

Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer writes an interesting essay on the claims by some surviving mid-west ‘native Americans’, anthropologically a misleading label, to their lands in the Dakotas.

My comments are directed at the quoted remarks about Adam Smith, who was not, by the way, ‘the founder of unrestricted capitalism’. Smith died in 1790, long before the word ‘capitalism’ entered the English language in 1854. Nor was commercial society, which Smith wrote about, ‘founded’ by anyone, least of all a moral philosopher.

Societies are not like technical inventions, which are the result of inspired, or maybe accidental, inspiration by individuals; they emerge in their different forms over long periods, sometimes millennia.

Attempts to ‘found’ new societies always (I do not exaggerate) fail, of which Soviet socialism is a prime example on a large scale, while North Korea is another on a smaller scale. I suspect that the re-claimed Wakan Wakpa (Rum River) in Minnesota ancestral homeland would go the same way eventually; experiments of returning people from the modern technological age to past ways of life have not been successful – they tend to break up in acrimony, exhaustion, and desertion. However, that is not my business to comment upon.

Smith did not recommend that people act in their self-interest; he observed that people acted in their self-interest (Smith was an observer, not a missionary). He most certainly did not advocate greed, nor were his observations ‘buttressed with the work of Mandeville, Hume and other avowed atheists’ to pave ‘the way for greed to be viewed as a natural, and even as a positive thing.’

Smith criticised Bernard Mandeville’s (1724) ideas about ‘Private Vice’ being ‘Public Virtue’; in Moral Sentiments (1759) he called such ideas ‘licentious’. David Hume is also totally innocent of the charge of ‘buttressing’ self-interest by notions of greed. What alleged ‘atheism’ has to do with this argument is not stated; it’s simply asserted? It’s almost a slur just to make its author’s case stronger, but for anyone informed of the ideas of Mandeville, Hume, and Adam Smith, the slur damages its author’s case.

Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer, or Wahkon (it’s not clear exactly who is the author) claims that if ‘the dominant society’ would ‘replace its current greedy economic system with a traditional tribal economic system it would be going (in respect to the economy of our nation) back to Judeo-Christian morality.’ Whether that would be a benefit (let alone a possibility) is debateable.

All the well-debated ‘ills’ of Judeo-Christian morality in practice may have dubious credentials for improving any form of society, but the extent that people believe that such morality (in its best forms) would be a benefit to any society is a perfectly legitimate reason for them trying to persuade others the agree with them. However, I think we should approach such suggestions with caution.

Consider this other paragraph from the article:

‘Indigenous people did not follow the English concept of property ownership, but never-the-less they had homelands that they considered their territory, so they did “own” land. And they would defend it if invaders tried to take it away from them. And do so by forcefully driving them from their land, if they had the military might to do so.’

As Shakespeare said, this is the ‘rub’. Wahkon articulates a rather rosy picture of life before the European settlers, perhaps forgetting that the Europeans had formerly been living life-styles similar to the plains inhabitants of mid-west North America. John Locke remarked that ‘in the beginning all the World was America’ (Locke, 1690: Two treatises on Government) and some parts had only recently began to transition from tribalism to commercial society.

The resultant picture in Europe was noisy, bloody, and pretty ghastly. That the tribalism of Wahkon’s past did not embrace private ownership of property does not free it from the consequences of tribal ownership of property, which took several millennia to transit to private property in Europe and East Asia.

The great State tyrannies of Egypt, Babylon, India, and China were founded on State property, and rival conquests, mass slaveries, dominant priesthoods, and dynastic kings and emperors. Something similar (with its attendant horrors) was already well underway in Central and South America when Columbus arrived in 1492 (which does not excuse the barbaric attrocities perpetuated by the Spaniards on the local inhabitants).

Moreover, Wahkon skates over the realities of inter-tribal warfare among the plains and mountain tribes that has began to penetrate anthropologists who have looked beyond the idyllic life before the European settlers and found strong evidence of warfare, raiding, and maltreatment of ‘strangers’ entering tribal property.

I recommend Raymond Kelly’s 2000 book, Warless Societies and the Origin of War, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for a detailed, scholarly account, of the realities of life in our mutual tribal past.

Remember, in the beginning, ‘all the World was America’; going back to that past, voluntarily, is not an option. It may come about by a world post-nuclewr, post-biolgical catastrophy.

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.

The Necessary Role of Property in History

‘Bill’, self-described as a ‘non-violent’, ‘liberation socialist’ writes in his Blog, HighBoldtage (‘politics and music in Humboldt County’), without comment (HERE):

“Adam Smith”

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
-Adam Smith

Comment
Bill tags his post in his own index as: ‘economy, fascism, land, poverty, private property, privatization, rent’, which raises the minor question of why only one 20th century political regime is linked to Adam Smith (or vice versa), and why not any of the others too? More commonly, he is linked by socialists to socialism or social democracy, both only slightly less absurd than his alleged link to Mussolini’s Black Shirts.

Smith held no public views on party politics and there is a modern controversy (historians of economic thought are a querelous lot) of distant vintage about his personal politcs – was he a Whig or a Tory? Eminent scholars disagree, largely by admitting to not being able to discern in Adam Smith a consitent set of ideas that conveniently fit into any neat modern concept of a political philosophy. For the best account of his views see: Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historio-graphic Revision, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

However, readers should be grateful that ‘Bill’ has extracted this particular quotation from Wealth Of Nations because it provides an opportunity to discuss the very points that Adam Smith was making. Here is the quotation in full:

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part.

The real value of all the different component parts of price, it must be observed, is measured by the quantity of labour which they can, each of them, purchase or command. Labour measures the value not only of that part of price which resolves itself into labour, but of that which resolves itself into rent, and of that which resolves itself into profit.” [WN I.vi.7-8: p 67]

This paragraph contains an historical account of a significant change in human circumstances, which ‘Bill’ has skipped over: the emergence of property, not by a political revolution, nor ordained, inevitable, or widespread geographically. Before this event, small populations of humans everywhere lived as hunter-gatherers and the majority of them continued to do so, and some remnant populations survive on the margins still.

For hunter-gatherers, the “wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them”.

The invention of (communal) property, to the exclusion of outsiders was inevitable when human populations grew and remained concentrated in a relatively small area. Ten thousand humans depending on hunting for subsistence in a continent-sized territory (India, China, the Americas, Europe and Australia) could subsist in a steady state for millennia, and we assume that for a long time that is more or less what happened. They could always disperse and move on whenever, as Smith put it, the ‘chase’ became ‘precarious’, or if relations within and among the various bands became turbulent.

Once shepherding evolved beyond tending to the young of killed animals and was practised through breeding, the need to keep flocks and herds from wandering away, and the need to keep wandering humans from taking them away, introduced, slowly and gradually, concepts of property and all that went with them, first as communal property (jealously guarded against other communities) and eventually as private property (jealously guarded against all comers).

The later developments in agriculture had the same effect, only more intensely, because farming was more propitious for its evolution as a new mode of subsistence. It also changed everything else in respect of the ownership of the products of labour and the necessary co-operating factors, which reduced the share of an individual labourer in the final product by including the shares going to the other owners of the contributing materials, their dexterity and technology, and most particularly the owners of the land. This was no longer a simple case of the exchanges between the arrow maker and the hunter, based on their unambiguous (Natural Law) ownership of the products of their labour, before and after the transaction. The evolution of property was associated with the need for adjudication in disputes, the emergence of ‘norms’, ‘rules’ and ‘laws’, and for their enforcement by civil government.

Because primitive exchanges made those participating in them ‘better off’ (a major incentive of the division of labour), they had a self-reinforcing effect over time of encouraging pair-wise exchange behaviour throughout a band and, later, between bands. Therefore, Smith’s unique vision of ‘truck, barter, and exchange’, as the precursor to a social-evolutionary road for those who stepped onto it, is of the utmost significance for all that followed. Those that did not take this step, for multitudes of reasons, there being nothing ordained about individuals undertaking social change, remained subject to their existing mode of subsistence because ‘the original state of things’ for them continued, at first uninterrupted (they could migrate outwards), and later ended by inter-marriage or violence, as the ‘superior’ subsistence modes spread. (Extract from my Adam Smith: a moral philosopher and his political economy, Palgrave Macmillan, July 2008)

After property was invented, aligned with politico-religious institutions of civil government, the settled societies changed in kind and scope. Thus ‘Bill’ posts on his Blog on the Internet and we read it thousands of miles away dispersed around the globe.

He describes himself as a ‘libertarian-socialist’ and thousands of us have some idea of what he is talking about, whereas before the Age of the Hunter passed in a few small territories to the Ages of Shepherding and Farming, our predecessors (and, be sure, we share them as ancestors) spoke highly localised languages, intelligible to few humans outside their territories, and of whom, for millennia, they knew little if anything about.

Of relevance to a ‘Libertarian-socialist’, if one had ever been alive in ancient times, is the thought that it could have been different to what it was; that property as we understand it could have been more equally shared and not have accumulated in the hands of a few men (the ‘rich landlords’), who ‘love to reap where they never sowed’. Such experiments may well have been tried (in pre-history by definition, nothing was recorded!). We do know of one such experiment in legislation, introduced by one of the most authoritarian of regimes of all times, the Romans. Smith discusses the subject in Wealth Of Nations:

“Rome, like most of the other ancient republics, was originally founded upon an Agrarian law which divided the public territory in a certain proportion among the different citizens who composed the state. The course of human affairs by marriage, by succession, and by alienation, necessarily deranged this original division, and frequently threw the lands, which had been allotted for the maintenance of many different families, into the possession of a single person. To remedy this disorder, for such it was supposed to be, a law was made restricting the quantity of land which any citizen could possess to five hundred jugera, about three hundred and fifty English acres. This law, however, though we read of its having been executed upon one or two occasions, was either neglected or evaded, and the inequality of fortunes went on continually increasing.” [WN: IV. Vii. 3: pp 556-7]

My brief point is that equality of property (or, indeed its absence) is not something that has been successful (it didn’t survive hunter-gathering, which is egalitarian at a low level of subsistence, and without the other attributes of knowledge that are beneficial) and where attempts have been made to enforce it from the top is soon corrodes under the normal human afflictions of family generations and their eternal verities – families with more sons than daughters acquire property by inheritance.

I submit these thoughts to ‘Bill’ for his consideration.