Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
A friend and I were discussing whether conservatives should "celebrate" Labor Day on a theoretical level, given that it's origins lie mostly in the union and labor movements and "progressive" ideals. He took the position that, as labor is the origin of all property, it was a fine thing for conservatives to celebrate it. He stated it rather matter-of-factly, and seemed surprised that I did not take his theory as PoliSci gospel.
This led me to wonder if other take his position (or whether people think about it at all).
His view, to give his side, is largely derived from Locke, who wrote that men own their own labor naturally and that by mixing their labor with the free products around them they make the product of those mabors their property. Stated more eloquently:
While this theory definitely rattled around in the heads of the Founding Fathers and many other Enlightenment Era thinkers, it seems to me to not be the origin of American (and western, generally) notions of property. I think the law of property can be traced as a progression from a feudal origin, the root of which was that the sovereign owned all the land. From there a series of complicated changes occurred that led us to our current state of widely distributed property.
At a most basic level there is no real reason to put much stock in Locke's "labor theory" of ownership. The Lockean theory was historically closely linked to the "labor theory of value" for obvious reasons, and we've now rejected that in the face of incontrovertible proof that, in a competitive economy, price is not directly related to the labor that went into producing the good or service in question.
Though it does have a lot of appeal to it, and seems to raise the possibility of placing property rights at the level of a "natural right" (as opposed to a mere societal construct), I think it's appeal comes from being raised in a culture that indirectly parrots it back at us, due to Locke's heavy influence on the founders. Look closer though, and even they seemed to live in a world of sovereign dominion.
This labor theory, in my mind, has a lot of appeal because it has shaped our laws and political discourse for so long. We can imagine the noble, ancient homesteader traversing bronze age Europe with his family, settling near a village and setting up a farm. We then imagine the land "becoming" his because he worked it, and he then hands it off to his children, and so on down the ages.
In reality though, we all know that property rights in the modern era are set and regulated by the government and its laws. Granted that many of the rules were crafted by men who believed in the Lockean theory, but even more recent homesteaders cannot simple work open land and claim title to it.
The Homestead Act for example, only gave an applicant title to up to 160 acres, no matter how much land he fenced off and worked, and there were steps involved in getting it (like filing an application and other documents) in addition to the mixing of labor with the soil. It was clearly a grant from the government, and they set the conditions on it that they liked. The Homestead Act was a great liberalization (in the good sense) of the Preemption Act, which made homesteaders pay the federal government for any land. Earlier still, as America formed, royal charters were granted, spelling out the rights of the sovereign and the people on the land, and those strongly clearly indicated that these were grants by the King of England, rather than land being taken as the result of labor-driven improvements. (They also ignored the possibility that the natives had any right to the land, labor or no labor.)
If there is a basis of property in modern western law, it seems to me that the origin was the feudal rule that everything belongs to the government (or king or other noble freeholder, or local lord in the case of personal property) who can then "alienate" it to you under certain circumstances. To use the technical terminology "allodial title" was initially held only by the king, in England, especially just after 1066 when William the Conqueror expropriated all the land of England to himself. As the kings alienated land to the churches and local lords, and local lords alienated land and goods to merchants, townsfolk, churches and others, the wealth became more generally disbursed. Eventually (despite interludes whether people in Britain were prevented by law from alienating property due to the perception that it was "too dispersed"), where patterns of property ownership are so complex that we no longer see the direct link back to the crown.
Even the basic notion (which I myself find hard to shake) that we "own" our labor was not true under feudal law. Serfs did not own even the clothes on their backs which they made themselves. All of their property belonged to the lord, and they used it only because he allowed them to do so. They crops they planted were likewise his, and he let them keep a portion only because it let them live to farm another year and because it was customary. If he wanted them to starve, though, they did. Their labor was freed up only if they could escape from the lord for a period of years (long enough to be free of their serfdom) or, more generally, when the population of serfs declined and different lords started to have to compete for their services (a serf was not allowed to leave his land, by law, without his lord's permission, but the feudal arrangements were complex with each lord having multiple lords above him and multiple liege lords above that, so it was often hard to enforce when other lords wanted your serfs). Increased autonomy and even cash payment, became more common and serfs found themselves "owning" personal property (though still no real property, as their ownership of that came only later).
Vestiges of this old system still remain (in the overused "eminent domain" for example, which has direct feudal origins (though no compensation was necessarily required initially). Part of the reason why eminent domain clashes with our modern notion of property is that it is based on a fundamental dominion of the government over all land, which we have become unaccustomed to recognizing. (That said, in any third world nation, the possibility of "nationalization" of assets is always there.)
In fact it's vastly more complicated than I make it out to be above (but I am not prepared to write a book on it), but my take is that we have a strong intuitive connection to Lockean value theory because we've been inculcating that theory into out thinking for about 300 years and in many cases it seems to work for us.
The reality, then, is that "property" is a social construct. It's based on rules (Lockean or otherwise) that the society is willing to enforce in order to maintain a certain degree or order, ensure some amount of economic efficiency or other goals deemed desirable by the decision makers within the society. Our original rule, that led us to the current state of affairs, was that allodial title is held by the sovereign, who then alienates it, while still retaining the right to act as sovereign over it. In some cases, the allodial sovereign might well allow people to make use of the land without formality or payment, but in the same way a modern owner can allow squatters to take over his property without objection.
So, in your view, what are the theoretical underpinnings of "property."
This led me to wonder if other take his position (or whether people think about it at all).
His view, to give his side, is largely derived from Locke, who wrote that men own their own labor naturally and that by mixing their labor with the free products around them they make the product of those mabors their property. Stated more eloquently:
While this theory definitely rattled around in the heads of the Founding Fathers and many other Enlightenment Era thinkers, it seems to me to not be the origin of American (and western, generally) notions of property. I think the law of property can be traced as a progression from a feudal origin, the root of which was that the sovereign owned all the land. From there a series of complicated changes occurred that led us to our current state of widely distributed property.
At a most basic level there is no real reason to put much stock in Locke's "labor theory" of ownership. The Lockean theory was historically closely linked to the "labor theory of value" for obvious reasons, and we've now rejected that in the face of incontrovertible proof that, in a competitive economy, price is not directly related to the labor that went into producing the good or service in question.
Though it does have a lot of appeal to it, and seems to raise the possibility of placing property rights at the level of a "natural right" (as opposed to a mere societal construct), I think it's appeal comes from being raised in a culture that indirectly parrots it back at us, due to Locke's heavy influence on the founders. Look closer though, and even they seemed to live in a world of sovereign dominion.
This labor theory, in my mind, has a lot of appeal because it has shaped our laws and political discourse for so long. We can imagine the noble, ancient homesteader traversing bronze age Europe with his family, settling near a village and setting up a farm. We then imagine the land "becoming" his because he worked it, and he then hands it off to his children, and so on down the ages.
In reality though, we all know that property rights in the modern era are set and regulated by the government and its laws. Granted that many of the rules were crafted by men who believed in the Lockean theory, but even more recent homesteaders cannot simple work open land and claim title to it.
The Homestead Act for example, only gave an applicant title to up to 160 acres, no matter how much land he fenced off and worked, and there were steps involved in getting it (like filing an application and other documents) in addition to the mixing of labor with the soil. It was clearly a grant from the government, and they set the conditions on it that they liked. The Homestead Act was a great liberalization (in the good sense) of the Preemption Act, which made homesteaders pay the federal government for any land. Earlier still, as America formed, royal charters were granted, spelling out the rights of the sovereign and the people on the land, and those strongly clearly indicated that these were grants by the King of England, rather than land being taken as the result of labor-driven improvements. (They also ignored the possibility that the natives had any right to the land, labor or no labor.)
If there is a basis of property in modern western law, it seems to me that the origin was the feudal rule that everything belongs to the government (or king or other noble freeholder, or local lord in the case of personal property) who can then "alienate" it to you under certain circumstances. To use the technical terminology "allodial title" was initially held only by the king, in England, especially just after 1066 when William the Conqueror expropriated all the land of England to himself. As the kings alienated land to the churches and local lords, and local lords alienated land and goods to merchants, townsfolk, churches and others, the wealth became more generally disbursed. Eventually (despite interludes whether people in Britain were prevented by law from alienating property due to the perception that it was "too dispersed"), where patterns of property ownership are so complex that we no longer see the direct link back to the crown.
Even the basic notion (which I myself find hard to shake) that we "own" our labor was not true under feudal law. Serfs did not own even the clothes on their backs which they made themselves. All of their property belonged to the lord, and they used it only because he allowed them to do so. They crops they planted were likewise his, and he let them keep a portion only because it let them live to farm another year and because it was customary. If he wanted them to starve, though, they did. Their labor was freed up only if they could escape from the lord for a period of years (long enough to be free of their serfdom) or, more generally, when the population of serfs declined and different lords started to have to compete for their services (a serf was not allowed to leave his land, by law, without his lord's permission, but the feudal arrangements were complex with each lord having multiple lords above him and multiple liege lords above that, so it was often hard to enforce when other lords wanted your serfs). Increased autonomy and even cash payment, became more common and serfs found themselves "owning" personal property (though still no real property, as their ownership of that came only later).
Vestiges of this old system still remain (in the overused "eminent domain" for example, which has direct feudal origins (though no compensation was necessarily required initially). Part of the reason why eminent domain clashes with our modern notion of property is that it is based on a fundamental dominion of the government over all land, which we have become unaccustomed to recognizing. (That said, in any third world nation, the possibility of "nationalization" of assets is always there.)
In fact it's vastly more complicated than I make it out to be above (but I am not prepared to write a book on it), but my take is that we have a strong intuitive connection to Lockean value theory because we've been inculcating that theory into out thinking for about 300 years and in many cases it seems to work for us.
The reality, then, is that "property" is a social construct. It's based on rules (Lockean or otherwise) that the society is willing to enforce in order to maintain a certain degree or order, ensure some amount of economic efficiency or other goals deemed desirable by the decision makers within the society. Our original rule, that led us to the current state of affairs, was that allodial title is held by the sovereign, who then alienates it, while still retaining the right to act as sovereign over it. In some cases, the allodial sovereign might well allow people to make use of the land without formality or payment, but in the same way a modern owner can allow squatters to take over his property without objection.
So, in your view, what are the theoretical underpinnings of "property."
