Right off the bat, we have to admit that the title of this
particular posting is misleading. With
respect to the change in the understanding of private property (and, by
extension, of the whole of the natural law) has had not one, but at least two
“turning points.”
The first that we know about was during the
Reformation. Whether it was due to the
Reformation, the Reformation was due to it, or simply happened at the same time
is not relevant to this discussion.
Whatever the reason, the belief spread rapidly that rights were no
longer inherent in the human person by nature, but that rights were somehow
vested directly in the State or, worse, in the person of a divine right ruler.
We see this theory most clearly expressed in the
totalitarian philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, again, especially in Hobbes’s views
on private property. This is laid out
quite clearly in Leviathan. In Chapter XXIX in which he lists the “Those
Things that Weaken, or Tend to the Dissolution of a Common-Wealth,” Hobbes
declared,
“Attributing
Of Absolute Propriety To The Subjects
“A Fifth
doctrine, that tendeth to the Dissolution of a Common-wealth, is, ‘That every
private man has an absolute Propriety in his Goods; such, as excludeth the
Right of the Soveraign.’ Every man has indeed a Propriety that excludes the
Right of every other Subject: And he has it onely from the Soveraign Power;
without the protection whereof, every other man should have equall Right to the
same. But if the Right of the Soveraign also be excluded, he cannot performe
the office they have put him into; which is, to defend them both from forraign
enemies, and from the injuries of one another; and consequently there is no
longer a Common-wealth.
“And if
the Propriety of Subjects, exclude not the Right of the Soveraign
Representative to their Goods; much lesse to their offices of Judicature, or
Execution, in which they Represent the Soveraign himselfe.”
Thus we have the intrusion of the idea that private
individuals don’t really own anything.
As John Locke responded to Hobbes’s theory in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government,
“Sect. 140. It is true,
governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one
who enjoys his share of the protection, should pay out of his estate his
proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own
consent, i.e. the consent of the
majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by
them: for if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people,
by his own authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby
invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government:
for what property have I in that, which another may by right take, when he
pleases, to himself?”
Hobbes’s theory, however, was solidly integrated into both
political and economic thought in England by the middle of the 19th
century. This was a time when the
British parliament was busily dismantling what had long been considered the
glory of England: Magna Charta. Walter
Bagehot lauded Hobbes in his pivotal work, The
English Constitution (1867), sneered at Magna Charta, and ridiculed the
Constitution of the United States because it did not provide for a dictator in
times of need.
Just as Adam Smith applied his ethical philosophy detailed
in The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1757) in The Wealth of Nations
(1776), Hobbes’s applied his political theories detailed in The English Constitution in Lombard Street: A Description of the Money
Market (1873). Lombard Street is virtually a “bible” for a past savings-based
model of modern mercantilism.
Today, mercantilism is combined with a redefinition of
private property. This is a necessity
when economic growth is constrained by what Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler called
the slavery of past savings. What
necessarily results is some version of the Servile State: a condition of
society in which the great mass of humanity is forced to subsist on wages and
welfare alone. Those who do not own
capital are necessarily forced into a condition of dependency, “a yoke little
better than that of slavery itself.” (Rerum
Novarum, § 3.)
In the class of “non-owners of capital” we necessarily include
those who are owners of capital only in a nominal sense, and whose capital is
controlled by others. It was these
controlling non-owners to whom Pius XI referred when he declared,
“In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth
concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic
dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners
but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they
administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure.” (Quadragesimo Anno, § 105.)
We have to insert a caveat
here. Hilaire Belloc believed that the
Servile State was a condition in which people were constrained by the
government to work for private
employers solely for wages, willy nilly. We believe that the rapid growth of State
power through widespread dependence on government for redistribution of
existing wealth, primarily through control of money and credit and distortion
of the tax system, has resulted in a condition of society in which people are
forced either to work for wages provided by either
private employers or (increasingly) government, or on welfare provided by the
government, circumventing or undermining private charity. This broadens Belloc’s definition of the
Servile State to allow for the expansion of government into all aspects of
life, but it retains the chief characteristic emphasized by Belloc: the
condition of dependency or servility.
The point to this is that Bagehot’s elitist political
philosophy and complete reliance on past savings as the only source for
financing new capital formation was a strong influence on the most important
economist of the 20th century.
The theories of this economist have led the world to the brink of global
bankruptcy: John Maynard Keynes.
