Yesterday we gave
in very broad outline some of the monetary reforms that will be required to
implement Capital Homesteading. Perhaps
the biggest reform, however, is in people’s thinking about money. Most people are absolutely convinced that the
only source of money for new capital formation is existing accumulations of
savings, which by definition are a monopoly of a private sector élite (capitalism), or the State
(socialism).
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| Money should work for you, not against you. |
There is a
problem with that, however. The only two
possible systems under what Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler called “the slavery
of savings” are capitalism and socialism, neither of which does anything to
secure the natural rights of life, liberty, and private property to every
child, woman, and man. And (despite what
you might have heard from either capitalists or socialists) neither capitalism
nor socialism has been all that successful — if we define success as providing
the environment within which every child, woman, and man has the maximum
opportunity to become more fully human.
So, did Kelso and
Adler mean that savings are evil or unnecessary? No, they just meant that savings should be
the servant of people, rather than that people should be the slave of savings .
. . or those who have savings — which is next to impossible as long as we have
to depend on past savings to finance new capital formation.
To try and get
around the slavery of savings or justify it, capitalists (who, to do them
justice, at least have the honesty to call themselves capitalists) either say
most people can’t own capital and must rely on wages and welfare for income, or
other people could own if they just had that “special something” that makes the
élite the élite. Private property and
other natural rights are fine . . . for those who are fully human. . . .
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| "The theory of the communists: abolition of private property" |
For their part,
socialists (especially those who don’t want to be known as socialists) either
abolish private property outright, redefine private property so that it is no
longer a natural right in the same way as life and liberty, or just abolish all
natural rights and hand it all over to the collective . . . as if the
collective, an abstraction constructed by human beings, could have something
that God gave only to human beings. It
is impossible for a human creation, an abstraction, to have rights that human
beings do not.
So, capitalists
and socialists, you’re both wrong.
Capitalists, every single human being has the natural right to be an
owner, as well as the limited bundle of socially determined rights that define
how someone may exercise the right to own in a particular context. Socialists, the collective only has such
rights as actual human beings delegate to it, not the other way around.
You see, this
whole “money thing” deals not just with one right, but with the whole Big Three
of life, liberty, and private property — all of which have been under
continuous attack throughout the modern era when the source of rights shifted
from the human person, to the State or community. After all, no rights matter if you don’t have
the right to life to begin with. If you
don’t have that secured to you, anyone who feels like it can just bump you off
because you’re inconvenient to someone else for some reason.
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| Liberty is freedom of association and contract. |
Liberty? Another way of saying liberty is free
association and contract. Free
association is key to the exercise of all rights because if others can dictate
with whom you associate and can enter into contracts with, then you aren’t able
to freely associate, are you? You aren’t
free.
Of course, even
if you are allowed to enter into contracts, but aren’t allowed to own (have
private property in) anything or control what you ostensibly own (ownership and
control are the same in all codes of law, as Louis Kelso pointed out), then the
“matter” of contracts is missing, and you can’t participate in money
creation. All contracts, and thus all
money, consist of offer, acceptance, and consideration.
This last,
“consideration,” is the thing of value that you own that induces someone else
to enter into a bargain with you. If
there is no consideration, there is no contract, and no money.
So you see, all
three natural rights, life, liberty, and private property are kind of important
if you want to have a just society.
So, how do we get
away from the slavery of past savings and avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of
capitalism and socialism? By creating
new money in ways that create new owners, as we’ve been describing on this
blog. And what to do about it is what we’ll
look at tomorrow.
#30#
