Introduction
A friend recently suggested that I do a series on how to vote that didn't assume that the reader was Christian. This is a short series on the subject. Now, remember, folks, that this is a blog--it's not a scholarly tract, so there will be quite a bit of painting with very wide brush strokes. This is not going to be anything like an exhaustive trip through history, political philosophy, or legal interpretations. These are just a few thoughts on one way to approach how to make voting decisions.
This will be a three-part series, with the first two covering some foundational principles, and the last listing values and applications. You'll note that I will not give a party affiliation or an ultimate conclusion. Instead, I list values and suggestions for how some of them might apply.
These first two entries will be a bit dry. Sorry, but ... hey, foundational stuff is important. And I will not be devoting a lot of time to Christian principles here -- I've made arguments from that direction often enough lately, so this series will be from the perspective of applying secular principles.
In particular, this entry is on how to think about--and problems associated with--property, value, and earning.
What does it mean to own property?
There is a ton of legal and philosophical tracts on property. The first thing to understand, then, is that this is not a simple concept. Many people like to ignore nuances because that makes the arguments easier, or at least simpler ... but this is a tough one.
That caveat aside, to own property generally means that you have the right to control something. There is a "moral" version of this, where you have "earned" it (see below), or someone that earned it gave it to me. This moral version is simple, and it says that I own it, and I have the moral right to control it.
The moral version doesn't take you very far on its own, though (without significant lapses into philosophy that I'm going to blissfully ignore). The "legal" version has some easily describable nuance, though. In the legal sense, you own property if society recognizes that you have the authority to control something. This control has several components ("sticks" in the "bundle" of property rights), such as the ability to sell, license, or leave to your heirs; alter or destroy the property; benefit or enjoy the property; and keep others from doing any of this stuff.
Note again that this is societal. These are all defined by societal agreements, and enforcement is through those agreements. Without some type of government, you only have your belief about what property means, and you have no way to enforce or persuade beyond your own power. Legal property is of the government.
But property rights spring from somewhere. Who is the first owner of land? Who is the owner of things pulled from the land? Or from the sea, or the air? From the mind? Who designed the tools? Who made it? Who owns it? Do they own part of the property procured through the tools? For how long? Each of these questions is debatable (and have been debated, in great length, throughout the world, and throughout our own legal system). How they are decided determines what it means to own all or part of something.
Why does this matter? Because much of government is devoted to property rights. When it is said that "property is 90% of the law," that may well be true -- lots and lots of law is devoted to dealing with defining and protecting property rights.
What does it mean to earn, and what is something's value?
Switching gears, let's talk about value and earning. Does property have an absolute value, or is all value relative? As you might guess from the above, I would argue that value is cultural and relative.
Back to the beginning in our cultural history, did Native Americans own the land in the U.S.? Why? What if they did not have that concept? What if they did, and conquerors ignored it? What if their conception of ownership was different?
If someone found land it looked like nobody had used in a long time, did they own it? What if it was part of the Louisiana Purchase? Does the U.S. own it? Why, because Napoleon claimed it? If you think that is silly and therefore theft, when does this theft end? Has it, for instance, for Native Americans?
What about slavery? Value was stolen from slaves. Life itself, and children and family. Plantation homes were built by slaves that were never given recompense. And what about other vestiges of slavery? If the responsibilities there have ended, when? What process do you use to determine this?
These beginning questions are important because of where we will go with value and earning.
Value
In our society, we generally accept that the best way to assign value is to allow those that we have granted that ability to whoever owns it. If you sell a car for $10k, it is worth that, then, to you and to the seller, and that ends the question of value. If, instead, you sell the same car for $20k, it is magically converted, value-wise, to that amount. Value is a social construct (In a communist society, value would all be based on something else: each person's relative need, decided by the government. In a fascist society, value might instead be based on how useful you can be to a member of the ruling party, which again eschews the individual.)
But even in our society, we don't really think that value is totally subjective and dependent on what the parties agree. We think that there is a more objective range, somehow. There is a fair market value, for instance, that is a range of what reasonable people would pay. This determination is used in judgments, eminent domain proceedings, and various contractual provisions (among other places). Each person can set his own value, but society is willing to protect that value only to a certain extent. If I wouldn't accept any amount of money for the house my father built, then someone burns it down, I can't claim a billion dollars in my lawsuit if the fair market value is $150k. If I sell something for too little, my buyer is not considered to have paid "value" for it, and that buyer will not get certain legal protections.
So, to oversimplify, something's value is a subjective amount within some objective range. That idea is important.
Earning
But what about earning? By "earning," we typically mean a fair trade of effort for effort. To earn something, I must actively do something of value to merit receiving something else of equal value. If it's not equal, I've only earned part of it. But, like value, to earn something also means something very individual. You have to do something valid that is "worth" it. For instance, most people do not think that a guy finding a lottery ticket means that guy "earned" the pay-off. The winnings are his property, but he didn't earn them. Similarly, even if a very talented thief steals a million dollars, she didn't "earn" the money. Her actions were not legitimate. So there is a moral component, where you have to do something yourself, within ethical bounds, to have earned something. By the way, even if the theft cannot be proved, most would agree that the thief still had not earned it -- this is not merely a legal determination, but an ethical one.
One popular conception of "earning" is that you "earn" anything you can convince someone to agree to convey to you. Actual coercion (such as a gun to your head) would be excluded, but virtually anything legal is allowed. This method, though, seems to exclude the ethical side of what it means to earn something.
Let's take a few examples. Do welfare recipients earn what they make? For certain actions (filling out paperwork, not working, whatever), they are able to legally receive payment from another party (the government). Indeed, the return on their investment is pretty large. Did they earn it? (Now apply this logic to all recipients of state funds.)
What about a Wall Street exec who signed off on toxic acquisitions leading to the housing bust? He knew that the assets were bad, but he was just a middle man, and so they were not bad for him. He made a ton of money, and lots of others lost even more. Did he earn that money?
How about someone who plants bombs for Hezbollah, inside Iran? Or Nazis that ran the gas chambers (which was undoubtedly difficult, both physically and psychologically -- if they earned something, maybe they should even get hazard pay ... )? KGB agents interrogating U.S. citizens kidnapped during the Cold War? U.S. military humiliating POWs in Abu Ghraib?
For a less extreme example, this is how the situation of being rich creates humanistic ethical problems. (Here, I'll be painting with particularly broad strokes.) Rich means, almost by definition, having more money than one could produce on one's own. You might have inherited the money, which is not exactly earning it. If you are a self-made person, though, somehow you have convinced others to give you more value than you were able to "produce" from the "sweat of your brow," else you would have gotten back about as much as you produced. Expertise helps some here -- someone that has devoted her life to a profession can produce something that would take vastly longer for someone without that expertise to produce. But that just means you will get more, and it is very unlikely to make you "rich" in the way that most of us think of it.
Another way to get there is through technology. If you use technology to help you do what many people would have done, that is a way to produce more. However, once the technology exists, others
could use it (unless the ideas for creation are somehow protected).
Information discrepancies can be very important. If you understand something that others do not (market is about to change, there is oil under the land, whatever), that can make a big difference. Of course, it is not normally the "sweat of your brow" that discovers these information discrepancies. We recognize that, and punish it, in insider trading laws, and while we might often think of the person using this information discrepancy as clever, did they really "earn" the money?
Very often, some sort of the power of having money is most likely to be used. As an employer, I have the only opening available, meaning I can make it difficult for you to work elsewhere (I've monopolized the local market). I make you tell me how much you made in your last job, and I can prevent you from talking to others (by contract).
Most often, the discrepancy between owner and employee is justified by the notion of risk. I risked much to start the company, so I get a higher return on my investment. One ethical question is, how long does that justification last? In other words, is the initial risk enough to justify an infinite amount of future money, or, after some period, has that risk been paid off? If so, should you be able to use the money you have garnered from the initial period to continue making more money? Have you "earned" that money?
This is not an easy question to answer. In some areas, like copyrights and patents, we say that you only get to use your creations for a certain period. In others, such as buying real property, you get the benefits forever. And, even if society makes a decision that the ROI should eventually stop, what is the remedy? Who gets to decide?
How you answer these questions should influence how you think the government should function. If you think it is important that someone "earn" the money they have, then your conception of who earns what should make a difference. How we value property, and how far we go back with property rights, should be considered.
It is definitely considered in how we define our legal system. Remember, property is 9/10s of the law. It is in our earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence, and it is explicitly in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
These decisions, and how we shape our laws, create winners and losers in this fairness game.
The next entry will cover the role of government.
A friend recently suggested that I do a series on how to vote that didn't assume that the reader was Christian. This is a short series on the subject. Now, remember, folks, that this is a blog--it's not a scholarly tract, so there will be quite a bit of painting with very wide brush strokes. This is not going to be anything like an exhaustive trip through history, political philosophy, or legal interpretations. These are just a few thoughts on one way to approach how to make voting decisions.
This will be a three-part series, with the first two covering some foundational principles, and the last listing values and applications. You'll note that I will not give a party affiliation or an ultimate conclusion. Instead, I list values and suggestions for how some of them might apply.
These first two entries will be a bit dry. Sorry, but ... hey, foundational stuff is important. And I will not be devoting a lot of time to Christian principles here -- I've made arguments from that direction often enough lately, so this series will be from the perspective of applying secular principles.
In particular, this entry is on how to think about--and problems associated with--property, value, and earning.
What does it mean to own property?
There is a ton of legal and philosophical tracts on property. The first thing to understand, then, is that this is not a simple concept. Many people like to ignore nuances because that makes the arguments easier, or at least simpler ... but this is a tough one.
That caveat aside, to own property generally means that you have the right to control something. There is a "moral" version of this, where you have "earned" it (see below), or someone that earned it gave it to me. This moral version is simple, and it says that I own it, and I have the moral right to control it.
The moral version doesn't take you very far on its own, though (without significant lapses into philosophy that I'm going to blissfully ignore). The "legal" version has some easily describable nuance, though. In the legal sense, you own property if society recognizes that you have the authority to control something. This control has several components ("sticks" in the "bundle" of property rights), such as the ability to sell, license, or leave to your heirs; alter or destroy the property; benefit or enjoy the property; and keep others from doing any of this stuff.
Note again that this is societal. These are all defined by societal agreements, and enforcement is through those agreements. Without some type of government, you only have your belief about what property means, and you have no way to enforce or persuade beyond your own power. Legal property is of the government.
But property rights spring from somewhere. Who is the first owner of land? Who is the owner of things pulled from the land? Or from the sea, or the air? From the mind? Who designed the tools? Who made it? Who owns it? Do they own part of the property procured through the tools? For how long? Each of these questions is debatable (and have been debated, in great length, throughout the world, and throughout our own legal system). How they are decided determines what it means to own all or part of something.
Why does this matter? Because much of government is devoted to property rights. When it is said that "property is 90% of the law," that may well be true -- lots and lots of law is devoted to dealing with defining and protecting property rights.
What does it mean to earn, and what is something's value?
Switching gears, let's talk about value and earning. Does property have an absolute value, or is all value relative? As you might guess from the above, I would argue that value is cultural and relative.
Back to the beginning in our cultural history, did Native Americans own the land in the U.S.? Why? What if they did not have that concept? What if they did, and conquerors ignored it? What if their conception of ownership was different?
If someone found land it looked like nobody had used in a long time, did they own it? What if it was part of the Louisiana Purchase? Does the U.S. own it? Why, because Napoleon claimed it? If you think that is silly and therefore theft, when does this theft end? Has it, for instance, for Native Americans?
What about slavery? Value was stolen from slaves. Life itself, and children and family. Plantation homes were built by slaves that were never given recompense. And what about other vestiges of slavery? If the responsibilities there have ended, when? What process do you use to determine this?
These beginning questions are important because of where we will go with value and earning.
Value
In our society, we generally accept that the best way to assign value is to allow those that we have granted that ability to whoever owns it. If you sell a car for $10k, it is worth that, then, to you and to the seller, and that ends the question of value. If, instead, you sell the same car for $20k, it is magically converted, value-wise, to that amount. Value is a social construct (In a communist society, value would all be based on something else: each person's relative need, decided by the government. In a fascist society, value might instead be based on how useful you can be to a member of the ruling party, which again eschews the individual.)
But even in our society, we don't really think that value is totally subjective and dependent on what the parties agree. We think that there is a more objective range, somehow. There is a fair market value, for instance, that is a range of what reasonable people would pay. This determination is used in judgments, eminent domain proceedings, and various contractual provisions (among other places). Each person can set his own value, but society is willing to protect that value only to a certain extent. If I wouldn't accept any amount of money for the house my father built, then someone burns it down, I can't claim a billion dollars in my lawsuit if the fair market value is $150k. If I sell something for too little, my buyer is not considered to have paid "value" for it, and that buyer will not get certain legal protections.
So, to oversimplify, something's value is a subjective amount within some objective range. That idea is important.
Earning
But what about earning? By "earning," we typically mean a fair trade of effort for effort. To earn something, I must actively do something of value to merit receiving something else of equal value. If it's not equal, I've only earned part of it. But, like value, to earn something also means something very individual. You have to do something valid that is "worth" it. For instance, most people do not think that a guy finding a lottery ticket means that guy "earned" the pay-off. The winnings are his property, but he didn't earn them. Similarly, even if a very talented thief steals a million dollars, she didn't "earn" the money. Her actions were not legitimate. So there is a moral component, where you have to do something yourself, within ethical bounds, to have earned something. By the way, even if the theft cannot be proved, most would agree that the thief still had not earned it -- this is not merely a legal determination, but an ethical one.
One popular conception of "earning" is that you "earn" anything you can convince someone to agree to convey to you. Actual coercion (such as a gun to your head) would be excluded, but virtually anything legal is allowed. This method, though, seems to exclude the ethical side of what it means to earn something.
Let's take a few examples. Do welfare recipients earn what they make? For certain actions (filling out paperwork, not working, whatever), they are able to legally receive payment from another party (the government). Indeed, the return on their investment is pretty large. Did they earn it? (Now apply this logic to all recipients of state funds.)
What about a Wall Street exec who signed off on toxic acquisitions leading to the housing bust? He knew that the assets were bad, but he was just a middle man, and so they were not bad for him. He made a ton of money, and lots of others lost even more. Did he earn that money?
How about someone who plants bombs for Hezbollah, inside Iran? Or Nazis that ran the gas chambers (which was undoubtedly difficult, both physically and psychologically -- if they earned something, maybe they should even get hazard pay ... )? KGB agents interrogating U.S. citizens kidnapped during the Cold War? U.S. military humiliating POWs in Abu Ghraib?
For a less extreme example, this is how the situation of being rich creates humanistic ethical problems. (Here, I'll be painting with particularly broad strokes.) Rich means, almost by definition, having more money than one could produce on one's own. You might have inherited the money, which is not exactly earning it. If you are a self-made person, though, somehow you have convinced others to give you more value than you were able to "produce" from the "sweat of your brow," else you would have gotten back about as much as you produced. Expertise helps some here -- someone that has devoted her life to a profession can produce something that would take vastly longer for someone without that expertise to produce. But that just means you will get more, and it is very unlikely to make you "rich" in the way that most of us think of it.
Another way to get there is through technology. If you use technology to help you do what many people would have done, that is a way to produce more. However, once the technology exists, others
could use it (unless the ideas for creation are somehow protected).
Information discrepancies can be very important. If you understand something that others do not (market is about to change, there is oil under the land, whatever), that can make a big difference. Of course, it is not normally the "sweat of your brow" that discovers these information discrepancies. We recognize that, and punish it, in insider trading laws, and while we might often think of the person using this information discrepancy as clever, did they really "earn" the money?
Very often, some sort of the power of having money is most likely to be used. As an employer, I have the only opening available, meaning I can make it difficult for you to work elsewhere (I've monopolized the local market). I make you tell me how much you made in your last job, and I can prevent you from talking to others (by contract).
Most often, the discrepancy between owner and employee is justified by the notion of risk. I risked much to start the company, so I get a higher return on my investment. One ethical question is, how long does that justification last? In other words, is the initial risk enough to justify an infinite amount of future money, or, after some period, has that risk been paid off? If so, should you be able to use the money you have garnered from the initial period to continue making more money? Have you "earned" that money?
This is not an easy question to answer. In some areas, like copyrights and patents, we say that you only get to use your creations for a certain period. In others, such as buying real property, you get the benefits forever. And, even if society makes a decision that the ROI should eventually stop, what is the remedy? Who gets to decide?
How you answer these questions should influence how you think the government should function. If you think it is important that someone "earn" the money they have, then your conception of who earns what should make a difference. How we value property, and how far we go back with property rights, should be considered.
It is definitely considered in how we define our legal system. Remember, property is 9/10s of the law. It is in our earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence, and it is explicitly in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
These decisions, and how we shape our laws, create winners and losers in this fairness game.
The next entry will cover the role of government.
I would venture to say that sales and investment are ways you can amass riches that are infact earned through works. Sales and investment are what turns the economy. If one were to be taxed on capital gains then the same man should be able to declare bad investments as losses.
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