Property rights can be immensely helpful to society, increasing our collective productivity, motivating and inspiring people to work harder, and consequently augmenting our standard of living. There is however, another side to that coin–property rights can create a distribution of wealth that undercuts economic demand and leads to the replacement of wage-financed consumer demand with credit-financed consumer demand, leading to, as we recently collectively experienced, economic crises fuelled by unsustainable levels of private household debt. Clearly there is a balance with property–we need to maximise the benefits of this institution while minimising the societal costs. The trouble is that the political theory that lies at the foundation of right wing thinking in the Western world does not allow for this balancing, and these ideas continue to hold sway. Today I’d like to address where the difficulties in the right’s theory of property lie and what sort of negative consequences these difficulties have for the rest of us.
Tag: Justice
Who Deserves What?
One of the central questions of distributive justice is desert–what determines the size of one’s claim to the economic pie. The conservative right often maintains that certain inherent virtues or positive qualities justify desert. A hard working person is said to deserve more than a lazy person, a smart person is said to deserve more than a dumb person, and so on. This amounts to sort of a virtue ethic, a deontology–these things are inherently good, and consequently those who possess them deserve more. The liberal left has a different answer to this question, one grounded more in consequences and less in arbitrary virtues and vices, and I think there’s a strong case for saying that it more closely reflects reality.
Harmony versus Dichotomy
It is often overlooked how democracy changes the nature of politics from a question of “what is best for society, what leads to harmony?” to a question of “how can my faction or voting block get its way over other factions or voting blocks, how can I best exploit dichotomy?”. Philosophers and theorists often see politics as a question of how to create the good state, the good society, but this view does not correspond to the larger population’s understanding. As most voters are not philosophers or theorists, the entire political process becomes designed around this alternate, inaccurate understanding. Let us elaborate on the differences between the harmony of the philosopher and the dichotomy of the voter and see how truly dangerous and destructive the latter’s perception is to wider society.
Benjamin Studebaker 