Rational Conduct

The below text is from a paper I wrote for the Philosophy of American Life and Business I attend at Northwood.  I got the maximum allowed points for the paper.

In 1848 Frédéric Bastiat had written in his essay The State, “The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody.” The most common retort to this allegation against government is that a limited or equitable government would help alleviate such pressures to use The State for an individual’s own personal gains in disregard of the well-being of those individuals for which The State is to serve. Alas, we run head on into our main problem; who shall restrain and how shall The State be restrained from infringing on the rights of the individual?

In the Constitutional government the United States possesses today it is supposedly the Constitution itself that is thought to limit our government along with the populous who elects their various officials to do the deeds of The State. The idea behind the checks and balances within the Constitution is that government will allow maximum human Liberty to the individual while granting protections to ensure Liberty. So how on earth did the Takings Clause, the clause that legalizes eminent domain—the confiscation of an individual’s property for public use as long as “just compensation” is offered, make its way into a document which is supposed to limit government and maximize Liberty? For me it’s something so far distant and disconnected from Liberty that it is beyond any conceptual vision of Liberty at all.

Eminent domain is a far cry from the Lockean labor theory of property, put into text in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which had established that it was an individual’s labor which “put a distinction between them and the commons.” According to Locke individuals have an inherent property right to themselves which no other individual has a right to. While the “earth and all inferior creature” is to be of common ownership of everyone it is the individual’s labor which adds value and an ownership title to the property, as an individual’s labor is a direct extension of the individual.

In the Supreme Court Case Kelo v The City of New London there was an attempt to check the power of the government to limit or cease this infringement of Liberty. This case is a classic example of the earlier Bastiat quote I used that referenced how everyone uses government power to live at the expense of everyone else. Here, Pfizer, a profit seeking firm, wanted to develop some land for some activity other than the rightful property owners had in mind for the property. Pfizer could have used the market’s price mechanisms to determine the worth of the property and obtained through a voluntary exchange; however, Pfizer decided to go the rent seeking route and urged the government to step in and obtain the land for them. The government, seemingly ever so happy to oblige because of the assumed increase of tax revenue, used the New London Development Corporation to condemn and remove the property from the owners who had already been in possession of the bettered property. Even when challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court the court ruled in favor of the government economic development project rather than the original property owners. If one is to assume the Lockean theory of property it is then safe to say that the government infringed on the most important human right; the right to oneself.

This brings me to my next point; why was government, limited in size and scope to protect Liberty, unable to protect it at all but rather infringe upon it? Many have come to believe what Hobbes wrote about in the Leviathan; human nature was not of a peaceful persuasion, but it would lead to a perpetual war amongst everybody. Hobbes thought that people’s self interests would violently take over society causing any invention and industry to cease; art, culture, and knowledge to die; and society to crumble. For these reasons Hobbes had believed that government must exist to ensure these circumstances didn’t take place. In order for peace and Justice to flourish we need to allow government the monopolistic power on force and fear it in risk of death. According to Hobbes it then seems to follow that if we put these self interested individuals in charge of everyone else they will have purer intentions than individuals left to anarchistic machinations. I have to take disagreement with Hobbes on this particular issue. Trust and fear of government would rather lead to further egregious examples of government abuse on industry, invention, culture, and individual rights. The Kelo case being a perfect example in that the politicians were the ones who forced people out of their homes and property which they held a rightful deed, stripping them forcefully from their right to be left alone, all the while the plunder being shared by corporations and the government plunderers. This was not done irrationally mind you. The coercive parties were allowed under the law to serve their own rational self-interests at the expense of others—therein lay the problem of collectivist government.

Indeed, the very nature of government allows the process of “reciprocal plunder,” as Bastiat labeled it, to take place. In a world of civilized humans without government intervention the reality would have been that the profit seeking firm would have had to find some other way to obtain this property. In human history there have been two ways of obtaining another individual’s property. There is the uncivilized method; through coercion, force, violence, and war, and the civilized method; through voluntary contracts and the pricing mechanisms of the marketplace. Pfizer, as a profit seeking firm, would have recognized the positive cost of obtaining the property through force and defending that property from the rightful owners and would generally seek the latter route. Hobbes puts little faith into civilized human nature. Though it is quite possible that Hobbes thought logically having known the conditions of human nature prior to civilization; however, the reality is people have evolved into civilized beings from our barbaric brethren of the distant past with the ability to recognize the gains from peaceful and voluntary interaction.

The concepts of individual Liberty, especially the ownership of property, should not be left to collectivist or utilitarian concepts—or worse, the whims of politicians or political expediency—but rather the individuals themselves through voluntary association and contract. It is, after all, the individual who knows what is best for him or herself and not some politician, judge, bureaucrat, or even a majority.