[ExI] Social right to have a living

[Kelly Anderson]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Damien Sullivan
<phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 01:42:35PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>> What justification is there that society owes a living to anyone? Is
>> that belief based in the same flawed religious roots as the belief
>> that it was OK to steal the land from the American Indians, or that
>> slavery was just fine? This is a really important question to answer
>> if you want to support your position that society should help the
>> poor.
>
> The counter-question is "what justification is there to have rich people
> and starving people in the same society?

The justification in most cases is that the poor (and people from
other economic strata) have of their own free will purchased something
they deem of value from the rich. It is a voluntary exchange of money
for goods and services. There is clearly nothing unethical about free
trade amongst free people. No society in the history of earth that has
provided economic freedom and opportunity produced starving people in
any significant numbers. Starving people are ONLY found in despotic
countries like North Korea, Sub Saharan Africa, etc. If you want to
change your statement from starving to hungry, then perhaps we can
have a conversation.

> Why should the alleged
> property rights of one who has a lot be respected by someone who doesn't
> have enough?"

Alleged property rights? Are you promoting the idea of giving all the
land back to the aboriginal inhabitants around the world?
And again, I reject your premise that a libertarian country would be
full of starving people. Hungry perhaps, but hunger is a powerful
motivator to get off your ass.

> I actually wouldn't start with any abstract blanket right to "a living";
> society's clearly not rich enough yet for that.  We can start with the
> right to *make* a living, including fair access to the tools needed for
> that.  This gets simpler to think about if we go back to mostly agrarian
> societies: a right to an equal share of land to work.  No one starts out
> with a right to be fed by other people, but they start with a right to
> land with which to feed themselves.  If someone has more land, while
> someone else has none and must work as a servant for the landlord, what
> justifies that?  And while one can talk about "I cleared this land",
> most commonly the answer is "my ancestor stole it from yours and I have
> force to back up my claim".

The good thing about today is that you don't need land to make money.
All you need is an idea and a willingness to work hard (in a
sufficiently libertarian society). Unfortunately, in America, you have
to have a willingness to work hard enough to feed two; yourself, and a
moocher. Tomorrow, we might have two moochers for each worker.
Eventually, we might have ten moochers to each worker, and then we'll
have a real problem!

Ancestral land rights is beside the point. If you want to make an
argument about ancestrally inherited psychological damage that keeps
you from being productive, that might be a better argument.

> (Even if one did clear or improve land, it's far from obvious that that should
> grant an indefinite right of ownership.  In the first year, much of the
> food value will have come from the initial land improver, not just the
> farmer, but over time likely the land has to be maintained.  If the
> first improver does it, they're being paid for service rendered; if the
> tenant farmer does it, then in justice ownership by usufruct and effort
> invest passes to them, as eventually they've provided most of the value.)

This argument doesn't carry weight with me because intelligence is
more important than land ownership. Only 3% of people today (in
America) work in agriculture, and it is a very small percentage that
own farm land (except perhaps indirectly by owning stock in a company
that owns land, a lot of us own land in that manner; almost collective
farming in a sense).

> So a fair society would give an equal bloc of land to everyone.  Of
> course, some people are better farmers than others, A better than B,
> say.  In which case B might let A farm B's land, in return for a share
> of the crop, while B goes off and does something else.  If B can't get
> other jobs, and if A doesn't pay enough, B always has the option of
> coming home and working their own land again.

And so, some become rich and some poor. No matter how often you level
the playing field, this approach does not work. Millions starve
because nobody knows how to fix the tractors except the poor slobs in
Siberia.

> OTOH, if A is a highly productive farmer, they might be able to pay B
> enough so that B never has to work, while A still does quite well
> themselves.  This looks at the surface like B profiting idly from A's
> labor, but it's actually rooted in B's fair share of the land as a
> whole.

Do you actually believe this? Seriously?

> If you reject that, then we don't have much to talk about.

So you're saying that if I don't see an agrarian version of communism
being the fairest way to run the world, we can't talk about it? That's
a bit rigid.

> If you can
> accept that, as a simple and idealized version of a fair society, then
> the question becomes how to relate it to our complex non-agrarian
> market society.  And any answer will likely be messy.  But instead of
> individually owned parcels of land rented out to farmers and other
> users, we might have a land value tax whose receipts are redistributed
> as a modest basic income.

Of course any answer that works will be messy. Let's start with your
agrarian utopia. Then say that A SELLS his land to B. (Unless he
doesn't have the freedom to do so). And then A spends all the money on
farmer C's daughter. How does your society then feed A?

> Alternately, in lieu of an individual grant of land, there might be an
> individual grant of modern capital, as Thomas Paine proposed.  $100,000
> given at adulthood, say.  Of course, with human capital being perhaps
> the most valuable kind, public schooling and children's health care and
> cheap or free college might be seen as non-cash delivery of said
> capital.  OTOH, that still relies on the market to match jobs to people,
> and a right to direct money or even food might be seen as safer.

Most of that money would be wasted. Without morals and education, you
might as well just give the $100,000 directly to the Columbian drug
lords.

> That's for general welfare programs.  Aid for the disabled, or universal
> health systems, aren't so much a fundamental egalitarian right as a
> choice we make for a nicer (and possibly more efficient) society.  The
> cripple or retiree has a right to a living because of a social insurance
> system creating such a right.

The "efficient" part may have some merit... but efficient government
is an oxymoron. Who has the "right" to create the social insurance
system in the first place? From where was that right derived? In a
God-less world, where do rights come from in any case? From our
evolved sense of justice? What if I evolved a different sense of
justice than you?

In our society, it is hard to find physically disabled people who are
completely unable to make some limited kind of living. Mentally
disabled people are at more of a disadvantage. People who are both
physically and mentally disabled, well, I'm not really for leaving
them out on the ice... but I don't believe that it's government's job
to care for them. I think that it would be more reasonable to leave
that to the conscience of their relatives and local communities.

> A tidbit to think about: it's illegal today to sell oneself into
> slavery.  (Some libertarians think it should be legal.)

Not me. Selling yourself into slavery would give you money, but then
no opportunity to spend the money. Loss of freedom is the thing
libertarian societies are fighting against.

OTOH, if someone wanted to trade their reproductive capacity for
drugs, I'm OK with that. The freedom of the potential children
outweighs the fact that they are consensually giving up their freedom
by becoming enslaved to drugs. One of the harder things for societies
to do is balance the freedom of parents and children, particularly
unborn children. The rights of never conceived children seems fairly
uncontroversially to be zero.

> Ditto for
> debt-slavery, which has been common at times.  But apparently in ancient
> Egypt, not only was debt-slavery illegal, so was seizing a workman's
> tools to pay off a debt.  The ability to make a good living, granted by
> the tools, was inalienable (though perhaps sellable) -- one's tools were
> part of oneself, in a sense.

Selling one's self into time limited indentured servitude in exchange
for passage to the new world was known in early America. It was
trading short term freedom for greater long term freedom for himself
and his children. The apprentice system was another form of the same.
I'm OK with these systems, but not with selling one's self into
slavery of indeterminate length. There must remain the potential
equitable freedom.

I am a great admirer of the Egyptians. I frequently employ Egyptian
engineering techniques when moving large rocks around my yard by
myself. I wonder what would happen if a workman decided to sell his
tools under such a system. Was starvation allowed in the Egyptian
system? I'd bet it was.

In the end, starvation MUST be an option for a sustainable society. In
such a society, I don't think actual starvation would actually occur
in many cases, but the IDEA of the POSSIBILITY of starvation must
survive. In America, the idea of actual starvation has died, and with
it the sustainability of our system.

Now let's fast forward to a society in the not so distant possible
future... Suppose that there are AGIs and robots of sufficient skill
that unenhanced human beings are no longer capable of making
meaningful contributions to society. Are the robots required by your
rules to sustain us?

-Kelly