Thread by @arctotherium42

Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom.

One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it.

Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege.

The major outlines of Western thought on property were laid down by the time of Plato and Aristotle. The pro- and anti-property political, moral, economic (efficiency vs wasteful competition), and psychological (identity vs greed) arguments have changed little since then.

Plato was something of an egalitarian utopian who wanted to abolish property completely and establish a form of communism, perhaps in reaction to Athens' loss in the Peloponnesian War due to infighting and greed (vs Spartan dedication to the state).

Aristotle took the opposite approach, arguing that people took better care of things that belonged to them, and that property both solved disputes and allowed for generosity. Rather than a communist elite dedicated solely to the state, he preferred a middle-class society.

Contrary to popular belief, the church, even the early church, never condoned communism; Christians exhorted their followers to voluntarily renounce their own wealth for spiritual benefit, not to seize the wealth of others. Veneration of poverty was a hallmark of heresies.

18th and 19th century, critics of property shifted from attacking its excesses to attacking the idea itself. This was related to the spread of democracy and was very concentrated in France.

Property refers not only to possessions but to traits; John Rawls's unique contribution to the anti-property tradition was to apply redistributionist sentiment to abilities and talents as well as wealth, arguing that talents should be viewed as common asset.

The Cold War solidly settled the question in favor of private property.

Anthropology was torn between those who (correctly) understood man as an animal with inborn instincts for acquisitiveness and territory and blank-slatists like Montagu or Boas who viewed human behavior as arbitrary. The latter won in part by physically attacking the former.

Children raised on communistic kibbutzes in Israel possessed innate instincts for acquisitiveness, exclusivity, and territoriality, that they were taught and slowly learned to disregard as they grew up.

The California gold rush provides an example of property in land spontaneously emerging by common consent through self-interest alone, with no forcible appropriation. Prerequisites for property include something being both scarce and valuable.

However, exclusive possession is not enough for something to be private property; it also must be alienable. Most ancient societies, except Greece and Rome, did not have private property in land; at least in theory, the king owned all land and merely leased it to his subjects.

Though what counts as property depends on the society (nomads rarely have private property in land, for example), all known societies ever have some form of property; it is a 'natural' institution like marriage, not a contingent one like joint-stock corporations.

It is impossible to translate the word 'freedom' into any ancient Near or Far Eastern language; when the word arrived in Japan in the 19th century, it was usually translated as 'licentiousness'.

Pipes believes the idea of freedom comes from economic independence and the personal worth it generates, which comes from private property in productive assets - land in agrarian societies.

England developed a national state and institutionalized the democratic practices of Germanic tribes before any other nation; Parliament was able to rest power from the crown because the crown needed consent to access/tax their (private) property for war.

To take a man's property (including taxation) without his consent (through his representatives) was to steal and thus in violation of the eighth commandment.

Territorial representative parliaments were common in Medieval Europe (and nonexistent anywhere else in the world), but developed furthest in England because England was small (regional, as opposed to national, parliaments did better elsewhere) and secure.

Pipes believes Russia's failure to develop rights and liberties derives from the liquidation of private property in land in the Grand Duchy of Moscow; the Tsar was both the ruler and owner of Russia and his power therefore unlimited until the late 18th century.

Because land was so abundant in the Russian forests, private property in land emerged late, only around 1400, by which point it had existed in Western Europe for centuries. During the Mongol period, sovereigns treated their realms exactly like private property.

In Western Europe, land rights transitioned from conditional tenure to true property; in Russia the reverse happened, which removed all checks on the sovereign. There were no property rights in agricultural land or urban real estate.

19th century sociologists believed that the Russian peasant commune (mir) was a relic of primitive communism, but the reality seems to be the reverse.

In the late Middle Ages, Western serfs became free men; the reverse happened in Russia.

In 1785, Catherine the Great granted nobles property rights in land as well as personal freedoms to win their support for her coup. But turned ~everyone else, including the peasantry, against the idea of private property, which was seen as self-serving license for the few.

The emancipation of the serfs mostly turned over land and authority over former serfs not the the ex-serfs themselves, but to the commune. Stolypin attempted to change this, but didn't get too far before his assassination and WWI.

Despite its Cold War victory, the 20th century has been the most hostile age in history for private property.

War Communism devastated Soviet Russian economic output, with an 82% decline in industry and a 40% decline in grain production between 1913 and 1920. The Bolsheviks prioritized state control over productive assets, and so were willing to accept this.

The catastrophe of collectivization of agriculture in 1928 is without parallel in human history - no government had ever inflicted such destruction of lives and resources on its own people.

The Soviet system, with state monopoly on productive assets and employment, was capable of incredible mobilization for war, but destroyed the vitality of its subjects, since non-criminal individual efforts did not yield commensurate rewards, leading to moral decay.

Mussolini emerged from the socialist sphere, and while he was nowhere near as radical as the Bolsheviks and acknowledged private property, he had zero compunctions about forcing owners to use it according to the national interest (as determined by the fascists).

Property ownership in Nazi Germany again resembled feudal conditional tenure, with many restrictions on the use and disposal of property. Big owners were mostly willing to play ball as long as they could retain their profits, which they could.

Unlike the Communists, Nazis, or Fascists, 20th century democrats proclaimed the inviolability of private property, but wound up subverting and violating it in many ways (the obvious ones being the welfare and regulatory states) in the name of the common good.

Until the 20th century, poverty was usually assumed to be a result of human failings and not something that could be legislated away. The changed largely because of the rise of wage-earning and hence structural unemployment and business cycles beyond anyone's control.

Furthermore, during the 19th century, the common understanding of the purpose of law shifted from upholding pre-existing custom to resolving social evils, with Jeremy Bentham being particularly important in this shift.

The foundations of modern welfare states were laid in the 1880s, with insurance, pensions, and minimum wage laws, but remained miniscule and focused on securing against calamity until the 1930s, which turned governments into colossal taxation and redistribution machines.

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson set the goal as equality as a result, a massive break from the Western tradition and necessitating violation of property rights. Premodern checks on royal violation of property fail in the face of representative governments.

Since the 1960s, the government itself has become a major source of wealth - money, benefits, services, contracts, franchises, licenses - exceeding any prior era, and this form of wealth, held conditionally according to political whim, is replacing private property.

The modern state doesn't just redistribute citizen's possessions, it also greatly regulates their use, combining in the admin state judicial, executive, and legislative powers. Particularly dangerous because it is to some extent beneficial and necessary.

We confront a situation where private property, the most effective bulwark of freedom, must be restricted to benefit society, which enhances the power of the state over society - but the state itself reflects the free will of free citizens. No easy answers.

Until the 20th century, regular direct taxation was seen as unlawful in the West, except for subject peoples.

Historically, rights referred to guarantees given to individuals that neither state nor society would infringe on life, liberty, or possessions, and limited state power. Social "rights" do the reverse; they require a more powerful state to access other's property without limits.

Property rights are often violated in the name of environmental protection - the primeval fear that the planet will be destroyed, deriving from the human love of doomsday scenarios rather than rational analysis, justifies unlimited violations.

"The idea of absolute ownership of land, the absolute right of the owner to exploit and develop the land as he thinks best, has... entirely disappeared from English law." (remember, this book came out in 1999).

By 1964, law professors at Yale (Charles A. Reich) were noticing that property in the US was coming to resemble conditional or feudal tenure, which endangered individual liberty by rendering people totally dependent on political/state whims.

Eight ways people became dependent on the state in the US as of 1964: (1) direct income and benefits/welfare, (2) public jobs, (3) occupational licensing, (4) franchises, (5) government contracts, (6) subsidies, (7) use of public resources, and (8) services.

The extraordinary dependency of Americans on USG from sources 1-8 (we can add Medicaid and Medicare and others since) has created a sort of neo-feudalism; whether we like it or not we are all dependent to various degrees on government largesse.

In the 19th century, the Supreme Court regularly affirmed freedom of contract to be an inalienable right that the govt couldn't interfere with, but in the 20th the govt gave itself the right to intervene on behalf of the 'weaker' party, a reversion to medieval conditions.

One of the many examples of state interference with private property, rent controls, at their apogee in New York City. The major beneficiaries being middle-aged, middle-class tenants. Supporters justify rent control on the grounds that it makes NYC more diverse.

Another case of state interference in private property is anti-discrimination ordinances; the right to exclude has always been an essential attribute of ownership.

Another example is the state forcing banks to give more loans to favored classes (mostly blacks and Hispanics in the US) than would be justified by financial considerations such as risk (this helped cause the subprime mortgage crisis 8 years after this book was published).

And yet another, also justified in the name of fighting discrimination, are business set-asides, government contracts set aside for businesses owned by various favored classes (blacks, Hispanics, women, Asians).

The most egregious form of state interference with freedom of contract is affirmative action, state-mandated employment preferences for favored classes. It gave the state extraordinary power over hiring in ~all major organizations in the country.

This distinguishes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from its 1866 namesake, which focused on the right to property and equality before the law. Some useful idiots today still pretend that Civil Rights movement was shooting for 1866 rather than 1964.

The inherent vagueness of establishing discrimination creates a Red Queen's race because orgs have to meet de facto quotas without ever being assured they have met them and are therefore in the clear (and so must lurch from leftist fad to leftist fad).

In 1997, the Americans with Disabilities Act was interpreted to prevent employers from taking disciplinary action against employees behaving rudely, being late, or coming to work disheveled, as these could be the result of mental illness.

Title VII has also been interpreted to interfere with freedom of speech in the workplace. Though nowhere in the original wording, courts and agencies have determined it prohibits expression of "offensive" (towards privileged classes) language.

One example of the pernicious effects of state largesse is affirmative action in higher education; it is illegal for the govt to interfere with higher ed, but the state was able to force affirmative action on ~all of higher ed by threatening to withdraw funds.

Federal funding of higher ed went from 0.7% of the total in 1940 to 22.5% in 1970 (even higher at elite research universities); in 1999 only 2 colleges in the entire country, with a combined enrollment of 5000, rejected federal funds.

In 1997, the DoJ threatened University of California system with the loss of $1.1B if they didn't get their black and Hispanic enrollment up - perhaps by dropping standardized requirements - after it fell following official ditching affirmative action.

20th century totalitarian societies rejected property in principle, and the democratic ones that defeated have partly rejected it in practice, turning absolute dominion into conditional, quasi-feudal possessional, which bodes poorly for individual freedom.

Property doesn't guarantee liberty, but is the most effective device for ensuring it by creating an autonomous sphere in which state and society can't encroach. Weakening it for welfare and civil rights undermines liberty, even if things seem OK due to peacetime wealthbuilding.

The trend of modern times is that citizens of a democracy will sacrifice freedom for equality, and as such are losing ability to hold what they own, enter contracts freely, hire and fire, and even speak their mind. The 21st century, especially the lockdowns, vindicates this.

Pipes, acknowledging that no society has truly unlimited property rights, suggests a compromise: infringements on property rights are allowed, but must be compensated accordingly.

In 1999, for every Swedish citizen earning his own leiving, 1.8 were maintained by taxes. In Germany and the UK, this was 1:1. In the US, 1: 0.76. Pipes correctly predicted generational conflict as a result due to population aging.

Tocqueville, in the 19th century, worried that democracy would produce a "guardian" despotism that, by relieving them all the care of thinking and trouble of living, would turn a nation into nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals. Prescient?