On this conception of the configuration of ownership, the situation is analogous to entering a workplace and agreeing to limits on talking on your mobile phone, or entering a restaurant and agreeing to rules against wearing hats indoors, or entering a lease on an apartment and agreeing to rules limiting where tenants place a satellite dish. In these analogies, the mobile phone, the hat, or the satellite dish is your property, but you have voluntarily entered into a contract against doing certain things with it.

Ilya has suggested that most leftists do not actually think this way. Rather, he suggests that they, like libertarians, subscribe to an individualist configuration of ownership, and simply favor more restrictions on individual liberty than do libertarians.

I wish Ilya were right in this matter. I wish that leftists would affirm the individualist configuration of ownership, and identify liberty and coercion as libertarians do. They would then make themselves responsible to the presumptions and burdens of proof carried by such semantics. Unfortunately, I do not find Ilya’s arguments persuasive.

Ilya has suggested that survey data about the Kelo decision supports his contention about how leftists see things. As Ilya puts it, the survey data “show that the overwhelming majority of both the general public and self-described ‘liberals’ oppose such transfers, with many expressing great indignation about the Court’s decision.”

I see a couple of problems in invoking the Kelo survey results as evidence against my conjecture that leftists have overlordist preconceptions.

First, one can have overlordist preconceptions and still oppose certain rules that the duly appointed officers of the overlord implement. By analogy, I might think that my employer’s rules against mobile-phone use, the restaurant’s rules against wearing hats indoors, or my landlord’s rules about satellite-dish placement are bad or even immoral. Even though I disagree with the rule, I do not deny that the employer owns the worksite, the restaurant owner owns the restaurant, or the landlord the apartment complex. Likewise, if we subscribe to overlordism and the government passes a law forbidding the selling, manufacturing, and transporting of alcoholic beverages (as did the 18th Amendment), we could disagree with that rule without giving up our overlordism.

Second, in the case of the Kelo question, a survey respondent might have overlordist preconceptions and judge the decision to be a violation liberty. The reasoning here would be that the Kelo decision upholds a violation of the contract that Suzette Kelo had with the people, a contract based on the United States Constitution. That is, if a respondent with overlordist preconceptions regards the decision as unconstitutional, then he would regard the decision as a liberty violation, but that does not mean that he subscribes to the individualist configuration of ownership. He is still an overlordist.

Thus, I do not see the survey findings about Kelo as significant evidence against my conjecture about overlordist preconceptions.

Evidence regarding my conjecture would have to address not merely whether people agree with a certain decision or policy, but whether they view it as a liberty violation – two matters that we must learn to keep distinct. That is the kind of evidence I offered from the questionnaire put to people who had signed a petition to raise the minimum wage (Klein and Dompe 2007). But Ilya attempts to shoot down that evidence, saying it “is at best only very weak evidence for Daniel’s point.”

I find problems with Ilya’s criticisms of the minimum-wage questionnaire. First, that employment is a matter or contract, not property relations, is immaterial: In the overlordist view, the contract with the overlord is a matter of permissible contracts as well as property issues. Second, Ilya represents the question as asking whether the minimum wage law is a significant coercion, rather than what the question in fact asked, which is whether the law is coercive in a significant sense of that term. Third, he criticizes the sample of respondents, who were economists, who, he says, tend to be utilitarians. I do not see why that should affect how they see the underlying configuration of ownership. Finally, he criticizes the complexity of the question and suggests that respondents may have answered hastily without fully understanding the question. Yes, the question was very unusual and conceptually complex, but such is the nature of asking someone how they conceptualize a matter in terms of liberty/coercion. As for the possibility that the respondents answered hastily, note that the respondents were told that their answers to the questionnaire would be made public and would not be anonymous. They originally put their names into the public realm by signing the “raise the minimum wage” petition, and we proceeded to make our questionnaire public and non-anonymous as well. These circumstances would militate against responding carelessly or hastily.

When designing the minimum-wage questionnaire I wrote the liberty question to get at the issue of this Cato Unbound exchange. The responses show that very few leftist economists answer as Ilya suggested they would, and that a flat-out majority selected the option: “I give little to no weight to that definition of liberty; the minimum wage law is not coercive in any significant sense.” These responses are a unique form of evidence on the very questions with which we are dealing.

In Ilya’s comment he repeatedly quotes me as describing overlordism as the view that “everything is owned by the state.” In retrospect I see that I should have avoided any such simplified variation of the idea – I used those words as a warm-up to the fuller idea elaborated in my original essay. That is, I should have described overlordism only in terms of a contract between the individual and the owner of the substructure/ realm/”flower pot,” a contract that thereby envelopes his actions within the polity.

Reference

Klein, Daniel B. and Stewart Dompe. 2007. "Reasons for Supporting the Minimum Wage: Asking Signatories of the 'Raise the Minimum Wage' Statement." Econ Journal Watch 4(1): 125-67. Link

In his last response to me, he declares in the title “Freedom Is Not an Absolute,” something I said plainly in my opening essay. Similarly, he says that “taxation in not the same thing as slavery,” that taxation “does not mean that the government ‘owns’ you,” that “Singling out liberty as the only idea that matters” is wrongheaded. Perhaps he confuses me with Robert Nozick, the nonlibertarian’s favorite libertarian philosopher. That could explain why he thinks that the Hayek passage he provides is more at odds with what I say than it is. Yes, the taxes used to fund a government safety net would be reductions in liberty, but nothing I have said necessarily implies a position against such impositions.

Matthias admits that Obamacare forces individuals to buy health insurance. But he continues:

I will admit to this only if you admit that the fifty federal states of the United States of America ‘force’ their adult citizens to buy car insurance. And to your immediate response that ‘nobody forces you to buy a car or drive one’ I can only ask how anyone in this country could be truly free without a car, given the decrepit state of public transportation everywhere. As a good libertarian, you will surely appreciate that the only way you can exercise your liberty to move around the country is by car, and you do not even have to live in Los Angeles or Texas to understand this.

I agree that it is hard to move around the country without driving. One is thus dependent on roads, and thus on the owners of the roads. But dependency is not the same as force or coercion.

To draw the distinction, consider what Smith says about dependency in The Wealth of Nations. He says that in feudalism individuals “lived almost in a continual state … of servile dependency upon their superiors.” But in commerce: “Each tradesman or artificer derives his subsistence from the employment, not of one, but of a hundred or a thousand different customers. Though in some measure obliged to them all, therefore, he is not absolutely dependent upon any one of them.”[1]

We feel forced to buy car insurance because the government has enveloped the road industry. It is like the great lord. But in the feudal context, if we grant the lord’s ownership of his lands, we cannot say that he coerces the peasants who live on them. Assuming that the peasants are free to leave and that the lord sticks to agreed terms, the peasants are dependent, and probably servile, but not coerced. It is a terrible situation, but the problem is that society is enveloped by the feudal lord, not that the lord coerces. A better situation would come from voluntarily subdividing the land, giving rise to many competing owners.

I am supposing that car insurance today is a condition simply of driving on government roads. The government owns the road, and, as owner, it offers certain rules for use of its property, as the feudal lord offers for his. (I realize that our simplifications of both feudalism and car insurance are probably inaccurate in some respects, but I am assuming away complications to draw a basic parallel.)

Smith detested the dependency of feudalism, and he wrote at length about the feudal period as an “unnatural” development built and sustained by violations of natural liberty, including the engrossing of uncultivated land, primogeniture, and entails. He advanced natural liberty, whose natural tendency was toward subdivision not only of labor but also of land. Smith saw liberty as the bulwark of independence and the school of virtue.

Suppose there were liberty in road ownership, perhaps restricted in that crossing easements were imposed (sometimes coercion is our friend!). Roads owners would be private and multiple. Would all of them require users to have car insurance? Who knows. But even if they all did, we would feel less forced in the matter.

Practically all restaurants require a shirt and shoes, but that is not force, either. To say that we are forced to buy car insurance is to say that we are forced to wear a shirt and shoes by the pizza shop.

If you go about your business and avoid agreements that require buying car insurance, no one will stick a gun in your face for not buying car insurance. Someone will stick a gun in your face for not buying health insurance, under Obamacare. Unless you count being in the polity as agreeing to Obamacare — unless, that is, you grant overlordship — you have not entered any such agreement, and the gun is an initiation of aggression.

Dependency is one of the hazards of social democracy. The government monopolizes schooling by coercion, partly in the tax financing that advantages government schools, partly in the restrictions put on private competition (which in some states, such as California, are very significant[2]). In consequence, students and parents enter passive dependency on the local government school. Smith said that when our position is only passive, our sentiments tend to be sordid and selfish; when active, generous and noble.[3]

In social democracy individuals indeed often live in a state of “servile dependency upon their superiors.” People stoop to get permission to engage in voluntary intercourse. Pharmaceutical companies would no sooner antagonize the FDA than a slave would antagonize the whipping master. About 30 percent of the workforce is now in fields subject to occupational licensing.[4] The policy is to ensure that noncompliant service providers, though perfectly peaceful, will be fined and, as necessary, arrested and shot, and it creates other forms of dependency. Practitioners have to submit to the requirements to get permission. For many of the trades, one must get an accredited college degree — what Smith called “the privileges of graduation,”[5] and these are privileges again based on the gun pointed at anyone who would practice without the required credentials. Students are thus induced to go to college, a realm of privilege and dependency, sustained in part by this coercion-induced demand and the coercion of tax financing.

Social democracy is the new feudalism. That is why Hayek titled his work The Road to Serfdom. Thousands of coercions create dependency on officialdom and its cultural institutions. Many of the professors and experts, and most leftists, tell us that the coercions are good for society.

In fact, the vast majority of professors range from left to center or neutral; there are very few libertarians or conservatives, especially outside economics. Maybe it is because professors are such a smart bunch. They want more Americans to go to college. They favor new coercions to induce more college-going. It is good for America, they say.

In Mattias’s first response, he quoted Karl Polanyi, to the effect that there is nothing particularly natural about private property. Polanyi was a Hungarian for whom liberalism was liberalism, however much he misunderstood it. Unlike the Anglos I quoted in my opening essay, he felt no impulse to pass his outlook off as “liberalism.” Throughout The Great Transformation he heaps contumely on liberalism, for example, speaking of “the liberal virus.”[6] It is not hard to see overlordism in Polanyi’s outlook:

Socialism is, essentially, the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society. It is the solution natural to industrial workers who see no reason why production should not be regulated directly and why markets should be more than a useful but subordinate trait in a free society.[7]

In this subordination, “the actual content of property rights might undergo redefinition at the hands of legislation.”[8] For the overlordist, private ownership of the manufacturer is not attenuated; liberty is not infringed. Rather, the manufacturer’s rights are redefined. Again, it makes sense if one grants that “democratic society” is the owner either of the resources handled by the subordinates, or the owner of some kind of enveloping substructure with which the manufacture is then under contract. Either way, there is no incursion on liberty: If you do not like our terms, you are free to leave.

Ilya, in his second posting, says that overlordism underlies “some left-wing rhetoric about these issues, but by no means all or even most of it.” I had noted, and Ilya quotes me, that “one could affirm the individualist configuration of ownership and then go on to say that he nonetheless favors the myriad initiations of coercion of the modern activist state.” Ilya adds: “In my view, this is in fact what most American left-liberals (and many European ones) do.”

Ilya is suggesting that most American leftists would grant that, say, the minimum wage law is an incursion on liberty, but simply say that they nonetheless favor it (assuming they do favor it, that is). Well, I have some evidence on that.

In October 2006, 659 individuals, mostly economists, signed a petition to raise the minimum wage. I wrote a questionnaire asking them about the matter (Klein and Dompe 2007). Among the questions were the following:

In one manner of speaking, liberty is freedom from political or legal restrictions on one’s property or freedom of association. Subscribers to this definition are apt to say that the minimum wage law is coercive because it (along with concomitant enforcement) threatens physical aggression against people for engaging in certain voluntary, consensual acts (namely, employing people at sub-minimum wages). (Notice that even subscribers to this definition of liberty recognize that it does not by itself carry a policy recommendation; values other than liberty exist and might conflict with it.)

Q7: Please indicate which of the following options best fits your view of this semantic issue:

• A. [ ] I agree that that definition of liberty is the primary definition of liberty, and in that sense the minimum wage law is coercive.
• B.[ ] I give some weight to that definition of liberty, but not primary weight; the minimum wage law is only coercive in a sense.
• C.[ ] I give little to no weight to that definition of liberty; the minimum wage law is not coercive in any significant sense.
• D.[ ] Other [please specify]:

Now, if we take the questionnaire respondents to be a representative sample of vocal leftists, then, on Ilya’s supposition, most would have chosen option A. Yet, of 93 respondents who answered the question, only five did.

The responses frequencies (in percentages of the 93 individuals who answered the question) were as follows:

• A. 5.4%
• B. 19.%
• C. 50.5%
• D. 24.7%.

Thus, a straight-up majority selected the option that says that the minimum wage law “is not coercive in any significant sense,” and given that most of the responses at D were essentially denying the classical liberal interpretation, we may say that a vast majority of these respondents did not fit Ilya’s description of how leftists think. Again, 94.6 percent rejected the option that simply says that the minimum wage law is coercive.

For leftists, the minimum-wage law, which threatens to stick a gun in the face of employers who peaceably contract to pay less than the specified minimum, does not tread on their liberty. To use Polanyi’s term, the law simply “redefines” the employer’s rights.

Most leftists do not accept the individualist configuration of ownership. Do they affirm the collectivist configuration, or overlordship, as I have described it? Not consciously, perhaps. But, again, in the original period of social-democratic reaction to liberalism, the collectivist configuration was often quite explicit, as seen in quotations in my opening essay and many other quotations that could also be shown.

But the Left Hates Feudalism and Domination: Enter the Atavism Thesis

Frankly, I do not know what to make of the left. They fail to support school choice, the repeal of occupational licensing, and 100 other focal liberalizations that would obviously help the poor, whom they say they care about. Even worse, they often champion interventions. This conundrum has puzzled thinkers for centuries.

Searching for explanation, I look around and see what we can come up with. One of the best explanations available is Hayek’s conjecture that leftist ideology is an atavistic expression of deep-seated yearnings and penchants evolved over millions of years but little changed since the Upper Paleolithic ending 10,000 years ago.[9] It seems that the Upper Paleolithic band was a small, simple society, quite democratic in its structure and functioning, with solidaric ethics and encompassing experience and sentiment. Like any band of 20–40 members, consisting largely of family groupings, there would be a leader, an “alpha male,” but our researchers seem to suggest that the social relations were rather egalitarian and consensus-oriented.

Band-man sees society as organizational, not a network of spontaneous relationships. He yearns for an encompassing coordination of sentiment, not a cosmos of intersecting romances.[10] He yearns for common knowledge, and is uncomfortable with disjointed knowledge.[11] He yearns for social justice, and is not satisfied with merely procedural or commutative justice.[12] He presupposes an underlying configuration of collective ownership, not one of individual ownership.

In the narrative of ideological development, the biggest factors in enlivening the political reassertion of these instincts as a modern statist ideology are the rise of the nation-state and universal suffrage. Those provide the mythos that enlivens the Paleolithic ethos and mentality.

Although there are always jackals and others interested in overlordship and dependency, I think that the raw leftist impulse is Paleolithic, not feudal. In the small band of 10,000 years ago, there is collective ownership in the community: Even if nomadic, the troop is a collective club, and if you belong to the club you are agreeing, as it were, to its consensus-based governance and habitus. Otherwise you exit or are expelled. In the small band, there is no overlordship because there is just one level of organization. There is no basis for the “over” in overlord. And even the “lord” does not really apply, because of the personal familiarity and democratic ethos of the simple troop.

So the left wants “The Cooperative Commonwealth,”[13] not feudalism, dependency, and overlordship. But the latter is what their penchants yield in a society that is no longer small and simple. From leftist foolishness we get social-democratic feudalism, as though by a vicious and evil invisible hand.

I regret I am being so critical of the left. If they would stop championing coercions and opposing liberty, I would be a lot friendlier.

Notes
[1] Smith, WN, 412, 420.
[2] Seireg 2004.
[3] Smith, TMS, 137.
[4] Kleiner and Krueger 2009.
[5] Smith, WN, 778, 780.
[6] Polanyi 1944, 196.
[7] Polanyi, 242.
[8] Polanyi, 243.
[9] Hayek 1967, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1988.
[10] Klein 2005.
[11] Klein 2010.
[12] Hayek 1976, 1978.
[13] The leftist expression “the cooperative commonwealth” presumably originates with Gronlund 1884.

References
Gronlund, Laurence. 1884. The Cooperative Commonwealth. Boston: Lee and Shepaud.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1967. The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume. In Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, 106-121. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1976. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1978. The Atavism of Social Justice. In New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, 57-68. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1979. The Three Sources of Human Values. In Law, Legislation and Liberty: Volume 3, The Political Order of a Free People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 153-176.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1988. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Klein, Daniel B. 2005. The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (as Much as They Do). The Independent Review 10(1): 5-37.

Klein, Daniel B. 2010. "Knowledge Flat-talk: A Conceit of Supposed Experts and a Seduction to All." The Independent Review 15(1): 109-121.

Klein, Daniel B. and Stewart Dompe. 2007. Reasons for Supporting the Minimum Wage: Asking Signatories of the "Raise the Minimum Wage" Statement. Econ Journal Watch 4(1): 125-67.

Kleiner, Morris M. and Alan B. Krueger. 2009. Analyzing the Extent and Influence of Occupational Licensing on the Labor Market. NBER Working Paper 14979.

Polanyi, Karl. 1944/1957. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.

Seireg, Bahaa. 2004. Addition and Subtraction: State and Local Regulatory Obstacles to Opening a New Private School. Policy Study 329. Reason Public Policy Institute, December.

Smith, Adam. 1790. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982.

Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981.