Wealth, Property and the Dire Need for Reform

In a world and time such as ours it is not unusual to be outraged by human conduct, but sometimes the outrageous event provides insight into just how bad things are and why they are that way. The so-called budget deal reached by California's governor and its legislature is one of these. 500,000 children will no longer have health insurance and thousands of infirm elderly people will no longer have home care. Meanwhile a proposed severance tax on oil to redress some of the budget shortfall was eliminated and the oil companies were allowed to resume offshore drilling after 40 years of protecting our environment against this practice. In the midst of the legislative struggle caused by a Republican minority the wealthy Republican governor provided the perfect paradigm for what has gone wrong with this society when he said that he would wait out the legislative battle by basking in his jacuzzi while smoking a favorite cigar. This is the modern equivalent of Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned.

The need to control wealth for societal benefit is a world-wide priority on a par with the need to reduce human population. Contemplate this. Let the enormity of the implications settle in: The 1996 U.N. Human Development Report report gave the mind-boggling statistic that the net worth of the 358 richest persons in the world was equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 percent of the world's population, that is, of 2.3 billion people. The aberrant distribution of wealth in the United States has resulted in an unresponsive government, a munitions-for-profit industry second to none and war without even a credible pretext. This kind of maldistribution of wealth is an ancient problem for humanity, but technology and a vastly overpopulated planet have made its elimination critical to human survival.

One of the greatest bastions of wealth is private property. The old myths of private property will have to be mitigated if not abandoned. Notably, private property, while taken note of in the Constitution, was never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. This would imply that private property is not essential to freedom, which is the burden of the Declaration of Independence. This planet is our species' only home. Nobody can own it. “It” will be here after we are long gone. Ownership is after all a social convention expressed in law. Some societies, including those of Indigenous Americans, did not have this notion. As a human convention it can be changed. Perhaps we will have to develop some system of “right to use” to replace ownership. This was a hot topic for philosophers of the 18th century when the United States was founded. I think this was so, in part, because Europeans were still finding their way out of centuries of feudalism. Initially transcontinental trade followed by the manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution created great wealth for non- aristocrats.. Private property was thus viewed as a hedge against the land-based dominance of the aristocracy and the crown. In brief, private property was a defacto banner of individual freedom. Is property a right as John Locke contended or is it a human convention as David Hume argued? Because property now has global significance and has become so powerful an influence on human well being it is, in my judgment, high time we began a reconsideration of the full implications of property ownership. Simply consider that Coca Cola can deprive Indian farmers of the aquifer they have used for centuries. Shell Oil can pollute African jungles with impunity. And Goldman-Sachs and the other money-manipulating corporations of Wall Street can cause a global economic collapse.

We can begin the kind of reform that is needed by defining property as a right of use conferred by society for purposes it deems useful. This, in effect, is what the corporation was intended to do. Incorporation is a grant by society to engage in a specified kind of business for specified purposes and, initially, for a specified period of time.

Enhancing this concept of the corporation so as to insure that the public good said to result from the approved incorporation is clearly defined would be a large step in the needed direction. Society should reserve the right to retract incorporation when the public good ceases to be served. This should be accompanied by the removal of corporate personhood illegitimately obtained by corporations in the 19th century. After all, if they are persons the repeal of their incorporation would be a form of homicide.

Bob Newhard

Postscript: As I was finishing this column David Sirota posted on Alternet an article on how the richest 1% of Americans are trying to subvert universal health care. It can be found at http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141520/how_the_ultra-rich_are_trying_to_kill_health_reform/ health care