4.21.26 - Dialogue on Democracy & Property
Knox: I think if you asked a typical American, particularly an American lib, they would say that property qualifications for voting were very bad. Why?
Lib: Becuase it stopped people from voting, was classist, etc. Its obviously bad.
K: Why do we care if people vote?
L: Because people should have their interests heard, everyone has the right to advocate for their interests in a democracy.
K: Why?
L: Because everyone is equal.
K: How?
L: Just are. That's how we're made. Natural Law.
K: Fair enough, but do you think everyone is equally good at making decisions?
L: No. A lot of people don't research, are brainwashed by corporate media, political spending pushes people to vote against their interests. Billionaires affect politics too much.
K: Okay, so unequal material conditions can make people less capable of democracy?
L: Yes, we also need more economic equality to have a healthy democracy.
K: Okay so our current economic system is somewhat incompatible with democracy.
L: I would agree, yeah.
K: How do we fix that?
L: Well we have to vote for people who will fix that.
K: You see we're in a loop now, why haven't we done that? We've had universal suffrage for a while now. And I think that's been good on a lot of fronts, but I don't know if it's resulted in less economic inequality. It seems that's only gotten worse since the Nineteenth Amendment (which I'll pick becuase its when women got the vote). Yeah we had some compression in midcentury, but I don't think that was a result of politics. That was after an economic shock and a World War, which in turn created different material conditions and a broader middle class, which facilitated a more healthy democracy. The material shocks preceded the healthy democracy. In fact, the short period before WWII where we had universal suffrage was marked by growing inequality and corruption, very much like we see today.
L: Well, democracy wasn't perfect, even though people had the right to vote doesn't mean that they were educated, or that weren't racist/sexist in some kind of way that polluted their judgment. Also, there wasn't enough time for a necessary class consciousness to develop.
K: Okay, yes, but that stuff always exists. We're trying to build a political economy that takes people as they are. There's a question here. Why hasn't mass democracy resulted in more distributed control over capital? I mean, the mechanism is there. People can vote for their leaders, who can in turn can implement redistributive policiies. This is a puzzle! The founders wouldn't have predicted that. If you asked them what would happen if everyone was allowed to vote, they would predict that people would use the vote to break up property interests and redistribute them. In some ways, we do that--but mainly by moving labor income from young to old people. We haven't seen real redistribution of title or capital.
L: What do you mean by that?
K: I mean, why aren't big companies broken up more often? Why don't we see the government buy up land and give it to people? Why aren't titles to deposits of natural resources not distributed by lottery to a whole bunch of people (who in turn can sell them off ? These aren't crazy ideas, because I'm thinking about them right now. I can imagine a world like that. Why is ownership so concentrated? If you look at early America, the homesteading movement, land grants, they way things look now isn't obvious to me. Widespread dispersal of ownership seemed to be an overarching policy goal.
L: Well, we don't have the right kind of politics for that. People don't understand the world that is possible and what was lost.
K: But what was lost? You think that a world that embraced that kind of politics was better?
L: In some ways, yes. I think that a politics that recognizes the importance of economic equality, more equitable distribution of resources is good.
K: And we had that in the founding?
L: Well, I guess at least as far we saw the government trying to give out land and such, yes. But again, there was slavery, women were disenfranchised, so I really wouldn't go as far as to say it was materially more equal.
K: Okay, yes, for our purposes lets just worry about white men. I think that could streamline our discussion because the quesiton of women and racial minorities adds too much to this discussion.
L: Sure.
K: You would say that the politics of early America were more concerned with the distribution of economic resources, and that was good.
L: In this very limited sense, yes.
K: The yeoman farmer ideal and all that, you see some virtue in that?
L: Well, the idea that everyone should have a shot at owning something and have their own dignity, not be dependent on others, and the government taking policy efforts to promote that is good. We should have the modern version of that. It wouldn't look like homesteading or land grants today, but the same basic principle should be more present in politics. We want to protect people from arbitrary control of others. Ownership is part of that, I agree.
K: Yes. But isn't it curious that that politics existed before people without property could vote? That is, the government was taking efforts to give property to individuals who were definitionally not enfranchised. It wasn't because they voted for it, they couldn't vote for that! I mean at base, this shows that policies that promote material equality can be passed without the benefitting parties being part of the political system.
L: Look, I mean, this was the early republic. We had a lot of vacant lands. We had a set of elites that were really committed to a certain vision of the Republic, namely Jefferson who was a once in a generation mind. It's a totally irreplicable set of conditions. The fact that, in a nation-building context, the governemnt sought to give out property to the propertyless, in a completely positive-sum fashion--it just says nothing about today. You can't glean some more general princiople about how politics works with property qualifications from that episode in our history. It wasn't that long.
K: See, I see where you're coming from. But I don't buy it. I don't think that the widespread and rapid dispersal of property, breaking up fee tails, ending primogeniture, and all those policies happen if the founders didn't see property rights as tied with political enfranchisement. Jefferson talked about wanting to make the franchise as wide as possible, and he drafted the Virginia constitution!
L: Then why didn't he just establish something like manhood suffrage in the Virginia constitution?
K: Precisely! Why not? It's like that wasn't even a possibilty to entertain. He did a land grant in the virginia constitution PAIRED with a very low property qualification. It was just self-evident that material independence and democratic participation were bound up this way.
L: Yeah, but we know that they're not.
K: No, they are, you said as much. We just artificially divorced them. You agree that if say, one person owned all the land in the country, even if everyone could vote, it wouldn't work out. That's not a "real" democracy. The material preceded the political.
L: Sure...
K: When we got rid of property qualification for voting, don't you think we at least, symbolically divorced two things that we agree are not separate?
L: Well, I think we came to the idea that political equality is a necessary prerequisite to there even being any substantive equality, that its the sine quae non. If we aren't equal under law, there's nothing. That has to come before any policy about economic distribution. Its just what we're all abouyt. All People Are Created Equal. It's a vindication of our Revolution. Property qualifications were incompatible with that. And also, everyone is affected by public policy, so everyone should have a say.
K: We're back to where we started. We LIVE in that world. We have universal suffrage. That hasn't resulted in economic equality. People do have a say and don't vote for things in their best interests. So something about your theory about the political preceding the material is wrong.
L: So what are you saying, we should bring back property qualifications? That would solve the problem? What even happens then? We just take away the right to vote? Hand it to the small subset of the population that owns homes or businesses? That's insane! It would only exacerbate the oligarchic direction of this country. Talk about inequality! You mean renters and laborers shouldn't be allowed vote?
K: I don't know if I'm ready to make that leap, but many things are counterinuititive, and I think there some kind of dialectic move at the heart of all of this...that moving in one direction is a simultaneous move in the opposite. Maybe this is my idea; If we have a system that allows political represntation without a real economic independence, then overtime we'll just trend to the ideal type of that system. If ownership isn't a prerequisite, and we target political right, if that's the bedrock of our political system, over time we'll have a lot of political rights, and very little ownership. I think that's where we're at. American have a lot of political rights. We have a lot of ability to vote, influence planning of the built environment, veto building things. We have all these legal rights which are actually quite remarkable. We have a broad latitutde to initiate litigation for all sorts of things. You can just sue people and you don't have to pay if you lose! We're an extremely litigious society. We can sue our employers for discriminating against us. We can sue shops for excluding us. Stuff that would be unthinkable in our early system and views on property/freedom. We have a LOT of rights! When we get down to private law, we can get people in our institutions fired for just saying things. Large employers are basically little nanny states, which provide us our benefits, healthcare, help us plan our retiremenet. We're all like well treated renters and laborers. Spoiled tenants. But we're not owners. I think this is the logical conclusion of a system that guarantees political rights but does not guarantee economic participation. I don't like it. I think if we started with different premises, we'd see a different world. A Republic of Small Business owners, merchants trading with eachother on relatively equal terms, home owners. A republic of owners is a culture of savings and investment, one of stewardship. You're not trying to extract concessions from a bigger player, like people do from employers and stuff today. I have a friend, a genius really, who just got laid off from his B2B SAAS Big Tech company, and he's spending time trying to sue them for extra severance. I just don't think that's the world I want to live in! He should have his own little outfit.
L: I get what you're saying, but don't you think youre fetishizing the owner and the entrepreneur a bit much? There will always be laborers. There will always be some economic dependents who aren't owners. People will always live on property owned by others, work in firms owned by others (at least under our current property regime). You couldn't have a world where EVERYONE is an entrepreneur or a small business owner. What do you want, a world of just sole proprietorships? It would be propesterous. And if you didn't have a world of only sole proprioterships, and if your fantasy land has real firms of scale and people who live together and people who rent out their property, AND you had property qualifications, you would just be definitionally excluding a bunch of people from political participation.
K: Sure, but why do we care about political participation. Why do we care about democracy? Is that a good initself? And insofar as people wanted a political voice, wouldn't they aspire to be owners of something to secure that? I can imagine if I was a 20 something renter and worker who couldn't vote, and I wanted to join the "governing class," I would probably save more of my money to buy a home to do that. And also, I think the whole economy would just look so different in this world and that small scale ownership would be accessible to satisfy this demand. Maybe I own a small condo in this world. Maybe that's the entry level for the political franchise. I don't know. But I can visualize it.
L: Okay, but why do you care so much about ownership? Why do you care about economic independence in that way? Is it just an intrinsic good? Why is that different than me seeing democracy as an intrinsic good? We both have these foundational beliefs on what a good political economy is based on, which is hard to explain outside of aesthetic preferences or vibes.
K: Maybe you're right. But I think that ownership and economic dependence is an inherent good because it's about liberating people from coercion, its about elevating their spirits. Democracy in my mind is just about already liberated people contending with eachother and reconciling their preferences. You need liberation before democracy. Democracy without that liberation is just insecure, precarious people clawing at eachother. Or people augmenting the preferences of their big mommys and daddys. Laborers doing the bidding of labor bosses. Poeple repeating the talking points of a centralized media environment. Its a proxy warfare of the elites, throwing their dependants at eachother as cannon fodder. Democracy in a world of dependants is just having to share contentious space with other shitty, stupid people.
L: It sounds like you just don't like living in a society. You want rule by aristocracy, maybe a relatively low barrier aristocracy, but an aristocracy nonetheless. And you think you could be part of that aristocracy, so you're fine with it. But plenty of people will never be owners, are you fine with that?
K: I think that, in the society I'm thinking of, if you can't be an owner, and if you don't want to be, you're not fit for democracy and public life doesn't concern you, and you basically have to depend on others to represent your interests, yes. That's not unlike the fact that kids have to depend on their parents to vote for their interests. And it happens! So not so bad.
L: Don't you see that the world you're envisioning has the very qualities you just condemned, people have to depend on Big Mommy and Big Daddy to represent them!
K: Well, at least in this system, we're being honest.
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