Human Rights

The Never Ending Struggle

The great struggle for human rights centers on two closely related concepts. Both ideas have substantial histories with many heros and a large literature. The concepts overlap.

Life, Liberty, and Property.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The idea of Life, Liberty and Property was the main contribution of John Locke to the struggle for human rights. However, by placing property in the circle of the hallowed three, Locke was paying homage to the property owners of his day and was saying, in effect, "Large landowners, you have a God-given, natural right to your property." Thomas Jefferson added the concerns of Francis Hutcheson, a philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, when he exchanged the "Pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, for "Property." Hutcheson's main thesis was that the role of government was to provide for the security and happiness of its people. His slogan was, "The greatest happiness for the greatest number." Seeing to this was the role of government. Government fails, according, to Hutcheson's concept, when it produces misery (probably the first use of the "misery index.")

The term "property" turns up again in the Constitution, emphasizing, the fact that the Declaration of Independence is the origin of our liberties. (Furthermore, it says that we can change our government by any means whatsoever, if our government fails to provide security and happiness). The Constitution, on the other hand, was written to establish governance.

Throughout history, the people who had the property have done everything they could to retain their ownership of that property and to extend its aggregate amount by whatever means they could. Property translates to power. The more property the more power. The propertied people provided the kings, the other rulers, and, the ruling class. When the concept of general human rights arose, the comparisons were between this class of people, the "have alls," with the "have nones." The "All men are created equal" phrase was hard to swallow for the "have" classes, since they could point to obvious differences between the classes. But who could deny that everyone should have the right to be happy? The substitution of happiness for property was the substitution of sociological/value for economic value. We could not all be equally rich but we could all be equal in our attempts at happiness.

Property law once placed property value above every other value in the civilization—above life, above liberty, and above happiness. The sacred right to property justified the ownership of human beings—slavery. The sacred right to property forbade the government to interfere between employer and employees of the sweat shop of the industrial revolution because of the sacred trust in the contract. Property rights exercised without the restraint of taxation are authoritarian, dictatorial, tyrannical, and fascist. Property rights exercised with reasonably progressive taxation, are philanthropic, charitable, altruistic, and humane.

The concept of private property, privatization, private enterprise, and unrestrained trade, i.e., free markets; plays a great philosophical role in our present-day world where many think that private is good (equate sacred), and public is bad (equate evil). Communism is evil in its purest form since it does not recognize the right to private property.

Much of the argument over human rights from the very beginning of the argument had some reference to income distribution or rather redistribution. The idea was that the rich and the well-to-do should share their wealth with the poor. From the Middle Ages on, charity was the outward expression of this proposition—voluntary charity. Social welfare programs are a latter day manifestation of those charity starting conditions, and they have always carried a stigma, as having wealth is considered virtuous, while being poor is seen as being without virtue. Several philosophical efforts have been made to justify this situation. The first was Malthus, whose thesis was that population was the problem, since there was not going to be enough (e.g., food) to go around. The poor had the population, so poverty was their problem. The Club of Rome in a latter day put forth the same idea in the form of "Limits of Growth." Both are false. For no prolonged period of time has scarcity been a problem for mankind. There was a time in the Third Century Roman Empire when everything went to hell, but the cause was anarchy not scarcity. Diocletian put order back into the system and the Roman Empire went on its merry way for more than a thousand years.

If scarcity has not been and is not the problem then what is the problem? The problem is abundance, what to do with all the abundance—goods and money.

Wealth is a function of resources and information—knowledge. It is the product of resources and information Resources are finite, extremely abundant but finite. What we have is what is here on Earth, under Earth, and what falls to Earth from space. In the future, we will be able to extend our reach to the moon and planets, but for the present we have to settle for the enormous resources of planet Earth—finite, exhaustible, but huge.

Knowledge like light is everywhere dense. Information is infinite. There is no end to new knowledge. A finite number times a transfinite number is a transfinite number. There is no end to wealth. There never has been in the past and there never will be in the future. The ability of the human population of the Earth to produce wealth has never been a problem. The problem has been what to do with the wealth once it has been produced.

Ancient and Medieval societies had no problem figuring out what to do with the wealth. They built great cities, great walls, great zigguruts, great pyramids, great roads, great temples, great cathedrals, great agoras, and great monuments. They built fortifications and went to war. All these "public" works, including war, were paid for by taxing ordinary people. The rich never have to worry about the lower classes because those less well off never get their hands on enough resources or time to do anything. In living, memory the work day has been 14 hours, 12 hours, 10 hours, and finally 8 hours.

We can look at many of the great events of history and see the ruling classes wanting more and going to war for it. The abundance of advancing technology primarily benefits the owners of property, not the creators of the goods and services. Through time, however, the everyday lot of ordinary people has improved. One of the factors in the fight for the 8-hour work day was symmetry—8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, and 8 hours recreation—often referred to as a well rounded life.

There may be local shortages of food that cause famine, but these are strictly local and, in many cases, the shortage is manipulated politically or militarily for strategic purposes. The recent famines in Ethiopia and now in Somalia, were and are of this nature. And even in those famines, the food shortage could be alleviated with money. It turns out that there is almost always enough to go around if the people have the money to pay for it.

The two ecological processes that are vying with each other are greed—the natural proclivity for persons to accumulate resources as an end in itself—and taxes, the process whereby the citizens-sovereign share the burdens of government in order to share in its fruits. Unrestrained greed is socially pathological. It leads to authoritarianism and fascism, particularly when the power of the state is commandeered to provide for the safety and protection, of the greedy and their assets, and when property is valued above life. We saw an example of the latter when Mayor Daly of Chicago said during the 1968 riots, "Shoot the looters." Adam Smith proposed that each of us should pay taxes according to our ability to pay. Smith's statement is easily recognized as the progressive income tax, which is the great engine of social evolution, providing all the people their unalienable rights and making democracy possible.

The problem of what to do with the abundance has been the plague of mankind. Many wars have been fought over it and many economic theories have been created about it. The problem has been stood on its head, however, because after the rich get "their's," in many cases there is not enough left to go around. It is not the production of abundance that is the problem, but its distribution. The basic economic function of greed causes the magnates (and everyone else) to want to increase their property and assets even after they have surpassed all known personal, family, and corporate needs. We have a thousand-year history that shows that the rich will only sparsely let go of their money for charity, and then only if they get a tax break. If one disavows any value of the human ecological community and its derived society, rugged individualism and all persons being for themselves first-and-last is the rule of the day. The hell with charity. Taxes are considered evil at the least and anathema at worst. If the human ecological community with its derived society has value to all the members of the society, then taxes and humane laws are the mechanisms for providing life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and all the other unalienable rights. Taxes are owed in roughly the same proportion as the individual has income safeguarded by the state.

The important concept of charity, particularly the charity of the welfare state, is an ecological stopgap. Only in rare conditions should charity/welfare be any more than a strictly temporary measure. What is required of society is to provide the unalienable rights, to all its citizens. All citizens with their unalienable rights become self-generating, self-regulating individuals capable of making their own lives' decisions and contributing individually to society and providing, for their own place in society.

If the rich do not have to pay taxes, their accumulation of wealth quickly increases in magnitude. If they do pay reasonable progressive taxes, there is an abundance and their wealth will continue to accumulate, without end, but at a slower rate and without imposing constraints on the social levels below them. In that case, every one moves into an accumulation mode and the society as a whole gets richer with each generation being better off than the preceding it. This always supposes that the middle class will continue to pay taxes as it always has, and then through the exercise of their unalienable rights the greatest number of citizens-sovereign will be added to the middle class in each generation.

The development of a middle class has been of sporadic success in the history of the world since it potentially poses a threat to the superrich, especially if the middle class controls the governmental process through free elections. When the process of government is in the hands of the middle class, and the middle class harbors rising expectations, there is always the potential threat that the power to tax will become the power to destroy. The alternative, of course, is that through the normal productive process of industry, sufficient abundance will be produced so that reasonable progressive taxation will fill the bill, taxing for the most part only current income rather than amassed holdings. The history of the world bears abundant evidence that through technological and intellectual development an ever greater abundance is being produced to be shared by society.

A great abundance was manifested after World War II, because both our burgeoning productivity and world trade, and the great surge of up ward mobility caused by the GI Bill, were shifting the wealth of the nation away from the superrich to the middle class. By making education universally available to veterans, the GI Bill created a producer class of people and, at the same, time, a consumer class as well as the producer's class had additional wealth. This by itself was a great spur to the economy, and it resulted in the proportion of the wealth in the hands of the superrich falling to a point only slightly above where it had been in colonial times. In other words, wealth was redistributing itself and the wealthy were getting a lesser and lesser share. The nation was actually moving in the direction spelled out in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a nation conceived in liberty with the notion that all men were created equal, with government for, by, and of the people—precisely the conditions that have frightened magnates roughout history, the magnates who are ever fearful that popular democracy will take their fortunes way from them.

World War II was the extension of World War I, which was an extension of the Franco-Prussian War. All these wars had to do with the breakup and collapse of the Hapsburg Empire—the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and Pope Leo III's creation. These wars all had some popular motto for the people who fought them. World War I was the war to save democracy and World War II was the war to end all wars. World War I gave us Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Communist Russia. World War II gave us the Soviet Empire and world wide communism, and the Japanese and German economic juggernauts.

These wars cost trillions of dollars. If the money spent on these wars had been spent on domestic Tranquility, we could have made over the whole world into a middle class society.

There is another way to look at this issue. The percentage of the total wealth of the nation owned by the superrich had been steadily rising over the decades of our history. In colonial times the percentage was 14.6%. The all time peak was 1929, just before the stock market crash, when the percentage was 42.6%. It fell to 32.1% at the depths of the depression, and went back up to 35.1% in 1938 as Europe was building for war. The superrich's share of our wealth bobbed along between 35% and 32% until the 1950's when the effects of the GI Bill began to be felt and the percentage owned by the superrich began a sharp dip.

The middle class was growing. Its members were buying houses and cars, and since they y were college educated they were in good jobs making good money. Because of the tremendous momentum in the system, the middle class continued its gains, until it reached a peak in 1976 when the superrich had only 17.6% of the worth of the nation. By the beginning of the 1980's, however, the rich were recovering their lost position. In the years of the 80's, as the Reagan tax cuts and spending fastened their grip on the economy, the superrich surged ahead to 36.3% after receiving 70% of all the new wealth generated in the 1980's.

The superrich are now approaching their 1929 all time high; with the curve still sharply pointing up and no slowdown in sight.

It took ten years for the economic juggernaut of the middle class to slow down and stop. But slow, stop, and reverse it did. The results of these starting conditions cannot be seen on a day-by-day basis, but they are meal and with time they express themselves. We now have a country torn, arguing with itself, divided, and bumbling. The magnates are recouping their customary share of the wealth by legally having it appropriated to them in the form of interest on the national debt (from taxes the middle class earned, by going to school and getting a job) by lower taxes in the first place, and continued defense spending.

When will it end? It will end when the ordinary citizens-sovereigns knows enough about the eco-historical cycles of abundance and scarcity, and when the ordinary citizens sovereign understand that it is often the case that the government does not act in their best interest. Participatory democracy is the cure for skewed wealth distributions that produce scarcity, unemployment, and dysfunction at the lower income part of our society and that threatens the existence of the middle class. We have to teach ecology so that ordinary people can understand systems and how they affect the everyday events in our lives, and in the lives of our community and the nation. We have to foster voluntary association so that together and in effective groups the citizens-sovereign can demand that the government serve the people. We must promote ecological equity through using the unalienable rights as the mechanism for each and every one of the citizens-sovereign to have the means to live the good and productive life with an abundance for themselves and their families.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility