This is sort of an aside, but something Steve just said overlaps with some issues I've been thinking about lately. Since the observation is brief I'll note the overlap for what it's worth. In response to Eric, Steve writes: [...] >Then the question arises, just as Eric seems to be asking, why the >continual bias to communal forms of appropriation? For me, the answer >comes down to the question of participation, and its inverse, exclusion. I >consider this a variant on the idea of unpaid labor as theft, but I like it >better because unpaid labor may be justified theft under some >circumstances, as Marx pointed out long ago. > >I actually borrowed an idea from Robert Dahl about participation to argue >for the importance of doing away with exclusion, even in the economic >realm, and including doing away with exclusion over the appropriation of >surplus. I basically extended his argument in a couple of ways (in a kind >of argument by negation) by asking why would we want exclusion in surplus >appropriation (say) but not in the political process of elections (which >most seem to agree on). I think it is very hard to defend persuassively an >argument for inclusion in one realm (the body politic), but exlusion in the >other (surplus appropriation). I think this is a good point. Classical liberals do defend the dichotomy, of course, by drawing a qualitative distinction between so-called "negative" and "positive" freedoms, such that they champion the former and often question whether issues pertaining to the latter properly involve questions of *freedom* at all. This distinction, for example, affirms the provision of universal (if limited) political rights but only contingent economic rights, in the form of property rights. However, I think it can be shown that in a world of finite alternatives, apart from idiosyncratic matters of degree, the restrictions of choice implied by granting of contingent and unequal property rights is equivalent to restrictions of choice implied by transgressions on "negative" freedom. In hindsight, this is perhaps the implicit basis for Locke's caveat in his labor theory of property that any appropriation of land must be such that "there was never the less left for others because of his inclosure for himself." [A related note concerns the relative emphasis classical liberals put on "exit" over "voice" as the appropriate mechanism for exercising individual freedom, and the challenge to this emphasis posed by the existence of externalities and nonconvexities, but that's another post.] These considerations suggest that while classical liberal doctrines may have made some sense with respect to a primarily agrarian economy with a vast frontier (as in Canada or the US in the early 1800s, say), they make no sense whatsoever with respect to the conditions of modern capitalism. Granting that there may be other relevant and even more salient arguments, *just* modifying the social philosophy of freedom and rights to reflect these conditions leads one to affirm some form of socialism (though possibly not the Soviet-style centrally planned form). OK, back to the main action. Gil Skillman
