Liberalism as a Defense of Ownership

It was a hot Saturday. A large family complete with mothers, fathers, aunts uncles, grandparents, cousins displaced in-laws, and babes in arms repaired to the seaside.

Absorbed as they were in the latest news of the absent, no one noticed that the youngest ambulatory member of the group, proudly sporting a new sun hat, had waddled to water's edge.

His mother pausing in a discourse on her sister's latest unsuitable marriage turned to look for the child just in time to see him swept out to sea by a large wave.

Screaming in grief and remorse, she ran to the water, but before she could rouse anyone her son had disappeared.

However, the woman had raised such a commotion that the Lord God Almighty himself took notice, instantly diagnosed the problem, and in that same instant scooped the child up and delivered him dripping and giggling to his mother's arms.

She then glanced at the boy, looked our creator straight in his all seeing eye and asked, "Where's his hat?"

It's a stretch, but this little tale might be taken as suggesting one of the important principles of liberalism from which much else about it follows, namely that process counts, not just results. Had the mother herself braved the surf, snatched the child at the last moment from his wet doom, and finally crawled ashore with the half-dead boy clutched in her arms, she might have forgotten about the hat. Even in this case, it turns out that when what we desire comes about too easily and ad hoc, it taints the result.

In general liberals deplore third party intervention especially if the intruder has little at risk, imperfect foresight, and an apparent opportunity to turn the affair to his own benefit. Not only does such intrusion, as the joke suggests, impair the quality of the outcome, but it may unduly reward the third party.

Now few would begrudge divine intervention as depicted in the tale. Preserving the toddler is of such importance as to override the risk of ingratitude and skewed perspective. Even so, it might have been done better. The Deity might have infused mama with just sufficient courage and adrenalin to have rescued the child under the benign illusion that she had done so unassisted, and thus in a sense had earned his salvation. The Deity is after all supposed, "to work in mysterious ways his wonders to behold." For those who insist on Jehovah as a character in this drama, perhaps "his mysterious ways" should be understood as enabling rather than determinative - as giving us the means to get what we want rather than conceding it as a demeaning favor.

Thus, the liberal might concede that if the third party has perfect knowledge, perfect goodness, and a certain subtlety, his intrusion might be supportable. This is not much of a concession. Even that mighty engine of third party intervention, the state, does not openly avow such marks of divinity, though it used to and it comes close even now.

So, liberals, at least of the sort I am discussing, (I will discuss the other sort toward the end), skeptical of third party intervention, mindful of the secular and uncommonly fallible character of the state, will attempt to limit its intrusions. To thus restrict the sovereignty of the state is virtually to claim counter- sovereignty. The clearest, and I think most fundamental example of such counter-sovereignty is private property.

What is it in the end that might prevent the state from intervening in a contract between consenting adults? Too often nothing, but if there is some limitation it will most straightforwardly reflect ownership by the parties of the objects at issue and so derivatively their ownership of the contract itself, and thus their right to prevent trespass. To allow the state a general license to intervene in such transactions is correspondingly to grant it residual ownership of the objects, the contract, and, indeed, the people who have made the agreement. You own someone de facto at least if you can dispose of what they have and control what they do.

Therefore, because the liberal believes in limiting the state, he also believes in private property since this is the principle on which the state may be limited. Private property in turn might be thought to derive from the relationship we should bear to ourselves - a kind of self - ownership or self-command manifested in the material world as the things one possesses and in law as the rights one can claim. What are freedom of speech, assembly or press, in the end, but such self-ownership expressed as limitations on the state?

But you really don't have property even in yourself if it has been merely dumped wet and giggling in your arms. Property is not so much a thing as a phase in a process in which the property as a productive asset comes to be part of you as you use it at least as well as anyone who might be in a position to contest your use. So, you don't inherit property or get it as a political favor. What you get in such ways is a bad start.

Market processes are thus favored by liberals; for this is the only way to determine whether a person is using either himself or some external asset competitively, and therefore whether he really has a claim to it. If you receive a thing as a gift, it is seldom what you quite want because you have not invested yourself in it. Besides that, "He that giveth taketh away", and "The one who distributes the goods seldom forgets himself" are bitter truths known only too well by the many victims of apparent state benevolence.

The market not being an agent gives and takes away nothing, and as it is not a self, does in a way forget itself. It is merely again the process by which people come together freely to exchange desired goods and services. By a sort of Darwinian selection those who come up with the better goods and services tend to prosper and are thus able to hold on to their assets, while those who do less well often must relinquish them to those who have done better. Thus is ownership allocated in a way that will maximize production and so the value and number of things to be owned. And it does this precisely because it is a process that discourages the bias and stultification of third party intrusion.

So, one might see liberalism as holding that means matter as much as ends, that the gift relationship consequently should be left to Christmas and birthdays, that the individual right to property is the basis of all other rights and that such property does not exist apart from the market.

I admit that this is not the usual interpretation of liberalism. I must therefore notice, however briefly, the more popular alternative. It is an allowable caricature to think of it as just the contrary of the view I have so far been agitating. This other liberalism assumes that some condition of society is so desirable that drastic measures are in order. The desired end is commonly some variety of egalitarianism, and the usual means a form of third partly intervention typically involving the state.

It is imagined that the state can thus act to liberate people from oppressive inequalities, and so protect the weak from the strong. True freedom on this view requires, as they say, affirmative action on the part of the governing institution. Leaving formal and informal contractual relationships alone invites private oppression and therefore captures only an empty, even an ironical sort of freedom - a freedom to lose.

I cannot here fully weigh the merits of these two interpretations - curiously pursuing apparently identical ends by opposite means. Furthermore, it would be folly to deny any merit whatever to this alternative. What I can suggest is that as a general interpretation it is in at least one respect incoherent.

Any sort of egalitarian pattern we might choose to impose on society, unlike the frankly inegalitarian market outcome, could not sustain itself. Otherwise, it would not need to be imposed. The state would have to maintain constant vigilance and act often and vigorously to maintain the pattern. But in doing so it must have such powers of surveillance and action as inevitably to disrupt the pattern while thus doing what must be done to prop it up. So, if the state limits itself, the pattern disintegrates, and as the state assumes sufficient power to prevent disintegration , the pattern is destroyed.

Just as there is no divine lifeguard who sometimes saves children from drowning, it seems there is no state that can save us from our follies. It supplies its own. If, indeed, we were so helpless as to require such supervision, we wouldn't be worth it. And this is perhaps the final contradiction in the idea of etatist liberation: to be the sort of person who needs to be freed by the state, one must neither desire nor need such liberation. And this is just as well because he won't get it.