Completing Liberalism

Liberalism began as a movement to gain freedom from arbitrary authority and inherited privilege. Three issues were prominent, individual freedom, limiting the power of government, and rationalizing property. Starting from an imagined view of human beings in a state of nature, before the aristocratic arrangements of that time, the early liberals saw individual freedom as natural, only limited by the equal freedom of others. Government was seen as a tool for the people to use to govern themselves, but a tool that needed checks and balances so that it would not limit freedom too much. Nature was seen as originally a common resource that became private property by mixing labor and from then on as something that needed to be protected with well defined and strict property rights.

As time has gone on, freedom has been expanded to more situations and to more people on toward the logical limit that we should all have the maximum freedom consistent with equal freedom for everyone else. The purpose of government is to protect and extend this freedom. How much government is needed for this has been an ongoing discussion that we need to continue. Private property has taken hold and extended its reach into more and more areas of life. Now it is not just property in the land that we use to live on and grow our food. We can also have property in ideas and in abstract legal constructs used to organize labor. Recently, property rights have been extended to the genetic code itself. At the same time, money has been taken beyond its original role as a means of labor exchange to become an abstract form of property that can be exchanged for natural resources and labor in a market system that allows massive movements of wealth through mechanisms far removed from the concrete goods and services we need to live.

In the transition from classical to modern liberalism, there was a recognition that the extremes of poverty and wealth that this market system can create needed to be mitigated and moderated somewhat by protecting the poor, redistributing some of the income from property, and pooling resources for mutual aid. This was seen as justified because true freedom requires at least a minimum of resources to use, basic opportunity to get more through work, and some protections from risk. But in all this most liberals have not been willing to question the fundamental nature of property and the problems that its extreme forms can cause.

It is time to go back to the original insight that nature is a common heritage and that a part of it becomes private property only by mixing labor with it. Making it private prevents our labor from being stolen from us. So the essence of property is actual and current use. If the property is no longer maintained and used it eventually reverts back to nature. So private property is tied to labor. Voluntary exchanges of equivalent property are legitimate because labor is exchanged for labor. Money as a means of labor exchange is also legitimate and a useful improvement over barter. The problem comes in when property is used to appropriate the labor of others without equivalent labor in return. This happens when property rights are extended beyond use rights to include income rights. Income from property can take the forms of rent, profits, interest, money creation, and speculation. These are basically ways to get the labor of others without equivalent labor in exchange.

So to complete the work of liberalism we need to roll back property to use rights and money to labor exchange and then go forward from there. This will naturally be difficult to do and will meet a lot of resistance. Doing it too quickly could cause a lot of harm. Some approaches include replacing corporations with cooperatives, redistributing income from property and money, reducing taxes on labor, using taxes to pool resources for mutual aid, reclaiming abandoned property, reducing property rights on ideas, eliminating property rights on the genetic code, eliminating corporate welfare, regulating financial markets to reduce speculation, and removing money from politics. Eventually once the effects of income from property and money are reduced, property law can be changed to reflect the new realities.