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The Subsidy of History The Subsidy of History BY KEVIN CARSON considerable number of libertarian commenta- and then that Jones came along and settled down tors have remarked on the sheer scale of subsi- near Smith, claiming by use of coercion the title to Adies and protections to big business, on their Smith’s land, and extracting payment or “rent” from structural importance to the existing form of corporate Smith for the privilege of continuing to till the soil. capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate Suppose that now, centuries later, Smith’s descen- and state interests in the present state capitalist econ- dants (or, for that matter, other unrelated families) omy.We pay less attention, however, to the role of past are now tilling the soil, while Jones’s descendants, or state coercion, in previous centuries, in laying the struc- those who purchased their claims, still continue to tural foundations of the present system. The extent to exact tribute from the modern tillers. Where is the which present-day concentrations of wealth and corpo- true property right in such a case? It should be clear rate power are the legacy of past injus- that here . we have a case of con- tice, I call the subsidy of history. The extent to tinuing aggression against the true The first and probably the most owners—the true possessors—of the important subsidy of history is land which present-day land, the tillers, or peasants, by the theft, by which peasant majorities were illegitimate owner, the man whose deprived of their just property rights concentrations of original and continuing claim to the and turned into tenants forced to pay wealth and corporate land and its fruits has come from rent based on the artificial “property” coercion and violence. Just as the titles of state-privileged elites. power are the legacy original Jones was a continuing Of course, all such artificial titles not of past injustice, I call aggressor against the original Smith, founded on appropriation by individual so the modern peasants are being labor are completely illegitimate. the subsidy of history. aggressed against by the modern As Ludwig von Mises pointed out holder of the Jones-derived land in Socialism, the normal functioning of the market never title. In this case of what we might call “feudalism” results in a state of affairs in which most of the land of or “land monopoly,” the feudal or monopolist land- a country is “owned” by a tiny class of absentee land- lords have no legitimate claim to the property.The lords and the peasant majority pay rent for the land current “tenants,”or peasants, should be the absolute they work.Wherever it is found, it is the result of past owners of their property, and, as in the case of slav- coercion and robbery. ery, the land titles should be transferred to the peas- Murray Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty, explained ants, without compensation to the monopoly the injustice of feudal landlordism: landlords. Kevin Carson ([email protected]) is the author of Studies in But suppose that centuries ago, Smith was tilling Mutualist Political Economy. He blogs at Mutualist Blog: Free Market the soil and therefore legitimately owning the land; Anti-Capitalism. 33 JUNE 2008 Kevin Carson So rather than defending all existing land titles in by the commons as a threat, first to an adequate supply the name of the “sanctity of property” and protesting of agricultural wage labor on the landed oligarchy’s when some left-wing government institutes a land own land, and later to an adequate supply of factory reform that transfers feudal land titles to the peasantry, labor willing to work the long hours and low pay Rothbard favored 1) dividing up Southern plantations demanded by the owners.The literature of the proper- and giving freed American slaves “forty acres and a tied classes of the time was quite explicit on their moti- mule,” and 2) transferring the latifundia from Latin vation: the laboring classes would not work hard American landed oligarchies to the peasants. enough or cheaply enough so long as they had inde- In the Old World, especially Britain (where the pendent access to the means of subsistence. They had Industrial Revolution began), the expropriation of the to be made as poor and hungry as possible so that they peasant majority by a politically dominant landed oli- would be willing to accept work on whatever terms it garchy took place over several centuries in the late was offered. medieval and early modern period. It began with the A version of the same phenomenon took place in enclosure of the open fields in the late Middle Ages. the Third World. In European colonies where a large Under the Tudors, Church fiefdoms (especially monas- native peasantry already lived, states sometimes granted tic lands) were expropriated by the state and distributed quasi-feudal titles to landed elites to collect rent from among the landed aristocracy. The new those already living on and culti- “owners” evicted or rack-rented the vating the land; a good example peasants. In the Old World, the is latifundismo, which prevails in expropriation of the Latin America to the present day. Expropriating from the Peasantry Another example is British East he Restoration Parliament of the peasant majority by a Africa.The most fertile 20 percent Tseventeenth century carried out a of Kenya was stolen by the colonial series of land “reforms” that abolished politically dominant authorities, and the native peas- feudal land tenure altogether—but only landed oligarchy took antry evicted, so the land could be upward. There were two ways Parlia- used for cash-crop farming by ment could have abolished feudalism place over several white settlers (using the labor of and reformed property. It might have centuries. the evicted peasantry, of course, to treated the customary possessive rights work their own former land). As of the peasantry as genuine title to prop- for those who remained on their erty in the modern sense, and then abolished their own land, they were “encouraged” to enter the wage- rents. But what it actually did, instead, was to treat the labor market by a stiff poll tax that had to be paid in artificial “property rights” of the landed aristocracy, in cash. Multiply these examples by a hundred and you get feudal legal theory, as real property rights in the mod- a bare hint of the sheer scale of robbery over the past ern sense; the landed classes were given full legal title, 500 years. and the peasants were transformed into tenants at will Contrary to Mises’s rosy version of the Industrial with no customary restriction on the rents that could Revolution in Human Action, factory owners were not be charged. The most important component of this innocent in all of this. Mises claimed that the capital “reform” was the Statute of Frauds of 1677, which nul- investments on which the factory system was built lified rights of copyhold by making them unenforce- came largely from hard-working and thrifty workmen able in royal courts. who saved their own earnings as investment capital. In Finally, the Parliamentary Enclosures of the eigh- fact, however, they were junior partners of the landed teenth and early nineteenth century robbed the peas- elites, with much of their investment capital coming antry of their rights of common.The propertied classes either from the Whig landed oligarchy or from the of England saw the economic independence provided overseas fruits of mercantilism, slavery, and colonialism. THE FREEMAN: Ideas on Liberty 34 The Subsidy of History In addition, factory employers depended on harsh barter among the unemployed, or the societies’ benefits authoritarian measures by the government to keep labor cross the line and function as de facto unemployment under control and reduce its bargaining power. In Eng- insurance for striking workers. The Corresponding land the Laws of Settlement acted as a sort of internal Societies Act, passed around the same time, prohibited passport system, preventing workers from traveling out- all societies that administered secret oaths or were fed- side the parish of their birth without government per- erated on a national scale. mission. Thus workers were prevented from “voting So the Industrial Revolution was, in fact, built on a with their feet” in search of better-paying jobs. You system of legal peonage in which employers were might think this would have worked to the disadvantage directly implicated. The form taken by the factory sys- of employers in underpopulated areas, like Manchester tem surely reflects this history.In a Britain composed of and other areas of the industrial north. But never fear: peasant smallholders, with no restraints on free associa- the state came to the employers’ rescue. Because work- tion, workers would have been free to mobilize their ers were forbidden to migrate on their own in search of own properties as capital through mutual credit institu- better pay, employers were freed from tions. Absentee ownership and hier- the necessity of offering high enough archy would likely have been far, far wages to attract free agents; instead, In a Britain less prevalent, and the factory system they were able to “hire” workers auc- composed of peasant where it existed far less oppressive tioned off by the parish Poor Law and authoritarian. authorities on terms set by collusion smallholders, with no A similar process occurred in the between the authorities and employers. restraints on free colonization of settler societies like America and Australia, by which the Legalized Discrimination association, workers colonial powers and their landed Against Laborers would have been free elites attempted to replicate feudal he Combination Laws, which patterns of property ownership.
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