Detriments of Democratizing the Economy


Love advances three lenses through which we can view Kantian interpretations of property and intermeditated capitalism: the conventional view, the semi-determinate view, and the natural rights view. In the conventional view, property rights have no effect until established by law. They are not inherent and are instead ascribed power via democratic means, and hence Love notes that “rights regarding material objects in the world must be established through omnilateral lawgiving” (7).

The semi-determinate view most closely mirrors the interpretations of Ripstein, and of Kant himself, suggesting a "provisional" right to property, which exists via original acquisition before the state. Upon the creation of a state, provisional rights must then be subject to “state redistributive measures”, ostensibly decided through “omnilateral lawgiving in the civil condition” (9). In this view, democratic will remains the primary determinant for property rights, but democratic means are constrained by the obligation to abide by the innate right, which “requires that we have access to the material conditions of agency and the basic socioeconomic resources”. (10)

The third lens takes the position that property rights are fully determinate prior to law, antecedent to the creation of a state. Love critiques this, stating that unilateral acquisition cannot create a right that binds others (13). Even if one accepts this view, she argues that because current property titles are often rooted in historical injustices (such as slavery or conquest), massive government intervention would be required to rectify these past violations. The state's role thus becomes not to decide omnilaterally how property is structured but "simply to secure these rights" that already exist (13).

In both the first and second lenses, it is an important stipulation that omnilateral authority, through the democratic will of the people, plays a part in the governernance of the economy. As necessitated by the Kantian aversion to unilateral assertion, power to control property, the economy, and the general faculties of the state is given to the people en masse, through a simple democracy.


However, using democratic means to control the economy is not without its banes. Love acknowledges that a democratic, socialist world (as in Waheed Hussain’s account) could mean “significantly reduced material abundance” compared to a ortho-capitalist society. (8) She also quotes Hussain’s assertion that democratic economies tend to “lag far behind market developments” (8).

These two concessions birth plenty more -- a democratic economy could, in principle, vote for policies that leave everyone materially worse off (by reducing growth capacity) in order to preserve equality and secure the innate right of all to access the basic conditions of agency. Citizens could vote to revert back to a bucolic world in which each person is a simple farmer, rejecting industrial and technological advancement for the sake of reciprocity and shared independence (maintenance of the innate right). If citizens knowingly chose a simpler but collectively less prosperous economy to protect fairness and reciprocity, would that be a legitimate exercise of omnilateral autonomy? Does Kant, in this scenario, allow for humans to vote themselves into economic deprivation, as long as innate rights are maintained? Rawls' Difference Principle may have some input here, on if a comparitively lower baseline for economic-well being is permissble, as long as it maintains innate rights.


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