Moving Past Nozick’s Tomato Soup
In Chapter 8 of Hijacked, Anderson advocated for Locke’s labor mixing requirement. Neoliberals like Nozick argue against this line of thinking. Nozick, mocked Locke’s labor mixing requirement, by attempting a reductio with his tomato soup example. He claimed that by dumping a can of radioactive tomato soup into the ocean, under the labor mixing requirement you are the owner of the ocean. Instead, Nozick uses the enough as good proviso to argue that if you can prove you acquired land without harming others (harming is narrowly defined to include extreme material difficulties), you should own it. I thought Anderson’s interpretation of Lockean labor mixing was much better than Nozick’s neoliberal view. Anderson writes: “When individuals mix their labor with the land, it follows that they are entitled to the value added by their labor to the land. They are not entitled to the value of the natural product of the land, to which everyone retains a claim. To compensate everyone for their exclusion from the value of the natural product of privately appropriated land, landowners owe a rent to society” (Anderson 230).
I think this is a much better interpretation of Locke than the neoliberal view. It makes more sense to me that people are not entitled to the land itself, and rather the value that comes from it. For example, if you are a farmer, when you work the land and harvest your crop, it exists because of your effort so you should be entitled to it. Nobody should tax your harvest since you made it. However, the actual earth, rain, and sunlight that created the crop was not created by you. A religious man like Locke would argue that God made these things the common inheritance of man. So it follows that by putting up a fence around your farm, you are excluding everyone from that piece of their common inheritance and in order to make this fair, you ought to pay a rent. I might be mistaken, but the rent Anderson talks about reads like Georgist Land Value Tax. In other words, you own what you make, but you rent what is already out there.
Nozick would view this rent as a system of forced labor under the view that a tax on your earnings is a seizure of your time and body. However, the land necessarily can’t be a part of your person because you did not create or labor it into existence. It can’t be yours if you didn’t have a hand in making it and you can’t exactly strike up a deal to buy a parcel from God. It makes more sense to me that people are only entitled to the value added by their labor, not to the land itself. Owning land is necessarily going to harm other people despite Nozick’s restrictive definition. The very act of owning land violates peoples Kantian One Innate Right, but if you compensate people for using land, then perhaps this makes things fair. Either way, it was nice reading a Lockean interpretation that felt true to what Locke might have believed in at the time instead of the neoliberal hijacked view.
This is a very interesting discussion Dylan! Made me think of Anderson’s discussion on intellectual property (IP). She criticizes contemporary IP protections (such as copyrights) as a tool of neoliberalism to prioritize capital interests over social welfare. Drawing on the arguments of Paine and Babeuf, she challenges the idea that individuals deserve the full market value of their intellectual production. Because productivity is due to the social division of labor and the inheritance of past knowledge, no individual can lay an exclusive claim to the to wealth generated from an idea.
ReplyDeleteWhile it is noted that Locke was against excessively long copyrights (which would not fulfill the conditions required of his spoilage and sufficiency provisos), on what grounds would he have supported this extension to tax personal property to fund social insurance? Intellectual property often takes non-exclusive form and therefore does not directly violate other equal individual’s Kantian rights, therefore not requiring compensation. I am curious about the application of the mixing argument to intellectual property for the same reason. Many entities could have benefited from mixing their individual labor with the same ‘common’ innovations, and further, where is the boundary drawn?
Dylan, you make a compelling case for Anderson's labor-mixing interpretation over Nozick's neoliberal reading. I agree with nearly all of it. Anderson's framework, where laborers are entitled to the value they add but owe a rent for the natural product they exclude others from, is more attractive than Nozick's enough and as good proviso. And I totally agree that this reads like Georgist land value taxation where you own what you make and you rent what was already there. One thing I do question is whether this interpretation is faithful to Locke or an improvement on him. Anderson draws a line in the sand between natural product and added value. You are right that a religious thinker like Locke would hold that God gave the earth to mankind in common. But Locke's own resolution is that God also gave man reason, and that labor converts the commons into private holdings. So I question that, even though this reading seems far more faithful than Nozick as you illustrated, is Anderson taking Locke's best materials and building something he did not quite build himself rather than offering a view most direclty aligned with that Locke is thinking.
ReplyDeleteFurther regarding Georgism, I feel like these are different extremely different projects even if they arrive at similar conclusions. If Anderson's rent is a logical entailment of Lockean premises, it has a different kind of authority than a Georgist proposal, which stands on its economic merits. I would be curious to see if Anderson views this as a convergence of thought or a possibly revealing conicidence.