Compulsory Leases: A Proposition

[MultipleTentacles]

It is a week after Independence Day; all the fireworks are smoke and ashes, and I found myself contemplating The Declaration of Independence. Have you ever noticed that of the three bedrock virtues it endorses—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—one is a nebulous abstraction which nobody bothers to clarify? That is, of course, "the pursuit of happiness." Everybody talks about liberty, and we have at least some sort of cultural understanding of what this means. And "life" is very concrete and easy to understand. But nobody seems to know or care what "the pursuit of happiness" means. John Locke did not use this phrase: he said that men have natural rights to life, liberty, and property. When our founding fathers developed the Declaration of Independence, they must have realized that either they could not or didn't want to try to grant everybody free property. But I think this is a mistake. I think one of the duties of government is to secure property for people.

This is why I propose a system of "compulsory leases." (Please hold your "yeah, right"'s till the end, and bear with me for a few pages.) My idea is based on the "compulsory license" concept found in copyright law. For those unfamiliar with copyright law, a compulsory license is a mandatory license that a copyright holder must grant to anyone who wishes to use the copyrighted work in certain ways. For example, a songwriter must give a compulsory license to anyone who wishes to record a cover of their song. The idea is that songwriters should not have a monopoly over their songs, even if they wrote the song. Similarly, I propose, people should not have a monopoly over property, especially land, even if they own the property. I think this is even more true of physical property than it is of intellectual property: you can justify owning intellectual property because you originated it, but you did not originate physical property—at most you simply changed one form of material into another, and in many cases you did nothing but pay for it.

Benefits

Currently our economic system is a capitalist, money-based, wage labor system. In such a system, you need money to make money. Thus, the most obvious downfall is that it is too easy for you to find yourself without money. Currently this isn't much of a problem for us because our country has a great deal of money. However, if our country begins to lose money, then we will run into some serious problems. For example, American workers are increasingly finding themselves working longer hours with less vacation time and for lower wages. But they are willing to put up with this because they have mortgages to pay, and children to put through college, and they can't risk losing their jobs. Why can't they risk losing their jobs? Because you need money to make money.

If we had a compulsory lease system in place, this problem would be cut at the root. People would no longer need as much money to begin making money, because anyone (within reason) would be allowed to use private land. In such a situation, joblessness is not such a scary thought. Thus, employers would not have as much leverage to lengthen hours and lower benefits. People without jobs could simply move to the country and camp out on forest and undeveloped lands while they regained their footing. Or, they could try their hand at ranching or farming.

The idea that the government has an obligation to secure jobs for people is not a new one. One of the major programs of the New Deal was the Works Progress Administration, whose goal was to get jobs to people who needed them. I think the most obvious way to give someone a job is to put them in a situation where they can work for their benefit. A compulsory lease system would do just that, in the most direct way possible.

Uses

I'm sure almost everybody would agree with one example: you should get a compulsory lease to hunt, fish, and gather wild berries, mushrooms, etc. on privately owned forest or undeveloped land. I think people should also get a compulsory lease to camp on private forest or undeveloped land. The lessees should be required to turn over a portion of what they gather or pay a sum of money for their use of the land.

Ranchers should also be required to give compulsory leases to those who wish to herd cattle on their land. The lessees should be required to turn over a portion of the butter, milk, meat, etc. that they produce using the land, or a sum of money.

Farmers who own a large amount of land should be required to give compulsory leases to a certain number of small tenant farmers. The lessees, in return, should be required to turn over a portion of their farmed goods or a sum of money.

Limitations

Clearly, there are boundaries to this concept. First and foremost, it is eminently clear that farmers cannot lease all of their land to everyone who walks in the door asking for a compulsory lease. The same applies to ranchers and even owners of forest or undeveloped land. Therefore, there should be a limit to the number of people allowed a compulsory lease, and a limit to the amount of goods they can produce on the land. For example, each lessee farmer should only be allowed a certain area to farm, and each lessee cattle herder should only be allowed a certain number of cattle. Clearly, fishers and hunters should only be allowed a certain amount of quarry, and indeed states already set limits to these. These are limitations of use.

There are also limitations of form. For example, it is unreasonable and unprofitable to set up a compulsory lease system for private residential property, or for commercial property. For example, a book store should not be required to sell a certain author. Thus authors should not get a compulsory lease for bookstore property. This is because a compulsory lease should allow people to profit from and make use of property, and the only person who can guess which books will turn a profit is the book seller, which is why she gets the right to the use of her property. Also, private home-owners should not be required to lease out part of their house or apartment, because it is unsafe to allow just anyone to sleep in your house, and an unsafe situation is an unprofitable situation.

Another type of limitation is a limitation according to justice. I don't think it's fair to set up a compulsory lease system where the leases are permanent. This would only set up another layer of land-owning monopolies. Therefore, compulsory leases should only be given for a certain term—for example, two years for fishers, hunters, etc. or ten to fifteen years for farmers.

Philosophy

People do have a right to life, liberty, and property. Therefore, opportunities for a profitable and happy life should be open to everyone. However, with these rights come corresponding responsibilities. People should not only get the right to life, liberty, and property, but they should also have the duty to uphold, defend, and spread these rights. I can't think of any more obvious way to uphold, defend, and spread the right to property than a system that requires people to lease property to others.

I don't think that any compulsory lease system would completely overturn the fact that you need money to make money, because I think this is a fact of life. However, I do believe that it's possible for everyone to make more money if land is, to a reasonable extent, free and open. If only one person has access to fruitful land, that person gets rich. But that person is only one person, and one person can only do so much. But if more than one person has access to fruitful land, more gets done, because a group can do the work of more than one person. More money will get invested, more ideas and innovations will take root, and because more people will be well-off, more people will contribute the fruit of their well-being to the rest of society.

I don't think that the fundamental problem of living an unsatisfactory life will be solved until we are willing to give up our homes, our wealth, our possessions, and yes, even our rights to life, liberty, and property. If you're unwilling to give up these things, then you're at the mercy of whatever fate provides you with. Therefore, this proposition is rather useless unless people decide to voluntarily give up what they own or have a right to. However, it is easier to give something up when you have it in the first place. You can't take a risk with your investment if you have no capital to invest. Therefore, sustaining a system which secures the most fundamental and necessary capital for any investment, land, should be the foremost priority of any government.

Why should the government have a say in who gets what land? Because a government is nothing more than a consolidation of power, and for any idea to take root, including this one, you need power. Therefore, government action is a suitable avenue for experimenting with this idea. Also, the government is what allows you to use the land in the first place. If it weren't for the government, anyone and everyone with a gun or a small army could walk onto your land and use it however they wanted to. But because we have a government, a person can own land without having to worry about roving bandits. I don't have a cynical view of government: I think governments are just human institutions that do human things. And one thing humans have a capacity for is virtue, and therefore governments have the ability to be virtuous. I believe this idea is a virtuous and profitable one, and people should pursue it.

Conclusion

This is the sort of idea which will probably anger a lot of people. If you're one of those people, I applaud you at least for reading this far. And I understand: as a musician, when I first heard of compulsory licenses, it set me on edge. How dare the government give away the rights to my song? But after I thought about it a bit, I began to realize that compulsory licensing really benefits the entire music community. Because the performing rights societies effectively grant compulsory licenses to performers, I have the right to perform cover songs in public. To me, this is a very important right. Similarly, the right to land use is a very important right, and similarly to how musicians are benefited from compulsory licenses, I think everyone would benefit from compulsory leases.

Cross posted to Open Salon (http://open.salon.com/blog/nathan_foster/2009/07/09/compulsory_leases_a_proposition) and Non-Zero-Sum Gain forums (http://nonzerosumgain.freeforums.org/compulsory-leases-a-proposition-t95.html).

[sonrisa]

MT, I read your proposal twice over & it sounds to me like you want to ressurrect sharecropping. As far as I know, nobody ever made a decent living sharecropping, otherwise folx would still be doing it to this very day. Sharecroppers were beyond dirt poor (this is where the term white trash comes from, btw) & your reference to camping is very apt cuz their shacks didn't have what we would consider basic amenities even well into the 20th century. You know, plumbing, insulation, stuff like that. Stuff that tenement houses had already.

I do think that everybody deserves to make a living wage & have a decent roof over their heads. But I don't think ressurrecting sharecropping is gonna make either one of those things happen.

[MultipleTentacles]

I think you're probably right. But I would rather be a sharecropper than homeless and jobless. In my view, it is better to be doing something and have some kind of economic support rather than be doing nothing and have no economic support.

Perhaps a better alternative would be to mandate that employers must not discriminate based on homelessness, and they must allocate a certain portion of their property as living space for transient workers, according to the percentage of transient workers in the given area. This might work a lot better even than welfare.

Again, I'm not sure how much of a problem this would be in America. But I think it may help in countries suffering from starvation and homelessness.

Then again, maybe the whole problem to begin with is corruption, not necessarily a system failure. If this is the case, probably nothing will help except well-written and well-enforced laws.

[j000han]

>
Then again, maybe the whole problem to begin with is corruption, not necessarily a system failure. If this is the case, probably nothing will help except well-written and well-enforced laws.
Hi MT
As this subject is in the section
[Politics & Current Events Politics, economics, society, environment, and social issues.],
this seems an appropriate moment to share some of my thoughts that I wrote down a while ago.

I often wonder about those people who claim to have intellectual property.
Oh yes, I am well aware that there is such a thing as copyright
and trademark that can be claimed.
But….
What is it that makes a man/woman think,
that he is entitled to charge money for thinking
and writing that down into words or produce videos and then claim the right on a reproduction of that particular pixel- sequence.
I think that is what essential bootstrap fundamaterialism is about, mainly
idiosyncratic notions, that are fuelled by greediness that comes from being conditioned/pre-programmed to think and act in human relationships
primary on terms as a customer/client/consumer <?> facilitator/provider/sales(wo)man.

How utterly debilitated we must have become to even have come at all upon the idea of copyright(s).
When I read an idea that I find usefull, I first wonder if I could have come upon it.
If so, then it probably is a good idea, if not then it is probably not worth paying much attention to it, let alone copy it and use it.
Where do these ideas originate anyway?
So again…
What kind of a mindset is that?
Is such a man/woman capable of comprehending the beauty of an idea?
One might easily dismiss the signifcance of the fact that a human body consists of
over 50 trillion cells.
But when counting each single cell at the rate of 1 cell per second,
it would take eaons of lifetimes to add up to that amount.
Nevertheless with the current memory techniques a device the like ie. the Memorax 3550 is certainly not so very far fetched as some may think it is.

[sonrisa]

I think you're probably right. But I would rather be a sharecropper than homeless and jobless.

--ya think?

MT-- In my view, it is better to be doing something and have some kind of economic support rather than be doing nothing and have no economic support.

-- ok well how about doing something, ie, laboring in the fields from dawn to dusk & having no economic support? I did a little research on sharecropping to augment what I remembered about it. Those folx were lterally in hock to their landlords. The landlord took the majority- some 70-75%- of their crop, leaving them not much to get by on. The landlord gave the families a line of, um credit, for lack of a better word, at the local general store so they could get things they needed. The store, of course, could rip them off as much as it wanted since it was the only place these folx could shop. The more they shopped- for necessities- the deeper in hock they got. It was a scam, a black hole from which these folx could not dig themselves out.

you mentioned in your proposal that the lessee farmers/ranchers- as you call them- would be required to turn over a portion of their crop to their landlord, but you don't state what terms. In traditional sharecropping the croppers turned over a certain percentage, which is how they got screwed. In good years they were left with not much, in bad years even less. 70% is 70%. But if your lessee farmers only had to turn over a flat rate X amount per annum, that might be a little different. In bad years they would still be screwed, but in years when there's a bumper crop, & they only had to turn over X amount, they would keep a larger percentage of the crop, perhaps even the majority of it. They could sell any surplus for their own profit. (That was the other thing about traditional sharecropping- the croppers were allowed to grow food for their own use, but they couldn't sell any of it. Anything grown for sale had to be given over to the landlord) Otoh, while a flate rate amount per annum may sound better in theory, it may not be much better in practice.

MT-- Perhaps a better alternative would be to mandate that employers must not discriminate based on homelessness, and they must allocate a certain portion of their property as living space for transient workers, according to the percentage of transient workers in the given area. This might work a lot better even than welfare.

-- or perhaps a pool of construction supplies could be established to enable the homeless & transients to fix up abandoned, vacant buildings for their own use....


MT--Then again, maybe the whole problem to begin with is corruption, not necessarily a system failure. If this is the case, probably nothing will help except well-written and well-enforced laws.

-- don't hold your breath for those

[MultipleTentacles]

How utterly debilitated we must have become to even have come at all upon the idea of copyright(s).

I agree with this. However this doesn't stop me from claiming copyrights on my songs, because I'm using them for a different purpose than to claim them as property. I claim copyrights because I think if anyone is going to be rewarded for the hard work I've done (and yes, writing music is hard work) then that person should be myself. I don't want some greedy slimeball downloading my song and selling it as his or her own. That's why I claim copyrights.

ok well how about doing something, ie, laboring in the fields from dawn to dusk & having no economic support?

That's a good point. This is why we need unions.

But if your lessee farmers only had to turn over a flat rate X amount per annum, that might be a little different.

Here's an even better idea: the lessee farmers would have to turn over the smaller of two numbers: the total crop yield minus what they reasonably need to live, or a set rate X. That way, if the farmers have a bad year, the first number kicks in: they take whatever they need to survive from the year's crop and give whatever is left over to the landlord. But if they have a good year, they give a flat rate X, which means any surplus they have they can sell for profit.

Of course, there should be a provision that at the very least, the landlord would be required to let the lessee farmers have some minimum, and the same would go for the other types of compulsory lessees. For example, the owner of a forest or undeveloped land would be required to let the lessee gather a certain minimum of berries, fish, game, etc. This would be analogous to a minimum wage. Otherwise, you'd end up with just another form of slavery.

or perhaps a pool of construction supplies could be established to enable the homeless & transients to fix up abandoned, vacant buildings for their own use....

This isn't a bad idea either, except that many homeless people probably don't know how to fix up a home for their use.

don't hold your breath for those [well-written laws combating corruption]

Yeah, no kidding. But nevertheless, we've made some progress: at least now we have a minimum wage, a 40 hour work week, and a whole bunch of other things that we can thank labor unions for.

[sonrisa]

that is true! :)

unfortunately, it doesn't stop companies from closing down plants (or even offices for that matter- a local company here has it's payroll office in Costa Rica) & shipping the jobs overseas. Any company that does this should get the bejesus taxed out of it, imho (but, again, don't hold your breath)

We also need a tariff to keep the cheap (& not just in price) stuff from coming in & flooding this country, especially during a time like this. The last time we had a financial crises this bad- in 1930 or 1931, can't remember which year- Congress passed the highest tariff in the history of this country.We need another one of those. But don't hold your breath for that either.

ps, with so many folx living from paycheck to paycheck, & one missed paycheck can mean out on the streets, there may actually be quite a few homeless & transients out their with construction skills. Infact, costruction work itself can be transient. I know consruction workers who used to go down to Fla & around the Gulf every winter to work on jobs, then come back home in the spring. Course that was before the housing bubble bust....

[MultipleTentacles]

[What follows is a followup to my original post, which I have posted on OpenSalon.]

For even the best of arguments, you can expect people to poke holes in it. And various people I have talked to have poked some serious holes in my proposition for compulsory leases. One person even went so far as to say (somewhat non-seriously) that I would be killed for it, because it opposes capitalism. Before I respond to the idea that it opposes capitalism, let's focus on more serious flaws.

The most serious flaw, as one ought to expect, was pointed out by someone who actually owns property, and who, under my proposition, would be required to give out compulsory leases. The person I talked to owned some forest land, and she told me she would not like just anyone to be allowed on her property, because most people are morons and would destroy it. I concede that point: now that I think about it, she's almost certainly right.

Another serious flaw is the possibility that it would simply resurrect sharecropping, which is an outmoded model for tenement farmers. It is outmoded, the detractor observed, because the sharecroppers were basically slaves to the landowners. They would turn over upwards of 70% of their crop yield, and were so poor that they could barely survive, no matter how much food they produced. Again, this is an excellent point, and I concede, corruption in my system would be likely, and if present, would undermine any possible progress.

After considering these two points, I am forced to concede that my compulsory lease idea may very well fail. One of two extremes may occur: either the landowners would be allowed to require so much from the lessees that you would end up with another layer of economic oppression, or the lessees would get the idea that they own the land they occupy and have the right to destroy it. So my idea may have been defeated.

However, its spirit lives on. Any system which allows someone to engage in the free market without capital is a system I would support, including plain-Jane welfare. The problem with welfare, however, is that money is not a very stable form of wealth. First of all, you have inflation, and couple that with the inevitable reluctance of people with money to give to the people without money, even if it is just to counterbalance inflation, and you have a serious flaw in the system. Second of all, just because you have money, doesn't mean you have the ability to buy anything you want. If you live in an urban area, for example, welfare may not cut it, because there may simply not be enough housing for you at the price you want. No matter how much money you give to people, downtown New York City can only hold so many people.

There are a few alternatives to my idea other than welfare. One is fairly obvious: public housing. Another would be to pass a law stating that no employer can discriminate based on homelessness. At first glance this second proposition may seem problematic because a homeless person may not have access to a shower or clean clothes. However, clothes are not debilitatingly expensive for an employer to provide--nor is a shower. It should be easy enough for a reasonably large employer to set aside ten square feet of his or her property for use as an employee shower. Another alternative would be to set aside abandoned property for use by transient and homeless people, provided they fix up the property themselves before using it.

Note that all these alternatives provide people the space they need to get back on their feet and start generating capital, which brings me to my next point. My ideas are not antithetical to capitalism. At least in my vision of capitalism, the fundamental driving force is the individual ability to transform capital into a profit-making endeavor. I have no truck with socialized capital or communism, because I don't think an entire nation has the resources necessary to simultaneously transform all of its capital in an efficient way, and besides, there is no difference between a socialized industry and a monopoly. However, I believe history shows us that any system whereby control of resources is completely centralized is destined for collapse, whether the people in power like it or not. A centralized, hierarchical system is a system that chokes off innovation and stifles morale. Therefore, for an economy to be viable, for an economy to have growth prospects, labor needs to be voluntary. Labor is not voluntary when people get a job for the sole reason that they're scared of being jobless.

If I get a job at a steel factory because I'm scared of being jobless, I could care less if the factory is inefficient. As long as I get a paycheck, I would have no incentive at all to improve the assembly process. In fact, I may have an incentive not to improve, because my ideas may raise the hackles of my employers. However, if I get a job at a steel factory because I think metal is cool and I have a knack for chemistry, I may be on the road to patenting the next great improvement in metalurgy. If I do that, then not only may I improve my position in society, but I improve the lives of everybody else as well. When people get wealth, they have the opportunity to transform and increase that wealth, and when one person legitimately increases his or her wealth, everybody else increases their wealth as well, because that one person will eventually spend their money. But if a significant number of people have no wealth at all, they can't transform and increase their wealth, because they haven't got any.

Now obviously it is possible that people may never take the opportunity to transform their wealth if they get it. Instead, they may destroy the wealth that they have. So providing free wealth is clearly irresponsible--another reason why I dislike socialism and communism. But there are ways to benefit the poor without giving them free wealth. For example, there are welfare-to-work programs, or other programs to help people find jobs. The bottom line is, people's needs (not wants) should be attended to, or else they cannot attend to the needs, nor the wants, of others. And at a certain level of income, you can assume that pretty much everything is a need and not a want. When people's needs are met, then they can begin to sustainably transform capital into increasing wealth, through their own individual participation in the free market. This is clearly a capitalist idea. Someone might kill me for my ideas (you never know), but you cannot argue that my ideas are not capitalist.

It is difficult to argue the point for any legal action, because inevitably, someone will end up trounced. Trouncing people, after all, is what legal action is all about. Unfortunately, sometimes it is necessary. And in the case of some genre of welfare which secures the right to property, I do in fact believe it is necessary: the minor discomfort such legal action causes is very insignificant in comparison to the vast good it produces. I'm not sure to what degree the welfare system has to be revised or reformed in the United States, and I'm not sure whether my ideas are profitable or practicable, but welfare is necessary, and I hope people can see the wisdom in it. And the capitalism too: welfare is not an economic burden, but a mandatory investment.