Week #6: (The Distribution of Property)

Question 1

Locke & Libertarians on Liberty and property

Answer 1

• Locke – valuing liberty requires the recognition of very strong natural rights to property
• Libertarians – these rights are so powerful that the government has no business interfering with them

Question 2

The income parade

Answer 2

Jan Pen:

• Imagine a grand parade of everyone in the UK economy who ears a wage of any sort, including those who receive social security
• The lowest earners in front, highest in back
• Parade passes us by in one hour
• Everyone’s height determined by pre-tax income
• More you earn, taller you are
• It is 45 min before we see people of average height
• In the last six minutes we see giants

Question 3

Locke: Survival argument

Answer 3

• Initially the world was owned in common by all human beings
• Relies on ‘fundamental law of nature’
• Anti survival – only speaks about things we consume to survive, food not land. It doesn’t specify how objects are to be taken into private ownership

Question 4

Locke: Provisos of survival argument

Answer 4

• The non wastage proviso – if it is to be justified we must not take more than we can make use of
• We must leave ‘enough and as good’ for others

Question 5

Locke: Labour- mixing argument

Answer 5

• You own your own labour, and in laboring on an object you mix your labour with that object
• If its not claimed justly by another, its yours
• Justifies appropriation of land

Question 6

Locke: Value-added argument:

Answer 6

• In labouring on land one massively increases its value

- Labouring entitles the labourer to appropriate cultivated land

Question 7

Locke: God and property

Answer 7

• God gave land for the use of the industrious and rational

Question 8

Nozick: Three parts of a theory, private property

Answer 8

• Initial acquisition – how did someone initially require private property right
• Transfer – how did we come to transfer property to and from
• Rectification – how we came to rectify it

Question 9

Rousseau on private property

Answer 9

• The true founder of civil society
  
  • The first person who claimed land privately
• Fruits of the earth belong to us all
  
  • The earth itself belongs to nobody

Question 10

Marx: Money

Answer 10

• Money transforms human relations
• Money is the “universal whore”
• Money talk debases our language
• force is the foundation of private property

Question 11

Utilitarianism: Property

Answer 11

1. Impartiality: equal concern
2. Diminishing marginal utility: equality
   - The more units you have of something, the less the next unit is worth to you
   - To maximize happiness equalize the distribution of income
   - Poor people will be happier with it than the rich
3. Incentives: inequality
   - Generate inequalities to income
   - If it produces a bigger pie, then you have more happiness through income

Question 12

Nozick’s Libertarianism

Answer 12

• Basic rights include the right to private property
• Entails free-market capitalism with a minimal state
• Forced redistribution is illegitimate

Question 13

Rawls’ Liberal Egalitarianism

Answer 13

• Unrestricted free markets generate unacceptable inequalities
• Commitment to freedom means equal freedoms for all
• Redistribution can equalize freedoms