We live in a peculiar society. Peculiar here means a chosen way to live that makes little natural sense. We live in a private property society.
It is certainly true that any other kind of society would allow its members to have complete control over things that are personal to them. It does not make sense that we should be forced to share our toothbrush or hairbrush, our underwear, our chapstick, with anyone else. It makes sense that such things belong to us exclusively. They are, in that sense our private property. But it is not true that it makes equal sense that any one person should be allowed to own a forest, a piece of cultivable or resource-rich land, or access to a river or a lake or airwaves that can be used with privately owned technologies to send signals. Yet the law gives title to some people to forests, water, air and land and all that is on it and under it, allowing them to treat these essential things as their very own, giving them the right to use the might of the law to stop all others from using them without obtaining permission from these owners.
The people with those kinds of protected property rights are the wealthy ones. They are the exclusive owners of the means of production, that is, of the means to create economic welfare. They thus are able to exercise power over all others who rely on them (which is nearly all of us) to use their wealth to create jobs, goods and services. Of course, this would not be the case if ownership of the means of production (the forests, lands, waters, air waves) was spread fairly evenly across the population. It is not. In Canada, in 2014, 86 people, 0.002% of Canada’s population, had more wealth than 11.4 million Canadians. It should not surprise us, that having established this peculiar, unnatural social organization, that those with power abuse it.
Recently we all became aware of a scandal involving one of those rich property owners, SNC-Lavalin, and the government of Canada. The sources of the problem were the arrogant, anti-social use of might by a property owner and the government’s belief that we are dependent on such property owners, even when they behave badly. SNC-Lavalin had used some of its wealth it to bribe foreign and local governments so that it could add to its wealth more easily; as well, it had made illegal campaign contributions to political parties to help it win more money-making contracts. After many public allegations and revelations, some members of the government felt they could no longer look away and brought criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin for these abuses of the power its property had given it. Surprised by being challenged, it asked, and obtained, the Trudeau government’s help to stop it from being prosecuted for some of these crimes. The Trudeau government tied itself into disgraceful knots. Prime Minister Trudeau is trying to justify his unethical behaviour by arguing that SNC-Lavalin, being a major owner of private property, was in a position to create jobs for non-wealth owners and that, therefore, SNC-Lavalin was entitled to special treatment, to special laws that permitted it to commit crimes without being labelled a criminal.
The ownership of private property elevates the owners above all others. This is inevitable in a society that allows the few to own most of the wealth. It is inevitable in a capitalist political economy. It is inevitable that private property owners will be given special treatment.
Take taxation or, better, take our failure to tax the rich.
As private property owners can do with their property as they choose and they can exclude the whole world from the uses made of it, even governments, governments have to justify imposing taxes on the owners of private property as this would mean taking away some of it from them. This imposes a political burden on governments when they want to tax the rich. All too often they find it easier to agree with the property owners that they should be taxed lightly, if at all. This, they claim, will leave the property owners with more of their wealth and, therefore, perhaps, more inclined to invest some of it, enabling the non-property owners to gather some crumbs that fall off the table. This goes a long way toward explaining why we have such poor welfare benefits in Canada amid so much wealth. Governments find it hard to justify ’taking’ private property away from the rich to ‘give’ it to the poor. Therefore when they do it, they do it in miserly fashion. They force the poor to justify their requests for help. It forces the poor to grovel. It makes us an uncaring society, an inevitable result in a society that worships private property.
More: the notion that private property ownership is sacred, closer to godliness than cleanliness is, makes it easier for the wealthy and their helpmates to truly believe that it is morally right for them to use all legal means possible to avoid taxes. They employ an array of devilishly clever lawyers and accountants. We have come to know how successful their manipulations on behalf of the rich and famous are through the Luxemburg, Panama and Paradise Papers which have revealed that, if they pay any taxes at all, huge corporations often pay much less tax than their lowly employees. We are always shocked. We, the non-private property owners, accept the idea that we should pay our fair share, that we should pay according to what we earn. As the famous judge Oliver Holmes said: “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”
It is all very ugly. The unequal division of the very means of survival and the privileging of those who own all this private property, leads to abuses. The major owners of wealth engage in anti-social, criminal and greed-infested behaviours. We are told this cannot be helped. This is false. There are many possible alternatives but they require us to come together and work out how best to challenge and repudiate a private property system that only works well for capitalists.