The privileges of private property owners
Canada is a market capitalist economy. It depends on the creation of wealth by private actors using their private resources, that is, their property (if they have any), and talents. In this way they are to add to their wealth and, in the process, increase the overall wealth of society. At the centre of that system is the right to own private property. To ensure it pride of place, the right to own private property is accompanied by a set of ideological tenets that allow the law to give privileged treatment to private property. Pivotal is the not-to-be-challenged belief that private property gives the owner the right to exclude anyone else from it and from its use. It is for the owners alone to determine what to do with their property. The starting point is that no one else, not even the government, should interfere with this ‘right’. Governments need to justify any such intervention by persuading the citizens that they are justified in doing so. This is a heavy burden for governments and they are reluctant to disturb the owners’ dominium over their private property.
How the logic of the privileging of property forces the police to favour capitalists
These starting points put individuals who own enough private property to invest (and they are very few) in a position to act as sovereign market capitalists.
*This is why those who own property (the very few) may refuse to share it with anyone, no matter how needy those without property are. This is why the rich demand to be – and so often are – praised when they act as philanthropists.
*This is why taxation of wealth and income by a properly elected government is so difficult. The government is easily portrayed as unjustifiably taking the private property of citizens and to do things with it that the owners of that property would not.
*This is why those who evade their tax obligations are rarely treated as criminals.
*This is why recipients of government welfare are treated so badly by governments and the public alike. The government will be giving them money that they have raised by taxing other citizens. The welfare recipients are seen as being given other people’s property that these property owners may not want them to have.
*This is why those who cheat on social welfare laws are convicted of crimes way more often than rich people who cheat our tax laws.
*This is why, should a homeless person set up a tent in a rich man’s backyard, the rich man can count on the police to physically remove the homeless person. This is one way the police “serve and protect”.
*This is why workers are not allowed to use an employer’s premises, that is, their workplace, to meet and ask fellow workers to join them to form a union unless the property-owning employer gives them permission to do so. While unionization is a perfectly legitimate activity in Canada, union organizers often find themselves meeting workers outside working hours, in secret, as if they were tawdry adulterers or low level would-be criminals.
*This is why workers who, when they have a dispute with their employer and who try to communicate with potential supporters, must keep off that employer’s property. They must stay on public property when picketing. This marginalization is enforced by the police. The police will claim to be acting ‘neutrally’. These kinds of ‘neutral’ acts put the police squarely on the side of the employer because it stops unions from being as effective as they might be. This is another way that the police ‘serves and protect’.
*This is why picketers also may be controlled and shooed away by the police even when they are on public property. The police will do this as picketers may not interfere with the public’s normal use of that public property. Yet another way for the police ‘to serve and to protect’.
*This is why people who want to exercise their right to speak, to protest, to associate, to assemble, on public property may face restraints. It is not only the public’s right to use the public space unimpededly that is to be protected from those seeking to express their political views, but also the right of property owners to conduct business with that public that is to be safeguarded. Shopkeepers and office operators may demand the police to ensure easy access to their places of business.
This is why demonstrators must get a permit for their marches, their rallies.
This is why peaceful, democratically encouraged demonstrations and rallies are patrolled by the police. This is yet another way ‘to serve and protect’ private property.
*This [the right for property owners to choose what to do with their property] is why every collective agreement has a provision that says that the employer has the right to do as it likes with its assets unless the union has explicitly limited that right in some way. It is known as the prerogative of management clause. The Oxford Dictionary defines prerogative as “the right of the sovereign, theoretically subject to no restriction; a peculiar right or privilege; natural or divinely-given advantage”. The disciplinary arbitration system enforces this crucial property right. It is backed-up by the courts and the police as they’ serve and protect’ private property owners.
The list of the ways in which the owners of private property are entitled to ask the law to come to their aid to allow them to exercise sovereignty over their property, to determine whether, where, how, for how long, to invest their property, is as long as the myriads of situations that throw up a conflict between property owners and all other citizens.
The viability of private ownership is a chief concern of the law.
*This is why it is crucial to have a zealous, well-equipped police force dedicated to the task of enforcing such laws. In Canada, police budgets have increased from $7-billion to $12-billion over ten years.
*This is why theft, which is defined as the taking of another’s property with the intention of permanently depriving him/her of it, is the paradigm of crime in a capitalist political economy.
All this protection of property serves and protects those who have property.
Those who have the most property benefit most
The drive to accumulate ever more wealth by the already rich inevitably leads to ever-increasing inequality. The numbers are ‘in’. World-wide, 1% of the population owns as much wealth as the other 99% combined; 62 individuals have as much wealth as three and a half billion individuals. In Canada, 86 individuals own as much wealth as the bottom 11.4 million people at the bottom of our population. Obviously, ‘to serve and protect’ private property suits the few rather than the many.
How working class who own some property are tricked into supporting the rich
But, even relatively poor people own some private property and, perhaps because they own so little, they are very pleased to have a skilled, dedicated force to protect it. This is why the poorer segments of our populations are often fierce supporters of law and order-favouring politicians and the police. This tendency is given a fillip because it is the same less well-off who are the most likely to be the victims of street crime. This may lead some observers to conclude that the police serve and protect in an evenhanded way. Such thinking reinforces the legitimacy of the rights of all owners of private property, small or big, to do with their property as they wish. The cause of market capitalism benefits from that kind of endorsement. The ensuing default position in law is that harms inflicted on the environment, consumers and workers as private property owners chase profits, are not truly criminal in nature. They do not warrant the intervention of the police, even if we want to regulate and control such activities to lessen the harms they are likely to inflict.
In sum, mechanisms are in place that allow the owners of the means of production, the truly wealthy, to ride roughshod over the rest of us. Their power to do so is bolstered by the police which serves and protects private property.
But the unequal division of wealth which makes this scheme so nasty has no moral grounding. If one digs into its origins, sooner or later, it will become clear that it stems from thievery. Take Canada: it was literally stolen from indigenous people by colonizing Europeans.
Is this a basis to serve and protect existing wealth ownership? Is this a basis to keep the majority of the population subjugated to the tiny members of the wealth club or, as Warren Buffet calls them the ‘lucky sperm club’?