Category Archives: Private Property

Crunchy Cons And Other Cud Chewers

Capitalism, Democrats, Economy, English, Free Markets, Government, Neoconservatism, Political Economy, Private Property

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Jeff Tucker of the Mises Institute provides a powerful and pertinent review of Crunchy Cons, by Rob Dreher, a book I’m as likely to read as I am to see Al Gore’s Global Gibberish. Jeff writes:

“What’s really strange about this book is that it … is mostly a guide to how above-it-all the author and his family are, how they got to be so fabulous, and how they and their friends are to be congratulated and admired for having escaped the trappings of the materialism of our age. No Wonder Bread and Cheez Whiz circuses for them! They live a fully ‘sacramental’ life, from their choice of crusty multigrains to their love of fancy French cheeses.”

“It never occurs to the author that his crunchy way of living is a consumable good—nay, a luxury good—made possible by the enormous prosperity that permit [sic] intellectuals like him to purport to live a high-minded and old-fashioned lifestyle without the problems that once came with pre-capitalist living….”

And:

“The author doesn’t speak of demographics at all: the population of England soared from 8.5 million in 1770 to 16 million by 1831. This is the result of a vast increase in living standards. The result of the Industrial Revolution was not “a loss of the human in everyday life” but exactly the opposite: the vast increase in the number of humans who could participate in everyday life.”

“The world today has 6.5 billion people, and many of them are growing richer all the time thanks to the advance of capitalism. How does Dreher propose to feed and clothe and care for all these people? If they were all required to live a ‘crunchy con’ lifestyle they would die, first by the thousands, then by the millions, then by the billions. The world today absolutely requires a vast productive machinery called the market. I’m sorry that he doesn’t like it but this is reality. To be truly pro-life means to embrace free markets.”

Let us not forget “the evil of large retail shops driving smaller ones out of business.” Crunchy creeps are not original in this particular fixation. In a book review of Naomi Klein’s “deeply silly” No Logo for the Financial Post, I wrote that “in her discrete demarcation between big and small, local and transnational business, Ms. Klein ignores the fact that consumer patronage grows a small business into a large one. To her, consumers are dim. They buy products they neither need nor want, and even when their purchases are unsatisfactory, they keep at it. If they are so incompetent, why allow them to vote?”

Joining Klein and her crunchy-conservative cohort is another cud chewer: Charles Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect. His think-piece was reviewed in The American Conservative by Marian Kester Coombs (the magazine has a preference for the double-barreled pretension). Now, even if a reviewer thinks a book is Bible from Sinai (not a metaphor TAC would tolerate, mind you), he ought to use some critical faculties to examine its flaws. That’s presuming such faculties exit.

Coombs is also a crappy writer: Wal-Mart, we are informed, is a “close-mouthed entity”; or “Wal-Mart knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I suspect both are mixed metaphors, and that Oscar Wilde is writhing in his grave.

She does nothing to articulate the mysterious mechanism that explains how exactly Wal-Mart impoverishes. By offering “the lowest possible prices all the time, not just during sales”? What exactly is the economic process that accounts for Wal-Mart’s ability to “expel jobs and technology from our own country”? Competition? Offering a product people choose to buy?

“Protecting the home market,” which is what this woman advocates, is to the detriment of consumers. It forces them to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. To keep inefficient industries in the lap of luxury, hundreds of others are doomed to shrink or go under.

Our reviewer also froths at the mouth over “the teenage girl in Bangladesh … forced to sew pocket flaps onto 120 pairs of pants per hour for 13 cents per hour.” Look lady, Wal-Mart is either offering higher, the same, or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival in Bangladesh. The company would find it hard to attract workers if it was paying less, or the same as other companies. Ergo, Wal-Mart is a benefactor that pays the kind of wage unavailable prior to its arrival. More material, if the entrepreneur were forced to pay Third-World workers in excess of their productivity, he would eventually have to disinvest. What will the Bangladeshi teenage girl do when that happens?

Zoning Free Speech

Bush, Free Speech, Private Property

During a Memorial-Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, the president expressed his “awe of the men and women who sacrifice for the freedom of the United States of America.” Earlier in the day, he had put his “awe” into action by signing

[T]he Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act, passed by Congress largely in response to the activities of a Kansas church group that has staged protests at military funerals around the country, claiming the deaths symbolized God’s anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuals.
The new law bars protests within 300 feet of the entrance of a national cemetery and within 150 feet of a road into the cemetery. This restriction applies an hour before until an hour after a funeral. Those violating the act would face up to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

Bush honors so-called freedom fighters by limiting the freedom for which they allegedly fought? The Act, of course, is an extension of the suppression of peaceful assembly via “free speech zones,” perfected under Bush, and documented here by James Bovard.

The only acceptable limits on speech are 1) those proscribed by private property—you have no right to deliver a disquisition in my living room, unless I allow it. 2) When speech poses a “Clear and Present Danger,” for which the required threshold is extremely high, as it should be. (I’d say that limiting speech is so abhorrent that, to give but one example, the preferred course of action against imams who publicly preach and incite violence against Americans on American soil is deportation, not censorship.)

Continuous Cronyism Update: Pretend the Ports Were Private

Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Government, Private Property, The State

DP World is owned by the government of Dubai, which is, in turn, “one of seven emirates that form the federation known as the United Arab Emirates.” This state-owned corporation will soon be operating port facilities in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, New Orleans and Newark, N.J. The deal embroils politicians—ours and theirs—in the usual tangled and tainted interests.

For instance, after Katrina struck, the UAE gave the U.S. government 100 million for disaster relief. Talks about the ports began shortly afterwards. Quid pro quo? CorpWatch alludes to an intricate web of war profiteers. Like Halliburton and other well-connected American companies, the Dubai conglomerate “does brisk war business.”

Tracing the slimy trail of the Bush administration and its corporate cronies reveals that Treasury Secretary John Snow “was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004.” Another edifying tidbit from the New York Daily News has it that “David Sanborn, who runs DP World’s European and Latin American operations…was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.”

Also, former Congressman Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican, is a consultant to the United Arab Emirates; and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole is a “fixture” at Alston & Bird LLP—a company that’ll be consulting and lobbying privately for DP World. Bling-bling (as in the sound of a cash register, not a rapper’s accoutrements)!

If U.S. ports were private, and not state run; if the deal were devoid of the cupidity and corruption that comes with government “enterprise”—all those politicized paybacks—then it is more than likely that the private property owners involved would react just as Americans have reacted to the involvement of a Middle-Eastern, state-owned company in the management of their ports. Most Americans are against this deal; only 17 percent approve.

If ports were privately owned, their proprietors would have to underwrite the endeavor and would thus be extra cautious, since it would fall to them—and not to taxpayers—to cover the costs of an attack. There’s no doubt that port owners would then express the same trepidations most Americans are now voicing over who manages—and has easy access to—their ports. Why, in a free market, even the perception of insecurity would cause insurance costs to skyrocket. Fairness doesn’t factor into this.

In all likelihood, if ports were privatized, we’d be witnessing a similar reaction. Right or wrong, the UAE would probably not be doing a rip-roaring trade in managing ports. So, to the extent that popular response to the Dubai deal mirrors what would transpire under private property, it’s neither unethical nor unreasonable; it is what it is.

When the issue at stake is near and dear to their hearts, people become propertarians.

* Related Reading: Whose Property is it Anyway?

Let Private Property Prevail

Feminism, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Private Property

A new right may soon be minted by the nation’s “representatives”: the right to have one’s birth-control prescription filled. As a pro-life protest of sorts, pharmacists across the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth-control and day-after pills. In response to their posturing —and the bleating by “reproductive rights groups” — The Great Centralizers in the House and Senate have proposed a bill that’ll allow a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription only if a co-worker is on hand to pick up the slack. It goes without saying that a federal law, if passed, would further corrode the cornerstone of civilization: private property. The keys to the store belong with the owner of the pharmacy. The decision is his as to what goods he distributes. If an employee —the pharmacist —refuses to sell goods the owner stocks, the latter has every right to sack the saboteur. One doesn’t possess a right to have a prescription filled, but, equally, one also has no inherent right to stay employed while refusing to peddle the boss’s wares.
The market —not the meddlers —has the best solution: pharmacies that cater to women who use the pill and apothecaries that don’t. The former will employ people who’ll supply these clients; to the latter will flock workers who have an aversion to certain dispensing duties. (My guess is that preachy pharmacists —be they employers or employees —will have a negligible niche market.)
Inhabitants of the land of the free forget that criminalizing behaviors entirely licit in natural law legalizes the use of force against these innocents. (One consequence of the last is that hundreds of thousands of Americans languish in jail for ingesting, injecting, inhaling, or exchanging “unapproved” substances.)
By the same token, Weyco, a medical-benefits provider in Michigan, is just exercising its property rights by refusing to employ anyone who smokes. Inherent to private property is the right to include or exclude; associate with or dissociate from. States that “have passed laws that bar companies from discriminating against workers for lifestyle decisions” are infringing a proprietor’s property rights.
Companies (Investors Property Management in Seattle is another example) who don’t hire smokers are responding to the costs of having to provide workers with another bogus right: healthcare coverage. Their reaction is an example of the perfectly predictable consequences of regulation. It also showcases the immortality of those who clamor for regulation —American workers are all for compelling companies to pay for their healthcare, but want to ban businesses from screening out high-risk candidates.