THE PRIVATE AND SOCIAL PROPERTY PARADOX

This is a shortened version (with minor editing) of a similar chapter in my book, Our Democracy Requires An Update.

The private and social property paradox contributes to our schizophrenic approach to solving societal problems in the United States. Social property includes all the elements of life you have ultimate control over, or should have, as well as those provided by the government or society that do not have a direct relationship to private financial elements. Public schools, roads, freedom of speech, and bodily autonomy are examples of social property. Health insurance is what I call a crossover property in the United States, since economic elites will not allow the consensus on its social property status to be instituted.

Our extremely unequal balance of both property types over time, and up until now in various ways, as to who has it and how much they have, helps explain our paradoxical situation. Race, and gender are the defining and divining factors in our detrimental dilemmas. Extricating ourselves from deep societal quandaries requires a realization of how these factors cloud our decision making process. Thinking these are only historical artifacts puts an immediate stop to viable solutions.

Only the society that takes more of this paradox into account will overcome their challenges. Equating much, or maybe anything to your personal existence, and experience often puts an end to discovering and enacting the broad solutions required to achieve real success. Avoiding a personalized spin is key to an in depth understanding of the true problem, as my four sisters taught me.

America was formed in most cases through the taking-by-force of native lands. Millions of natives, if not tens of millions, died due to this theft, and were driven from those lands. And a few million Africans were brought here as slaves, with millions more raised here as slaves who worked the land, garnering significant wealth for both the South and the North. Neither Africans or native peoples, who were subjected to an egregious extraction of social and private property, can be fully compensated for their losses.

That said, the little we have done to compensate the descendants of slaves is of such insignificance as to be substantially negative. Besides lynchings, massacres, peonage, Jim Crow, police brutality, a drug war and mass incarceration, we have added humiliation, and scorn to their “compensation”. The idea of the “black culture” has never been fully delineated from the “slave culture” by whites. A major reason the line is still blurred has to due with the fact they both have the dominant white culture in common.

“There is no property in durable objects, such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.” — David Hume.

Direct subsidies of a non-discriminatory level of remuneration going to black Americans was minimal until the 1960s. Before that time, government welfare payments or subsidies to blacks were mostly eliminated by the southern politicians who controlled Congress, and that includes the G.I. Bill. Both the North And South greatly restricted via redlining, or eliminated completely, the chance for blacks to receive FHA loans, which flooded into white households. 

The data noted throughout this book shows how wealthy, white male supremacist, elites have kept over ten percent of the population from attaining many government welfare benefits that were afforded whites. While the civil rights movement and new laws and rulings of the 1950s and 60s, helped reduce their control, our basic racist and economic elitist structure is not fully dismantled.

Though female Americans attained the right to vote in 1919, societal and political changes did not provide them with the power in numbers on the national stage to move much in their direction until the last decade. As of 1900 women in every state could own property, but not all financial matters were under their control. 

For example, it was not until 1974 when a woman was allowed to get a credit card on their own. The government, only in 2013, allowed women to serve in ground combat roles; yet it still has control over their health matters in many states. LGBTQ Americans recently were allowed to marry, but not all their rights are given the same respect or assigned the same legal equality as other Americans.

Whether born into a poor family, or a financial or health calamity puts someone into poorer circumstances, Americans, white or person of color, must relinquish much of their social property. Although worse for the working poor black American and POC, the working poor white American is also often perpetually trapped in a downward existence after one calamitous event. 

The education system expects less of poor children, local government provides fewer funds, and food security and quality, and environmental circumstances are worse than the middle class. Additionally, non-high deductible, affordable, or consistent healthcare are not as likely to be in the cards for people in the bottom two quintiles, and those who are between jobs, sole proprietors, or do contract work.

What has been prevalent throughout our history is the disdain for, and disapproval of, nearly every group noted above when they protested their predicament. And of course that abuse was, and is consistently employed by those in power: the wealthier, white male. Losing any power to these groups was and is a threat to their social and private property. Much of the property they did not “deserve” for any other reason than that they had the power to take it, and forcefully control it. By creating their legal fictions, they justified all of it, even slavery.

Land and other tangible goods such as artwork, machinery, and buildings are in a way historical flukes as to property rights. That’s because everything else, including broadcast licenses, intellectual property, and individual transferable quotas (ITQs), as in commercial fishing, have a very recent history. Though Hume noted earlier that other property rights were “founded on fraud and injustice”, and it is harder to figure out who really owned what when, more recent property rights have been determined by governments. Again this disputes the claim that government has nothing to do with deciding how the economy runs, or who should benefit and how.

While some portion of those legal fictions have been smoothed out because all groups have been integrated in additional ways, too big a portion of the legal fictions are still with us, as restrictive norms also persist. Of course, some earlier travesties are impossible to ever fully rectify. However, we can look at a few of the problems and contradictions that still exist, and have potential solutions.…

Continued…

Our contamination of social property from day one makes all private property ownership suspect. Reluctance to spread the wealth comes from a melding of the green greed gene with the white male supremacist gene. This socially constructed gene cesspool is layered with multiple legal fictions, which advantage the white male, whether in straightforward, ugly power grabs, or decisions made with historically corrupted, misogynist, and racist logic.

Our inability to go beyond changes in the law, and not overturn major fallacy-laden norms in a number of areas, has kept women from rising into higher management in varying levels of business. We still enforce a huge negative sanction on women who do unpaid work at home. Of course working outside the home for pay also incurs many penalties including when returning to work, from terrible maternity and family leave policies, minimal or no childcare support, healthcare restrictions, and the extra burdens of single and divorced mothers. 

Government has not been as responsive as it can be, which is directly tied to an overabundance of male politicians, particularly the rude, sexist, and even misogynist kind. Electing 65% women of every race and perspective, and 35% men of color to every office starting next year, for a few centuries, should do it. ;-)

That white males, or anyone “did it on their own” has no basis in reality, but in the fiction created to cover for their social property crimes. For a stark reminder of these crimes, think slavery for eight decades, and Jim Crow peonage for another seven decades afterwards. And five plus decades ago, although more socially acceptable than slavery, women were forcibly limited by laws in some cases, and restricted to a few jobs outside the home by near Saudi style social norms. 

Ironically, white men were taught by these women in schools, or women were at home raising them and their workforce, yet they thought of these women as inferior to them in most other areas outside the home. That none of these crimes have a direct impact on today’s political and economic environment is ludicrous.

Furthermore, as to race, some of these obvious social property crimes are also still present in norms and practices rather than laws. And many of their racist descendants are hidden in plain sight but in a reconstructed form, like mass incarceration and the drug war. The constant apoplectic and apocalyptic pronouncements by the we-must-return-to-puritanical-yesteryear-norms crowd also stymies change. Everyone’s opinion must be heard, but consensus building is impossible when the tug backwards tries to end the push forward.

Previous crimes unexamined, engender similar crimes into the future. Reforming our future-approach to private property including great wealth imbalances is required by using a new social property viewpoint, and progressive civic citizen empowerment.

While I am not suggesting a complete wealth and private property reallocation, the realization that considerable crimes have been committed, and are being recommitted on top of those crimes, proves why radical and worthwhile changes are essential. With truth and reconciliation that powerful “moment” for substantive, long term change is made available. Post baby boomer generations will require a different platform to achieve the “equality of opportunity” goal that America has failed at achieving in many ways.

In the following pages I expound on how to make the vital changes to put more Americans on a solid footing without violence, or disunion. Yet many, if not all, of us must dig deeper in places we have never dug into before to make this change possible.

Read the remainder of my book; purchase here. Excerpt originally published on Medium.

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