Universal Property
Description
David Bollier:
"In Peter Barnes’ latest book, Ours: The Case for Universal Property, he takes his analysis to a richer, more developed level. He argues for inventing a broad new class of property rights known as “universal property.” Its premise is that most of today’s wealth is co-inherited from nature and past human efforts, not individually earned.
Why should politically connected corporations and lucky individuals reap the lion’s share of benefits from public lands, watersheds and the atmosphere? Why should all of us pay for civic infrastructures like our financial and communications systems even though most of the benefits are privately captured?
If some of this wealth were placed in a trust for all citizens and future generations, it would introduce a new set of institutions that could tame two serious structural flaws in contemporary capitalism – its destruction of nature and concentration of wealth among the few. The lever for this shift would be a new class of universal property rights for common assets such as the atmosphere and ecosystems, for example, which are not protected by property rights. As a result (along with government inaction), industries are able to over-exploit them as “free” resources, with little or no economic penalty.
Universal property aims to correct this problem by making businesses respect nature’s limits and pay for its resources, while generating new flows of non-labor income for all citizens."
Discussion
James K. Boyce:
"The lesson: Neither private property nor state-owned property is sufficient to guarantee equality and liberty for all. The first can allow economic elites to monopolize wealth and power, the second can allow political elites to do the same. But there is an alternative type of property that can never be concentrated in the hands of an elite. It was pioneered in, of all places, Alaska.
In 1976, as oil production commenced on Alaska’s North Slope, the state amended its constitution to create a new entity called the Alaska Permanent Fund. The idea was the brainchild of Republican governor Jay Hammond, who believed that Alaska’s oil wealth belonged to all its residents, and that all should receive equal annual dividends from its extraction. The fund is “permanent” because some of the money is invested so that future generations will receive dividends too once oil production ends. “That money and the resources it comes from belong to all Alaskans,” Hammond wrote, “not to government or to a few ‘J.R. Ewings’ who in states like Texas own almost all the oil.” Not surprisingly, the fund has proven enormously popular across the state’s political spectrum. The record payout, more than $3,000 per person including a one-time rebate, came under Governor Sarah Palin in 2008.
The Permanent Fund is neither private property nor public property in the conventional senses. Unlike public property, the right to the revenue belongs to the people, not the government. Unlike private property, this right cannot be bought or sold, owned by corporations, or concentrated in a few hands. It is universal property: individual, inalienable and perfectly egalitarian."
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-for-universal-property/?)
More information
- Peter Barnes. Ours: The Case for Universal Property,