Redistribution

Discussion

Libertarian Alternatives to Redistribution

Note from Michel Bauwens: The P2P Foundation is NOT libertarian (in the U.S. meaning of the term), though we cooperate with left-leaning mutualist libertarians. Nevertheless, the following is of interest as a new way of thinking about distribution that is not necessarily reliant on state mechanisms.

Gary Chartier:

"Redistribution by the state is hardly the only conceivable kind. The kind libertarians ought to favor includes five elements:

1. The elimination of privilege. Existing market structures feature a broad range of privileges that shift resources into the pockets of the wealthy and well connected—while making and keeping others poor. Think occupational licensure, patents and copyrights, zoning laws and building codes, the use of eminent domain to benefit developers and their clients, transportation subsidies, and tariffs, just for starters. Ending these privileges would shift resources away from those who benefit from them and improve the economic positions of many poor and middle-class people.

2. The operation of a freed market. When privileges are absent, capitalization costs are lower, and more people can enter the market. The result is more enthusiastic competition—and, of course, the practical effect of competition is to reduce profit margins and to make it harder for people to preserve entrenched economic positions. Freeing the market is itself an act of revolutionary redistribution, because, as Jeremy Weiland emphasizes, the free market will “eat the rich.”

3. Acts of solidarity. Just because forcible redistribution by the state is problematic for multiple reasons doesn’t mean bleeding-heart libertarians should be anything but enthusiastic about wise acts of solidaristic redistribution—choices, that is, by people to share their resources benevolently with others. (Benevolence isn’t just the province of statists: among libertarians, it’s been defended even by neo-Objectivists like David Kelley and Tibor Machan.) When people give without compulsion by the state, their giving needn’t dampen their productivity. And they can ensure that it’s more effective than redistribution by the state, too. Solidaristic redistribution can be very effective as a response to accident, disaster, and ill fortune.

4. Radical rectification. The state engages in theft on a grand scale. Its cronies steal too, frequently with its blessing. Some obvious examples: the theft of land in Latin America from those who worked it—converted through violence from rightful owners to tenants and the use of eminent domain to take land from ordinary people in order to enrich the state’s corporate cronies. Land stolen in this way can and should be reclaimed by its rightful owners—without compensation to thieves.

5. Radical homesteading. Even when it doesn’t steal identifiable assets and pieces of real property from particular people, the state uses its power to take resources that don’t belong to it and to use stolen money to fund its own activities and those of its cronies. Consider, for instance, the arbitrary expropriation of vast tracts of land in colonial North America (and in the newly minted United States as well) by political authorities who proceeded to parcel it out to their cronies. Or think of the ways in which the state funnels huge sums of money to the military-industrial complex or to universities that maintain cozy relationships with the “defense” establishment. There are no specific, rightful owners of unjustly engrossed land and unjustly funded businesses or universities. But they can reasonably be regarded as unowned, and ripe for homesteading. These stolen assets should be redistributed by being claimed by ordinary people willing to occupy them, people whose just claims other should be quite willing to support." (http://www.bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/04/bleeding-heart-libertarians-for-redistribution.html?)