Hospitality vs. Property

One of the fundamental conflicts in our modern society is between the right to property and other peoples rights to things they need. Republicans hold the right to property to be the fundamental right. Democrats say that desperate people have a right to be helped, even if that means taking money from others to help them with.

This question takes us all the way back to our beginnings as hunter/gatherers because among primitive peoples the right to property frequently seemed not to exist. Frequently primitive languages had no words for mine or thine. The right to hospitality was fairly universal in early human societies.

The Right to Hospitality violates the Right to Property. A right to demand a share of the fruits of another persons labor means a right to take property that that person has worked for and earned.

As societies became more advanced, the Right to Hospitality became weaker and weaker. The question is why, and how does it relate to fundamental human nature?

One thing that changes as societies become more advanced is the degree of control that they exercise over their environment. That means that the results of their efforts are more reliable, and more directly related to the work they do. Maintaining the strength of this relationship is the fundamental principle of Adam Smiths “Invisible Hand”.

In a primitive society, a person might be lucky one day and have bad luck on another. If he shares with others when lucky and gets to share with others when they are lucky, he gets to eat more regularly than if he attempted to be greedy. In a primitive society the technology for storing food against spoilage is not as developed so he cannot store up today’s excess to feed him tomorrow. It is a wise economic strategy to be generous and share with others. Hospitality in a primitive society is like most noble actions, an action taken on the basis of noble feelings which has a hidden economic reality so that it can be modeled as selfish. There is a hidden contract in the hospitality of primitive people to one another.

If you do this as a farmer and someone comes along who never farms, but demands hospitality of you, there is no reward for the effort and labor you put into farming. You eat no better than those who do no work. Eventually you choose to stop farming yourself. All of society is poorer. Less total wealth is produced. The right to property is a necessary right to guarantee a return for labor done and a society which does not protect it cannot progress to those technologies which reward labor more reliably than hunting and gathering. Again, fundamental to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”.

In a primitive society the right to hospitality helps to guarantee a reliable economic return for work done by evening out the odds and compensating for chance. In an advanced society where chance has less of a role in daily life, the right to own property guarantees the same thing, an equitable relationship between action and result. Both rights, though on the surface the opposite, guarantee the same basic right to having your rewards correlate with your actions.

This is our fundamental principle of self-interest. The fundamental human right to tie their actions to rewards and to expect a reward for work. Hospitality as an action produces a reward, hospitality from others in the future. If others are never able to return the hospitality because they have not learned to work, the unwritten contract is violated.

Humans were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, it is plausible that there is an instinct to be charitable and to share from ones own plenty with others needs. As societies evolved this instinct came in conflict with economic necessity and reality and the right to property became sacred. There is a passage in the Bible which says if you don’t work you don’t eat.

The books of the Bible originated at different times and illuminate much about the evolution of ethics and morals as humans modified their environment.

Guaranteed hospitality, or a guaranteed right to food and clothing, or large scale charity remove the motivation from a large percentage of society to be productive. Communism included these rights in their system and it produced non-productive populations, factories and industries.

The saying that goods should be distributed from the able according to their ability to others according to their need rings true with the behaviors probably evolved as hunter/gatherers, but it is suicidal for cultures where the ability to control the environment has made individual production a matter of habit and work and less a question of luck and fortune.

Montesquieu in his book “The Spirit of the Laws” another of the books frequently quoted in “The Federalist Papers” criticizes the large scale charity of the Catholic Church in the England of Henry VIII as creating a population of people who refused to work and just lived on charity. It can be assumed that he was speaking of the large scale charities of the Catholic Church in France at the time but used England as an example to avoid trouble.

In the Contents of his Politics Book V (VII) part 5.Aristotle noted that above all else a society must avoid creating a pauper class. Rome is famous for it’s bread and circuses which are commonly related to its failure as a society.

It may be an instinct to be charitable and it may feel noble, but charity on a large scale is one of the constantly repeating mistakes of history. Charity should be practiced on the model of the nice person who stops and helps someone on the side of the road and then says, “The only way to thank me is to do the same for someone else.” Charity given to those who will never pass it on is a wasted investment.

All of the above must warm the hearts of Republicans. Truth is a two edged sword. The right above is a right to be rewarded for work because effort and reward must have a strong relationship to each other. This implies a livable minimum wage as well as a right to property. A fair and just compensation for a days labor. A wage high enough to motivate work. In fact you could call work a form of property that must be protected by laws like minimum wage laws, freedom to unionize, etc., from various forms of economic or other coercion. Locke ties the right to property to work. Locke in his “Second Treatise of Government” said,

It is the work a person puts into land or gathering etc. which makes that land or what he has gathered property. Work is indispensably tied to legitimate property rights, the work a person does is a form of property belonging to him and it must be recognized and legally protected. Failure to do this removes his motive to work, reduces the productivity of society and inhibits the creation of wealth. Adam Smith’s invisible hand depends upon the individual creativity of individual workers inventing more productive methods of doing their jobs.

Republicans scream about taxation being the redistribution of wealth from the wealthy to the poor. Then they lobby for laws in banking, credit, monopolies, and other techniques which allow them to force the poor to pay too much for credit and other goods and to work at ever lower and lower wages. Both parties strive every year to use the guns of the government to create and enforce laws that redistribute wealth from the members of one party to the members of the other party. Wealth is not created by the redistribution of wealth. It is created by new methods of production that make the creation of old goods more efficient or create new kinds of goods. Wealth is acquired by the redistribution of wealth, but that is not what creates it. We should not confuse the acquisition of wealth with the creation of wealth, different mechanisms and behaviors are involved.

Adam Smith warned extensively in “The Wealth of Nations” against allowing the merchants, bankers, et al to write the laws of the country. Such men make laws designed to facilitate their personal quest to redistribute wealth from others into their own pockets. This is inevitable from their self-interest. Dealing realistically even cynically with self-interest is the basis of our system of government. Let us not forget that. Wealth is not created by taxing people and spending the money on welfare, this is just another form or redistribution of wealth. Democrats and Republicans are both essentially wrong, but the Democrats do come closer to the truth here. Wealth is created when a healthy flow of money stimulates invention and investment to gain a part of that flow. In order for that flow to occur, the poor must have money to spend. If they become too poor the flow of money ceases or slows to a trickle, the opportunity it represents vanishes, stimulus to invention is destroyed and the creation of new wealth ceases. The poor must be wealthy enough to provide a market large and vital enough to stimulate the creation of new wealth.

It is better to do this by providing employment at livable wages than taxing the rich to supplement unlivable wages with government handouts. Such tax policies give power to political demagogues, swell the size of government, destroy self-reliance and independence, destroy personal responsibility, and remove the motivation to work and get better jobs. A minimum wage law is much more cost effective and less psychologically damaging than allowing unlivable minimum wages and supplementing them with food stamps and other programs.

They destroy the relation between work and reward which is the functional basis of most necessary or Natural Rights.

To quote Aristotle in his Ethics, possibly his most famous general principal, “Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right an extreme.”

This applies in balancing these issues of property vs. hospitality. It is an extreme vice to insist it is a virtue to give charity to those who insist on living on charity. It is an extreme vice to insist on a right to property which justifies slavery in any form. There is a continuum here. Hospitality to Property to Slavery. Hospitality is emotionally attractive but is a recipe for poverty. The reasonable guarantee of the right to Property is the middle course. The guarantee of the right to Property to the point where it allows men to reduce other men to Slavery is also a recipe for poverty as is shown in the section on Liberty and Slavery.