 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm your host, Terence West. Herbert Spencer, Henry George, and the Land Question, Part 6, by George H. Smith. Smith begins his in-depth examination of Spencer's fundamental objection to the private ownership of land. I explained Herbert Spencer's fundamental objection to private land ownership in Part 3 of this series, and I summarized it in the first paragraph of Part 4. This is the argument that private property and land is incompatible with Spencer's law of equal freedom. Spencer formulated his law of equal freedom in various ways, such as, every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties, provided always he does not trench upon the similar liberty of any other, and each man shall have the greatest freedom compatible with the like freedom of all others, and every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man. To recapitulate, here is the core of Spencer's argument from Chapter 9 of Social Statics. Given a race of beings having like claims to pursue the objects of their desires, given a world adapted to the gratification of those desires, a world into which such beings are similarly born, and it unavoidably follows that they have equal rights to the use of this world. For if each of them has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other, then each of them is free to the use of the earth for the satisfaction of his wants, provided he allows all others the same liberty, and conversely it is manifest that no one or part of them may use the earth in such a way as to prevent the rest from similarly using it, seeing that to do this is to assume greater freedom than the rest and consequently to break the law of equal freedom. Spencer concluded this argument by positing a world in which all land is privately owned. If this were to happen, as it theoretically could in a consistent system of private land ownership, then non-owners would have no right to stand, much less live, on any part of the earth, so they literally would be trespassers, who could rightfully be evicted from the planet, or perhaps pushed into the sea. But to accept this possibility, however unlikely it may be, as just would entail denying to non-landowners the basic right to life, since those with no right to stand and live on our planet cannot be said to have a right to sustain their lives by their own labor. Those who do not own land could live only by the sufferance of landowners, a condition that clearly violates the law of equal freedom according to Spencer. Spencer was not the first to employ this argument, an earlier and very similar formulation may be found in a 1775 lecture on land reform presented to the New Castle Philosophical Society and subsequently printed as a pamphlet by Thomas Spence, The Rights of Man. According to Spence, we have equal rights to land, as we have equal rights to life and liberty. To deny to some people this right is in effect denying them a right to live, for the right to deprive anything of the means of living supposes a right to deprive it of life. Thomas Spence, like Herbert Spencer, also maintained that the first landholders were usurpers and tyrants who passed their ill-gotten gains to later generations through inheritance and sales. However, the most interesting parallel between Spence and Spencer is the argument that non-owners could rightfully be evicted from the planet if all land were privately owned. Private property and land, according to Spence, means that non-owners may occupy private land only with the permission of owners. So if consequence were all the landholders to be of one mind and determined to take their properties into their own hands, all of the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there would be no place found for them here. Thus men may not live in any part of this world, not even where they are born, but as strangers, and by the permission of the pretender to the property thereof. This argument, according to which the right of land is an indispensable component of the right of life, became popular among both land nationalizers and advocates of a single tax. We find it, for example, in an essay on the right of property and land, 1782, by William Ogilvy, and much later in the Irish land question, 1881, by Henry George, who applied Herbert Spencer's reasoning to the case of Ireland. In the latter tract, which A.J. Nock and Henry George, in essay 1939, ranked with Thomas Paine's common sense and rights of man, George asked the question, has or has not the child born in Ireland a right to live? He continued, there can only be but one answer, for no one would contend that it was right to drown Irish babies, or that any human law could make it right. Well, then if every human being born in Ireland has the right to live in Ireland, these rights must be equal. If each one has the right to live, then no one can have any better right to live than any other one. Since then, all the Irish people have the same equal right to life, it follows that they must all have the same equal right to the land of Ireland, if they are all in Ireland by the same permission of nature, so that no one of them can justly set up a superior claim to life than any other one of them, so that all the rest of them could not justly say to any one of them, you have not the same right to live as we have, therefore we will pitch you out of Ireland into the sea. Then they must all have the same equal rights to the elements which nature has provided for the sustaining of life, to air, to water, and to land. For to deny the equal right to the elements necessary for the maintaining of life is to deny the equal right to life. How did defenders of private land ownership reply to this equal rights argument? A common response was to deny that property rights, including property rights in land, are absolute. This line was taken by Robert Flint in Socialism 1895. I deny that individual property and land is unjust and consequently that justice demands the nationalization of land. It is necessary, however, to explain precisely what I mean by this denial. I do not mean by it, then, that an individual may justly claim an absolute proprietorship in land, an unlimited right alike to use or abuse land. Nay, I wholly disbelieve that any man can possibly acquire a right to such absolute proprietorship in anything. All human rights of proprietorship are limited. This approach could easily deal with the equal rights argument by stipulating that governments should limit and regulate land ownership so as to avoid the eviction scenario proposed by Spence and Spencer. Moreover, Flint's position could justify vast tracts of public land, as we have in the United States today, that would accommodate individuals who don't own any land. This is a viable response for those libertarians who, while defending private property and land, deny that property rights are absolute. In this case, we would simply look to the government to solve the equal rights problem, a solution that will leave most hardcore libertarians unsatisfied and in all probability greatly annoyed. A plausible solution, or partial solution, to Spencer's eviction scenario has been proposed by the libertarian philosopher Roderick Long. In Spencer, Hodgkins, and Landrights, Long maintains that there are limits to how we may legitimately enforce our rights. For example, if you swallow my diamond ring, this doesn't give me the right to cut you open and retrieve the ring. Likewise, if someone is squatting on my land, this doesn't give me the right to doom the trespasser to death in the course of evicting him, as would occur in Spencer's extreme scenario. Long also discussed Thomas Hodgkins' critique of Spencer's position on land, which appeared in The Economist, February 1851, shortly after the publication of Social Statics. I discussed some aspects of Hodgkins' review in Part 5 of this essay. Although Long believes Hodgkins made some good points in his discussion of land, he also thinks that Hodgkins didn't quite appreciate the force of Spencer's arguments. I agree with Long to a point, but I also believe it is easy to underestimate the force of Hodgkins' basic objection. So, let's now turn to what Hodgkins had to say. Hodgkins' critique of Spencer and The Economist, which is quite brief, should be supplemented by reading his more detailed treatment of land on the right of property inland in Chapter 4 of the Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, 1832. I shall consider the latter in the next installment of this series. The remainder of this essay will explain what Hodgkins said in his review of Social Statics. That Hodgkins intended to address Spencer's core argument is indicated by passages he quoted from Social Statics, including this one. Suppose the entire habitable globe to be so enclosed. It follows that if the landowners have valid right to its surface, all who are not landowners have no right at all to its surface. Hence, such can exist on the earth by sufferance only. Here's how Hodgkin responded to Spencer's point. The author obviously implies that the free use of the earth by each man is necessary to supply his wants, supposing apparently that no individual can live without using the earth to gain the means of sustenance. But fishermen obtain sustenance from the sea, and what use is possession of the land to semen, locomotive carriage drivers, and wagoners? The right of individuals is not each to use the land according to the author's own doctrines, but each to use his own faculties, and if in the progress of society great numbers of persons can subsist without using the land to satisfy their wants, if experience has taught us that a much greater number of human beings can subsist and have their wants satisfied by the land becoming property than otherwise, if it be also a fact that more faculties are called into play, such as those of the men engaged in all the trades not connected with the land, then it follows on the author's own principles that the land should be appropriated in order to promote the exercise of faculties and engender the greatest happiness. It's important to understand what Hodgkin's is doing here. He's arguing, in effect, that Spencer's law of equal freedom is not a moral primary, as we see in Spencer's attempt to justify it, and that if we examine Spencer's justification, we will find that it authorizes private land ownership. This is an interesting and insightful approach, although Spencer called the law of equal freedom the first principle for a correct system of equity and claimed that it is in the nature of an axiomatic truth, he did not represent it as self-evident. On the contrary, Spencer attempted to justify it in derivation of a first principle, chapter four of social statics, and it is essential to understand Spencer's derivation if we are to appreciate Thomas Hodgkin's critique for Hodgkin's focused not on the law of equal freedom per se, but on the moral justification for this first principle of justice. Hodgkin's circumvented Spencer's law of equal freedom by going directly to its moral foundation. This has been Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about Libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org. I'm Terence West, thanks for listening.