Ours: The Case for Universal Property

Polity Press, September 2021

From Chapter 1: What is Universal Property?

CAPITALISM as we know it has two egregious flaws: it relentlessly widens inequality and destroys nature. Its ‘invisiblehand’, which is supposed to transform individual self-seeking into widely shared well- being, too often doesn’t, and governments can’t keep up with the consequences. For billions of people around the world, the challenge of our era is to repair or replace capitalism before its cumulative harms become irreparable. But how, quite practically, can either of those things be done, without sacrificing the benefits of liberty and markets?

This book envisions a transformed market economy in which private property and businesses are complemented by universal property and fiduciary trusts whose beneficiaries are future generations and all living persons equally. The way to build such an economy is to add, gradually but steadily over time, a new class of property rights whose beneficial owners are future generations and all living members of society equally, Economists wrangle over monetary, fiscal and regulatory policies but pay little attention to property rights. Their models all assume that property rights remain just as they are forever. But this needn’t and shouldn’t be the case. My premise is that capitalism’s most grievous flaws are, at root, problems of property rights and must be addressed at that level.

PROPERTY RIGHTS in modern economies are grants by governments of permission to use, lease, sell or bequeath specific assets — and just as importantly, to exclude others from doing those things. The assets involved can be tangible, like land and machinery, or intangible, like shares of stock or songs.

Taken as a whole, property rights are akin to gravity: they curve economic space-time. Their tugs and repulsions are everywhere, and nothing can avoid them. And just as water flows inexorably toward the ocean, so money, goods and power flow inexorably toward property rights. Governments can no more staunch these flows than King Canute could halt the tides.

That said, the most oft-forgotten fact about property rights is that they do not exist in nature; they are constructs of human minds and societies. The assets to which they apply may exist in nature, but the rights of humans to do things with them, or prevent others from doing them, do not. Their design and allocation are entirely up to us.

In this book, I take our existing fabric of property rights as both a given and merely the latest iteration in an evolutionary process that has been and will continue to be altered by living humans. Future iterations of the fabric will therefore be a product not only of the past, but also of our imagination and political will in the future. And, while eliminating existing property rights is difficult, adding new ones is less so.

For more information about universal property visit www.universal-property.org.

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