What a load of common sense and orderly thought! A delight to my morning. I have not discovered your work before, but I will certainly be back to try your patience. Thank you!
Thank you for pointing out that democratic government cannot and should not be run “like a business”. So many people don’t understand why, and this piece explains it so plainly. I was a civil servant for many years and I can see how the proposed Project 2025 changes to the agency where I worked will advance the property ideology you presented here. Interestingly, those changes will make everyone, including those who hold the most property, less safe. But I guess they think the payoff is worth the risk …
I genuinely appreciate this thoughtful treatise on property, need to go over it a few more times. It articulately and painstakingly bares the extremely problematic DOGE view of property and mankind’s relationship to it. I see the sturdy practicality of how this ends, with its foundational presumption that “property” itself has no say, as it were, in its disposition and ownership. I don’t have the right words for the final bit of unease I’m left with though. Possibly a vestigial echo from deep ecology? An inadvertent error of omission? What if the hubris of man neglects to adequately factor in the human primacy over it all? Anyway great job, lots of food for thought.
Thanks. I think you've put your finger on the real limit of Brock's argument — and of the entire tradition he's drawing from.
Hume and Jefferson didn't have to think about the planet's limits. Nature was, for them, the infinite backdrop against which the human drama played out. Today we know that's not the case. And here's the paradox:
If property is just a human convention, what voice does the land have in that convention? None. But if we exploit it without limits, the convention collapses and takes us all down with it.
Maybe what's missing — and what your 'unease' points to — is a political philosophy that isn't just a contract among the living, but also a pact with those who come after and with the world we'll have to leave them. Hume didn't write that chapter. But maybe it's the one we need to write now.
That said, Brock is still right about one thing: if we let the rich reverse Jefferson and go back to Locke — property first, citizenship second — nature won't be protected. It will be parceled out, sold off, and exhausted with no checks. Democracy at least allows for limits. Corporate feudalism doesn't."
There's no limit on my argument here. I think the regulation of property in the service of the collective good, such as the management of externalities like ecological limits, is absolutely part of the proper function of a democratic regulation of industrial activity. I don't see my argument failing to account for climate change or other collective action problems. In fact, I would state that my stance is a necessary precondition for addressing them at all.
In his 1978 book, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Garry Wills attributes Jefferson's use of "pursuit of happiness" to his reading of Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Hutcheson's philosophy was closely based on Shaftesbury, who had sharply dissented from Locke, his personal tutor as a youth.
Personally, I'm for Shaftesbury and Hutcheson's moral sense theory, the claim that beauty and virtue truly are, we're born with a sense of them, and thus are part of what "is" implying what we "ought." Hume's reduction of that to "passions" or "sentiment" as a separate sphere from reason -- which we should, Hume claims, best enslave to them -- creates an amoral mess almost as bad as Locke's.
Trump is entirely about enslaving reason to passions. That's not working out so well.
The Hutcheson-Shaftesbury line into Jefferson is important and upon your intervention here, perhaps I should have acknowledged it in the paper. Wills's book matters. You're not incorrect that Jefferson wasn't simply negating Locke — he was drawing on a counter-tradition that took moral reality seriously. That strengthens the argument I'm making, not weakens it.
But I think you're conflating two separable things in Hume: his logical claim about is and ought, and his psychological theory about reason and passion. I'm using the first, not the second. The is-ought distinction is a claim about derivation — you cannot logically extract a prescription from a description. You can believe moral truths are real, believe we're born with a sense of them, believe they're woven into the cosmos, and the gap still holds. Because it's not saying values aren't real. It's saying they don't follow from descriptions. They have their own authority. Their own domain.
And this matters politically more than it matters philosophically. If ought could be derived from is, then whoever controls the description of reality controls the values. That's technocracy. That's the expert class saying: we have the data, the data determines the good, your democratic input is redundant. The is-ought gap is not the problem — it's the space where democratic agency lives.
On Trump: I'd say you have it exactly backwards. Trump doesn't exploit the gap between reason and passion. He collapses the gap between is and ought. He takes what people feel — grievance, fear, betrayal — and converts it directly into political mandate. You feel it, therefore it's true, therefore follow me. That's the is-ought gap being denied, not honored. The Humean framework is the one that says: your feelings are real, your grievances may be legitimate, and we still need deliberation to move from what you feel to what we do together. The gap is what forces us to talk to each other rather than simply act on conviction.
I think we're closer than you realize. We both think values are real. The question is whether the reality of values eliminates the need for democratic deliberation or makes it more urgent. I believe the latter.
Yes. Property is defended either by law or by violence. If Mr Anyone builds a fence on land desired by Mr Someone- Else, Mr S-E either recognises that fence or not. If Mr S-E recognises it his recognition is either on the assumption that Mr A recognises his own fence, or has paid him to give up his competing " rights", or has superior force. Law or violence. If Mr S-E does not recognise Mr A's claim, his recourse lies in some kind of monetary agreement (law), or increasing his own forces of coercion. If Mr A has competitors with equal wealth or armies to his own, he will need to enter either into agreements of a legal nature or into warfare with his competitors. And any coercion by money is closer to a form of violence than to law.
Wow Mike, number 13 has blown my mind. Thank you for this great lesson in journalism. Number 14 is the culmination. We need redistribution, socialism, or call it whatever you want, but wild accumulation is fundamentally unjust.
I don't think it's about accumulation. I'm not terribly materialistic. I care about power and justice. I don't care if rich people own yachts, actually. Because the truth is, I pity people who think that's what the good life is. I think opulence is its own prison and its own punishment. But also think we have the right through popular sovereignty to set the terms of property. And yes, to redistribute wealth to alleviate suffering.
It is not that the billionaire shouldn't exist as a moral principle. It's the spiritual observation that I think is more important: why would anyone want that? Is having accumulated the most money what will comfort you on your deathbed? And to those who covet what the billionaires have, are making the same mistake. So this is why I'm not a socialist. Because my ethics are not materialist. They are based on truth and justice. Not on the accumulation of stuff.
This is why I'm neither a socialist nor an anti-capitalist. I believe the mode of production that Marx and Smith argue about is besides the point, really. That's what I think. And if you think that's wrong, I suggest you look to where we find the happiest people. And they're never the ones pursuing "stuff".
I'm convinced by the distinction: it's not about coveting the yachts, but about who has the power to set the rules. And here I follow you: property must be downstream of citizenship, not the other way around.
But I worry that even this framework — power, justice, popular sovereignty — is still too human. Because while we debate the terms of the social contract, another contract is being broken: the one we should have with those who come after us and with the planet we'll leave them.
Opulence may be a spiritual prison for billionaires. But for the rest of us, and for the species we're wiping out, it's a very material prison. And those who accumulate power (not just things) are the ones designing this prison.
The question isn't whether we're socialists or not. The question is whether our political framework can recognize that the earth is not just the stage where we exercise sovereignty, but the condition of possibility for any sovereignty at all. And that, I'm afraid, neither Hume nor Jefferson had to think about. We do.
Thank you for once again making the correct salient argument. An attempt at reverse recognition. Egocentric denial of another’s right to exist. Equanimity as an impediment. The very fact that this change is being affected proves its fallacy.
Do we, the people, understand America is a republic?
Well said! A couple of nuances, introduced without criticism.
1. Hume's is-ought logical distinction re-entered modern ethics explicitly last century by way of G.E. Moore's "naturalistic fallacy".
2. In common law legal theory (I never tried to qualify in civil law!), "real property" is something of an oxymoron insofar as it logically translates to what has been called a "bundle" of (in practice) over a dozen independent "rights". Some of these by default may be assigned (by contract or statute) to leaseholders or freehold "owners", depending on jurisdictional public policy; and most are held by third parties, especially including the state (by way of feudal reversion or even, as it is called in some common law jurisdictions, "eminent domain"). These rights were never absolute or even jurisdictionally universal: rather, they ultimately derive from medieval Norman common law, within which they even today are referred to as "choses in action". These include (just for example, I'm not a land lawyer so I can never remember anything approaching a full list even in my own jurisdiction) fee simple (aka "freehold"), fee tail (transfers permitted only within a family or other defined class, yes I've encountered this!), leases including sub-leases and "ground-rent" arrangements, licences, rights of way, reversion, covenants, easements, profits a prendre (including some beautiful case law in pre-1948 Palestine), mining rights, air rights, space rights (beyond a grey area), adverse possession, etc - plus a galaxy of statutory rights awarded by legislatures and international law (did you know Luxembourg uniquely is legally entitled to shoot down all intruding balloons? :)), as well as contractual rights.
Apologies for this legal word salad: but the point is it follows that, within any common-law constitutional framework that fails expressly and very precisely to define / refer to particular components of real property let alone chattels, money and other "property", the definition and interpretation of "property" is (at best) contingently reliant upon current legal precedent. Further, given that in federal systems of government (such as USA, Canada, Australia, and at a stretch the UK) almost all land law is devolved to the sub-jurisdictions (provinces/states etc), it likely verges on a category mistake to think that property can be a subject of *federal* constitutions.
With this dissection of property rights in mind, it comes to mind that a way of potentially addressing the corrosive effects of the network-state mentality would be, first, to implement Georgist taxation so that anyone who wants to leave but still hold title to real property must contribute toward the upkeep of the society within which that real property is situated, and second, to implement high tax rates on extreme incomes (including buy-borrow-die schemes) in order to ensure that rentiers of capital cannot simply extract endlessly. (I'd even go so far as to implement some sort of low UBI by direct redistribution of tax revenue collected in this second way.) To what extent could tax policy aid in this endeavour?
(I'm reminded of Ted Cruz arguing for cutting tax rates on the basis that when taxes were cut under Kennedy from the higher rates under Eisenhower, tax revenue went up, because this misses two things. First, it misses the policy justification for those Eisenhower-era rates, that even if government tax revenue might be lower with the higher rates it's still better to have the higher rates to ensure that rentiers cannot extract and accumulate excessively. Second, it misses the full extent to which Arthur Laffer was correct and incorrect about the relation between tax rates and tax revenue, which is that while there is, by Rolle's Theorem and some basic economic assumptions, some tax rate at which tax revenue is maximised, it is obviously not the case that said optimal tax rate is always lower than whatever the current rate happens to be.)
EDIT: It comes to mind that the social conservatives who claim that "family is the foundation of society" (by "family" here they always mean the husband-wife-children model, and a lot of them probably further mean the type where the wife is subordinate to the husband and would just love the return of things like head-and-master laws) are committing this same descriptive-normative failure, unless I'm misinterpreting Hume.
Wow. I really didn't think it would get this funky - "Man" is separate from Nature? Whooee -- wrong already. This is the descent into "civilization", a descent from human evolution into cravings toward the 6th Mass Extinction. Native Americans have the wisdom to learn from the magnificence that quantum nature displays. We're starting to relearn this. Hello?
As for god or no god. I read you again, and listened to your recent substack live ( we have very similar world views) and so I venture to guess your spiritual traditions, if any, tend Eastern. Some form of Buddhist perhaps.
What a load of common sense and orderly thought! A delight to my morning. I have not discovered your work before, but I will certainly be back to try your patience. Thank you!
Thank you for pointing out that democratic government cannot and should not be run “like a business”. So many people don’t understand why, and this piece explains it so plainly. I was a civil servant for many years and I can see how the proposed Project 2025 changes to the agency where I worked will advance the property ideology you presented here. Interestingly, those changes will make everyone, including those who hold the most property, less safe. But I guess they think the payoff is worth the risk …
I genuinely appreciate this thoughtful treatise on property, need to go over it a few more times. It articulately and painstakingly bares the extremely problematic DOGE view of property and mankind’s relationship to it. I see the sturdy practicality of how this ends, with its foundational presumption that “property” itself has no say, as it were, in its disposition and ownership. I don’t have the right words for the final bit of unease I’m left with though. Possibly a vestigial echo from deep ecology? An inadvertent error of omission? What if the hubris of man neglects to adequately factor in the human primacy over it all? Anyway great job, lots of food for thought.
Thanks. I think you've put your finger on the real limit of Brock's argument — and of the entire tradition he's drawing from.
Hume and Jefferson didn't have to think about the planet's limits. Nature was, for them, the infinite backdrop against which the human drama played out. Today we know that's not the case. And here's the paradox:
If property is just a human convention, what voice does the land have in that convention? None. But if we exploit it without limits, the convention collapses and takes us all down with it.
Maybe what's missing — and what your 'unease' points to — is a political philosophy that isn't just a contract among the living, but also a pact with those who come after and with the world we'll have to leave them. Hume didn't write that chapter. But maybe it's the one we need to write now.
That said, Brock is still right about one thing: if we let the rich reverse Jefferson and go back to Locke — property first, citizenship second — nature won't be protected. It will be parceled out, sold off, and exhausted with no checks. Democracy at least allows for limits. Corporate feudalism doesn't."
There's no limit on my argument here. I think the regulation of property in the service of the collective good, such as the management of externalities like ecological limits, is absolutely part of the proper function of a democratic regulation of industrial activity. I don't see my argument failing to account for climate change or other collective action problems. In fact, I would state that my stance is a necessary precondition for addressing them at all.
In his 1978 book, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Garry Wills attributes Jefferson's use of "pursuit of happiness" to his reading of Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Hutcheson's philosophy was closely based on Shaftesbury, who had sharply dissented from Locke, his personal tutor as a youth.
Personally, I'm for Shaftesbury and Hutcheson's moral sense theory, the claim that beauty and virtue truly are, we're born with a sense of them, and thus are part of what "is" implying what we "ought." Hume's reduction of that to "passions" or "sentiment" as a separate sphere from reason -- which we should, Hume claims, best enslave to them -- creates an amoral mess almost as bad as Locke's.
Trump is entirely about enslaving reason to passions. That's not working out so well.
The Hutcheson-Shaftesbury line into Jefferson is important and upon your intervention here, perhaps I should have acknowledged it in the paper. Wills's book matters. You're not incorrect that Jefferson wasn't simply negating Locke — he was drawing on a counter-tradition that took moral reality seriously. That strengthens the argument I'm making, not weakens it.
But I think you're conflating two separable things in Hume: his logical claim about is and ought, and his psychological theory about reason and passion. I'm using the first, not the second. The is-ought distinction is a claim about derivation — you cannot logically extract a prescription from a description. You can believe moral truths are real, believe we're born with a sense of them, believe they're woven into the cosmos, and the gap still holds. Because it's not saying values aren't real. It's saying they don't follow from descriptions. They have their own authority. Their own domain.
And this matters politically more than it matters philosophically. If ought could be derived from is, then whoever controls the description of reality controls the values. That's technocracy. That's the expert class saying: we have the data, the data determines the good, your democratic input is redundant. The is-ought gap is not the problem — it's the space where democratic agency lives.
On Trump: I'd say you have it exactly backwards. Trump doesn't exploit the gap between reason and passion. He collapses the gap between is and ought. He takes what people feel — grievance, fear, betrayal — and converts it directly into political mandate. You feel it, therefore it's true, therefore follow me. That's the is-ought gap being denied, not honored. The Humean framework is the one that says: your feelings are real, your grievances may be legitimate, and we still need deliberation to move from what you feel to what we do together. The gap is what forces us to talk to each other rather than simply act on conviction.
I think we're closer than you realize. We both think values are real. The question is whether the reality of values eliminates the need for democratic deliberation or makes it more urgent. I believe the latter.
Yes. Property is defended either by law or by violence. If Mr Anyone builds a fence on land desired by Mr Someone- Else, Mr S-E either recognises that fence or not. If Mr S-E recognises it his recognition is either on the assumption that Mr A recognises his own fence, or has paid him to give up his competing " rights", or has superior force. Law or violence. If Mr S-E does not recognise Mr A's claim, his recourse lies in some kind of monetary agreement (law), or increasing his own forces of coercion. If Mr A has competitors with equal wealth or armies to his own, he will need to enter either into agreements of a legal nature or into warfare with his competitors. And any coercion by money is closer to a form of violence than to law.
Wow Mike, number 13 has blown my mind. Thank you for this great lesson in journalism. Number 14 is the culmination. We need redistribution, socialism, or call it whatever you want, but wild accumulation is fundamentally unjust.
I don't think it's about accumulation. I'm not terribly materialistic. I care about power and justice. I don't care if rich people own yachts, actually. Because the truth is, I pity people who think that's what the good life is. I think opulence is its own prison and its own punishment. But also think we have the right through popular sovereignty to set the terms of property. And yes, to redistribute wealth to alleviate suffering.
It is not that the billionaire shouldn't exist as a moral principle. It's the spiritual observation that I think is more important: why would anyone want that? Is having accumulated the most money what will comfort you on your deathbed? And to those who covet what the billionaires have, are making the same mistake. So this is why I'm not a socialist. Because my ethics are not materialist. They are based on truth and justice. Not on the accumulation of stuff.
This is why I'm neither a socialist nor an anti-capitalist. I believe the mode of production that Marx and Smith argue about is besides the point, really. That's what I think. And if you think that's wrong, I suggest you look to where we find the happiest people. And they're never the ones pursuing "stuff".
Touche. And thank you for taking me seriously.
I'm convinced by the distinction: it's not about coveting the yachts, but about who has the power to set the rules. And here I follow you: property must be downstream of citizenship, not the other way around.
But I worry that even this framework — power, justice, popular sovereignty — is still too human. Because while we debate the terms of the social contract, another contract is being broken: the one we should have with those who come after us and with the planet we'll leave them.
Opulence may be a spiritual prison for billionaires. But for the rest of us, and for the species we're wiping out, it's a very material prison. And those who accumulate power (not just things) are the ones designing this prison.
The question isn't whether we're socialists or not. The question is whether our political framework can recognize that the earth is not just the stage where we exercise sovereignty, but the condition of possibility for any sovereignty at all. And that, I'm afraid, neither Hume nor Jefferson had to think about. We do.
I don't think we disagree on anything, here. We will have to insist on the moral imagination to overcome the challenge you frame. That's on us.
Thank you for once again making the correct salient argument. An attempt at reverse recognition. Egocentric denial of another’s right to exist. Equanimity as an impediment. The very fact that this change is being affected proves its fallacy.
Do we, the people, understand America is a republic?
Well said! A couple of nuances, introduced without criticism.
1. Hume's is-ought logical distinction re-entered modern ethics explicitly last century by way of G.E. Moore's "naturalistic fallacy".
2. In common law legal theory (I never tried to qualify in civil law!), "real property" is something of an oxymoron insofar as it logically translates to what has been called a "bundle" of (in practice) over a dozen independent "rights". Some of these by default may be assigned (by contract or statute) to leaseholders or freehold "owners", depending on jurisdictional public policy; and most are held by third parties, especially including the state (by way of feudal reversion or even, as it is called in some common law jurisdictions, "eminent domain"). These rights were never absolute or even jurisdictionally universal: rather, they ultimately derive from medieval Norman common law, within which they even today are referred to as "choses in action". These include (just for example, I'm not a land lawyer so I can never remember anything approaching a full list even in my own jurisdiction) fee simple (aka "freehold"), fee tail (transfers permitted only within a family or other defined class, yes I've encountered this!), leases including sub-leases and "ground-rent" arrangements, licences, rights of way, reversion, covenants, easements, profits a prendre (including some beautiful case law in pre-1948 Palestine), mining rights, air rights, space rights (beyond a grey area), adverse possession, etc - plus a galaxy of statutory rights awarded by legislatures and international law (did you know Luxembourg uniquely is legally entitled to shoot down all intruding balloons? :)), as well as contractual rights.
Apologies for this legal word salad: but the point is it follows that, within any common-law constitutional framework that fails expressly and very precisely to define / refer to particular components of real property let alone chattels, money and other "property", the definition and interpretation of "property" is (at best) contingently reliant upon current legal precedent. Further, given that in federal systems of government (such as USA, Canada, Australia, and at a stretch the UK) almost all land law is devolved to the sub-jurisdictions (provinces/states etc), it likely verges on a category mistake to think that property can be a subject of *federal* constitutions.
HTH
With this dissection of property rights in mind, it comes to mind that a way of potentially addressing the corrosive effects of the network-state mentality would be, first, to implement Georgist taxation so that anyone who wants to leave but still hold title to real property must contribute toward the upkeep of the society within which that real property is situated, and second, to implement high tax rates on extreme incomes (including buy-borrow-die schemes) in order to ensure that rentiers of capital cannot simply extract endlessly. (I'd even go so far as to implement some sort of low UBI by direct redistribution of tax revenue collected in this second way.) To what extent could tax policy aid in this endeavour?
(I'm reminded of Ted Cruz arguing for cutting tax rates on the basis that when taxes were cut under Kennedy from the higher rates under Eisenhower, tax revenue went up, because this misses two things. First, it misses the policy justification for those Eisenhower-era rates, that even if government tax revenue might be lower with the higher rates it's still better to have the higher rates to ensure that rentiers cannot extract and accumulate excessively. Second, it misses the full extent to which Arthur Laffer was correct and incorrect about the relation between tax rates and tax revenue, which is that while there is, by Rolle's Theorem and some basic economic assumptions, some tax rate at which tax revenue is maximised, it is obviously not the case that said optimal tax rate is always lower than whatever the current rate happens to be.)
EDIT: It comes to mind that the social conservatives who claim that "family is the foundation of society" (by "family" here they always mean the husband-wife-children model, and a lot of them probably further mean the type where the wife is subordinate to the husband and would just love the return of things like head-and-master laws) are committing this same descriptive-normative failure, unless I'm misinterpreting Hume.
Wow. I really didn't think it would get this funky - "Man" is separate from Nature? Whooee -- wrong already. This is the descent into "civilization", a descent from human evolution into cravings toward the 6th Mass Extinction. Native Americans have the wisdom to learn from the magnificence that quantum nature displays. We're starting to relearn this. Hello?
Incredible piece.
Enjoyed this reminder. Thank you.
Brilliant!
I nominate you for Philosopher King.
As for god or no god. I read you again, and listened to your recent substack live ( we have very similar world views) and so I venture to guess your spiritual traditions, if any, tend Eastern. Some form of Buddhist perhaps.
I refuse any such throne offered me. I seek truth, not power.
Ah Mike, I know that. Simply an accolade, a wish that those who do lead us, had your vision and insight.