Granted, the argument is often presented solely in material terms. Cyril makes a hundred thousand a year, Irving ten thousand. One kind of justice dictates that Cyril be allowed to keep the fruits of his labor, talent, or luck, but another dictates that it is a great deal more than unseemly if some children of God suffer or die for lack of material goods, while others, created equally and of similar worth, luxuriate in excess. Thus, Cyril is compelled to give to Irving. In such an argument, cars, roast turkeys, antibiotics, and things such as roof repairs are often the elements of an ethical equation. But this is more than a material question.
For if Cyril is required to surrender half his income to the state, which will presumably attempt to benefit Irving, he is, therefore, laboring for the state during half his working life. Every January through June, he must hold his metaphysical breath as the product of his labor, no matter how hard or brilliant his work, vanishes from his control. Someone else, someone who, like an Egyptian bureaucrat, dreams of rooms full of seals, stamps, and ribbons, with a thousand people camping meekly at the door, will decide how to use it and what to do with it, which means that this someone else, even if in the person of the state, has appropriated his time. If you spend twelve hours digging potatoes, you find it unnatural and tyrannical to go home, as you may from January through June, with an empty bucket. The counter to this is that except for the sake of theoretical illustration, the bucket will be half full. But the answer to that is that if it takes twelve hours to fill your bucket and at the end of twelve hours you go home with half a bucketful, you have spent six hours digging potatoes at the end of which the bucket is empty. And the response to this is usually, more or less, that, “It’s for a good cause.” It may be, but even good causes must have limits, without which they become tyrannies.
A kindly slave master who does not visit upon his slaves the particular atrocities normally associated with the ownership of human beings is still fundamentally indecent. For, no matter how beneficent he is, he presumes that the labor of his slaves belongs to him, that its product should lie within his power of disposition, that he is the owner of their time and their concentration, that whatever they make is rightfully his, to be distributed to them according to his lights.
It is no different if rather than with a plantation owner in a Panama hat the power of decision rests with ten million innocent bureaucrats each laboring so far beneath the horizon of moral alacrity that none can see the illegitimate effects of their compulsory power. Illegitimate, that is, mainly insofar as it exceeds the common agreement known as the social contract, about which many arguments of property and liberty rage like thunderstorms in the Hudson Highlands. These arguments are, unsurprisingly, an essential characteristic of democracy. We are individuals but we are not alone, and the tension of the two truths creates a perpetual dispute as natural as the tides. My purpose here is not to argue for the ideal limit in each of various circumstances (in war, for example, it would obviously be different from what it would be in peace) but rather to illustrate that property is directly related to liberty, that its existence influences more than the material, that its suppression results in the suppression of liberty, and that therefore property cannot but be one of the elemental guarantors of liberty.
As such, property cannot and should not be taken lightly, as a buzz word or a trumpet blast at Vance Bourjaily’s sheep, as something that, undeserving of more than superficial considerations confers a kind of moral superiority upon whoever is “noble” enough to dismiss it. In my experience I have found that most people who think they are above property are usually swimming in it. My father was once uncomfortably on a yacht when the owner’s wife turned to her husband and asked, “Michael, are we communists?” Such are the vapors of Long Island Sound acting upon a brain the size of a Gummy Bear,™ but the trophy wife was not straying far from the dictate of polite society, that property, ownership, profit, riches, exclusivity of possession, are forms of selfishness. One is warmly received when promoting this common conceit, and viewed with suspicion when contradicting it. It is the root of the argument against copyright, and its pedigree is as ancient as envy. But you never need be ashamed to claim what is rightfully yours—not merely as a pragmatic compromise with reality, or the expediency made necessary by an imperfect system of economy, but as a just principle morally superior to its opposite.
Before my satellite television system was destroyed by a discerning lightning bolt, I saw a series of commercials touting TIAA-CREF, the mammoth (at one time more than $400 billion) pension fund for “those in the academic, medical, cultural and research fields,” whom it distinguishes with its motto of, “For the greater good.” You may remember TIAA-CREF’s former president, Thomas Jones (“Now the time has come when the pigs are going to die….” ),108 serving the greater good as a leader of the armed group escorting the president of Cornell to a news conference in which he gave them the store (they had the guns), but that is almost irrelevant to the fact that certain classes of people presume that because they work “for the greater good” they are more deserving
