Grassroots opposition to the Dubai Ports deal is coming from left, right and all quarters. Bush really stepped in it this time and assorted politicos, smelling blood in the water, seem to be rising to the occasion. Maybe they’ll succeed in this instance, and maybe not. The Bush admin may be forced to retreat on this if the corruption angle to the story grows media legs. Let’s look at the big picture, though…
The assertion that bigotry is at work in this controversy ought to be examined and widely discussed. Even so, let’s grant for now that the security concerns over this deal are at least somewhat legitimate. As one Daily Kos diarist noted:
“…opposition to the deal should be narrowly focused on the implications of allowing a foreign government–friend or foe–to operate our vulnerable ports.”
What would be the libertarian take on the matter? Well, there are a variety of arguably libertarian perspectives that could be applied. All of them are rooted in support of the free market ideal. The picture that develops from that support, however, depends on how shallow or deep one’s understanding of the term “free market” is.
The shallower understanding of a free market belongs to those Kevin Carson refers to as “vulgar libertarians“. The shallow understanding of “free market” equates to following a cult of big business. The deep understanding, however, is that a free market is the economic system resulting from systematic application of the Zero Aggression Principle — an ethical principle which any form of government is incompatible with, as the defining characteristic of government is that it is institutionalized aggression.
A vulgar libertarian would say that opposition to the ports deal is incompatible with the free market ideal and the government should allow it. Many ordinary people, emphasizing obvious security concerns, would say the government should not allow it. The deep free market perspective is that the people themselves should not allow the government to make these decisions.
The deep free marketeer recognizes that, as Karl Hess said:
The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.
Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.
In this particular case, we’re not even really talking about private property, but public property. The Dubai Ports deal, you see, involves the buyout of a foreign (British) company already operating these ports by another foreign company (owned by the UAE government). We’re talking about a change of operators, rather than owners. The purported (legal) owners on paper of each of these ports, as I understand it, are the various municipal governments they are located in. We don’t have to bother considering whether or not each company is or isn’t “private property” because what concerns people about this deal is the role of port operator at these ports. Who fulfills that role and why? Who decides it?
What we have in this case, for those with eyes to see and minds to perceive, is an example of the problems that arise from confusing “public property” with “government property”.
A libertarian, you see, would want to abolish all public property, if public property is understood as government property. There are other visions of “public property”, though, that are more compatible with libertarianism. One that has some merit even though I don’t accept it personally is “common property“. Personally, I would prefer a more rigorously defined anarchistic “public property” as joint property voluntarily pooled together and held together by contract and related mechanisms such as deed restrictions. That sort of public property is in actuality a special, sophisticated application of private property rights and thus the most consistently libertarian approach.
But what of property that is officially “government owned” at present, such as these ports?
Questions of property are ultimately questions of rights, which are inalienable. Using rights as a noun often confuses people because saying that you have “rights” when the government doesn’t recognize your rights seems farcical. That, however, is rooted in a false understanding of rights as something bequeathed to you by a government or constitution. Rights are, in my opinion, best defined as “rightful expectations”, even if their recognition by government or society in any given instance is unlikely. Rights are a statement of what is right versus what is wrong. Just as government can not repeal the law of gravity, government can not magically make it ethical to violate your rights based solely on its status as government. In short, rights are an ethical construct from a point of view that doesn’t cede authority to determine what is ethical or not to any legislature.
Legitimate claims to property arise from occupancy and use, as a result of your natural rights as a self-owning human being. The details of that are a subject of some dispute between, for example, mutualists and Rothbardians, with Rothbardians taking the position that original occupancy and use is the origin of title while mutualists point instead to ongoing occupancy and use. Regardless of that dispute, though, the basic principle is recognized by anti-statists of assorted stripes.
Because governments systematically violate peoples natural rights in a myriad of ways, they are essentially criminal organizations — bandits — and thus can not rightfully own or transfer any property. This point ought to inform libertarian approaches to privatization, but it often doesn’t.
Let’s look at this port issue through our freshly informed eyes, then — particularly if you’ve been following the links given above.
The city governments in those cities pretend to own those ports. In reality, the rightful owners are the residents of each of the port cities, the workers who work there and the companies who do business there — but that last only to the extent those companies are not aligned with the interests of the state, which is somewhat rare.
It is through this usurpation of the peoples property rights in those ports that the question of whether the Dubai ports deal is good or bad management of the ports has been removed from the people and placed in the hands of government, which in addition to not being ethically eligible to make such decisions is not competent to do so either.
The real solution to this problem, and future repetitions of it, is for the people to organize to assert their joint ownership of the property in question independent of any government.
Specifically, I call for the people of the port cities to work on reaching a widespread consensus among themselves about what the rightful distribution of stock or ownership shares would be for a joint stock company to take possession of the ports.
I call upon all Americans who are concerned about government mismanagement of these ports to support and popularize this effort to remove the ports from government hands by speaking out and offering financial support to such an effort if avenues to do so emerge.
I call upon such joint stock companies, if they emerge, to seek peoples privatization of these ports through suing for title to them in compensation for the myriad wrongs city, state and federal governmets commit against the people on a daily basis.
Failing satisfactory redress in the courts, I call upon them to assert their legitimate ownership rights in these ports through non-violent resistance until those ownership rights come to be recognized by governments — where governments exist at all. Such resistance might include labor organizing of stevedores through radical unions such as the IWW and non-violent direct action generally.
Those ports belong to the people, and they’ll be treated that way when the people refuse to put up with anything else.
Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
2 Comments »
