Centre-left social democrats walk an unsound, uneasy path of pretending to favour “liberty” while also favouring redistributionary and intensely regulatory initiatives on behalf of the state elites. They seek to obscure the foundational importance that private property rights represent to holistic human freedom.
Last week, the African Global Dialogue was set to have an international event at the conference venues of Constitution Hill – the seat of the Constitutional Court – about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
At the last minute, the booking was cancelled by the venue. The Constitution Hill Trust thereafter indicated that it was not them that rescinded the invitation, but the owner of the property: the Panyaza Lesufi Royal Circus, also known as the Gauteng Provincial Government.
I have strong opinions about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but this column is not about that. And set aside, for just a moment, the absurdity of a provincial government owning a conference venue, not to mention the premises of the “independent” Constitutional Court.
“Basic” freedom
This occurrence is another confirmation of why so-called “basic” rights cannot in any substantive way be separated from the foundational right of private property.
Many social democrats have tried to maintain that “economic” freedoms like property rights, freedom of contract, labour freedom, and so forth, are not “basic,” and that the true basic rights are only those to dignity, association, expression, privacy, and the like. Dr Jessica Flanigan has ripped this argument to shreds – her work is highly recommended.
These faux-liberals, which includes the likes of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, believe that the latter liberties “are essential for the development of citizens’ ‘moral powers’” whilst the former liberties are not.
They have been remarkably successful in their enterprise, to the extent that many modern constitutions and international treaties reflect this sentiment. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are some of its most prominent manifestations, containing a list of liberties but conspicuously excluding the most foundational of them all.
Even good liberals, like Leo Marquard, who wrote the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) booklet Liberalism in South Africa in 1965, succumbed to this confused discourse and had little to say about property. This is to be starkly contrasted with Edgar Brookes and JB MacAulay’s Civil Liberty in South Africa – another IRR book seven years prior – that placed property and economic freedom within its proper context.
What’s really going on?
Of course, the social democrats and their government allies know exactly what they are doing.
All liberties, when divorced from property, become infinitely easier for governments to manage. Governments can pretend to be champions of human rights while keeping an easy veto in their back-pockets.
How is this?
All freedoms necessarily have to be exercised within a physical space. Private property is the foundational liberty – alongside the right to bear arms – therefore, that grounds all other freedoms (ultimately just strings of words and concepts) in tangible, practical reality.
One’s right to free expression – as an example – is an empty gesture when one is compelled to utilise the state’s property.
Under these circumstances, the state claims that the rule of law demands that the law must apply equally to the governed and the governor, meaning that if we as citizens and civilians have a right to freedom of association (a “basic” freedom), then it – the state – also has a right to freedom of association. If the state therefore disagrees with your expression, it is not repressing you or harming your liberty, it is simply exercising its own freedom by denying you access to its property.
That is, ultimately, what the Gauteng Provincial Government did when it rescinded the invitation to the African Global Dialogue.
When the enemies of property get their way, and the government owns all fixed property – leaving us plebs only with what they call “personal property” – liberty becomes fully discretionary on the part of the state. It becomes a mere pretence that the state may at its will “limit.”
Property and democracy
This has further significance, often pointed out by Professor Koos Malan.
Not only is private property the foundation of freedom, but it is also foundational to the proper exercise of democracy.
There are many “things” and “objects” in nature, but it is only when these things become objectively linked to a person that they become “property,” and it is only from this point that humanity starts to solve the issues of sustenance, shelter, development, and prosperity.
Regressing from “property” back to mere “things” and “objects” – as socialism and many incarnations of social democracy demand – sustenance, shelter, development, and prosperity are all made discretionary on the part of the state elite.
And when we are entirely dependent upon the state for our next harvest, our next meal, and the very roofs over our heads, how could we be regarded as “citizens” to whom the state is accountable? Instead, we are then mere recipients of state generosity. And the state’s generosity is fickle, especially in the face of political opposition.
The Gauteng Provincial Government had an opinion about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and it imposed this opinion on civil society by denying access to state property.
Just imagine how bad it would be for South African democracy if the state owned all fixed property and could decide on a whim which opposition and civic formations may utilise that property, how, and when. Sly tyrants can therefore fundamentally change the nature of democracy without changing any of the electoral or political rules of the game. By simply converting private property into state property, democracy would become nothing but a rubber-stamping exercise.
While supporters of African national-socialism might initially get a kick out of this, they would do well to remember that the resulting partisan competition over access to the state’s property portfolio often ends in bloodshed. By removing the pressure valve that is private property, especially in a low-trust society such as ours, conflict is bound to result.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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