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I've come to the conclusion that there are two essential commodities in any society. One is Property-- land, financial capital, social connections, reputation. The other is Energy-- talent, ambition, willingness to work hard, vision. Most social and class tensions are centered on the exchange rate between these two, which has historically favored Property except in times of crisis. The reason societies have typically been pro-Property comes from religious superstition; consider that the concept of private land ownership emerged out of a perversion of ancestor veneration; "<dead chieftain> will rape your shit for breakfast in the afterlife if you don't honor his descendant's claim to this land". Eventually, these ancestors became legends or gods and those who claimed ancestry became the priests, and the rest (literally) is history. [Note: I'm not saying that all religion was born this way, but only that the desire to corrupt or abuse the religious impulse is as old as dirt.] If you take a person's percentile-ranking on Property vs. Energy and compare the two, it determines what that person's politics will be-- not in a left/right sense, but in terms of how they view certain social justice questions. People who are Property-heavy (i.e. have a lot of connections and capital but low talent) tend to resist change and want to keep doors closed. People who have more Energy than Property want to shatter barriers and dynamite the doors keeping them out. The reason it doesn't map easily to left/right politics is that both corporations and government can be corrupted to protect the entrenched (i.e. undeserving, Property-heavy people) so there are a lot of pro-Property types who are superficially liberal. Most HN-types and entrepreneurs, even the libertarians, tend to be pro-Energy. A source of our continuing frustration is that the world is still run (look at who actually makes major funding decisions, a few top incubators aside) by extremely connected people who have lots of Proprety and little Energy/talent. There's another way to view this, which is more fundamental and equally correct. Property equals Past. Energy equals Future. Sadly, people tend to have more faith in an established (but rapidly becoming irrelevant) past than in an uncertain future. |
The fundamental dichotomy is: Property is by nature excludable, Energy by nature must be applied to something (usually either Property or the Commons) to do any work.
Markets run on excludability. If you can't fence something off and appropriate it as your own, you can't trade it, because someone else can just take it from you.
Here's a theorem: the more excludable something is, the more accurately markets value it. This is why Commons Goods and Public Goods are dramatically undervalued in a market system: they're non-excludable. Anyone can breathe the air or attend public schools, but someone has to keep the air clean and provide public schools.
Beyond this, I recommend reading Henry George's Progress and Poverty, as well as Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
But what it comes to is that in the great struggle between Capital and Labor, or Property and Energy, capital is by nature very excludable, while Labor (lacking organization into a guild or union) is not very excludable (workers cannot stop the capitalist from working for himself, even if only temporarily). Capital will thus be valued more on free markets than Labor, in general.
This actually maps exactly onto left-right politics, outside the United States. In most of the world, the Right represents Property/Capital and the Left represents Labor/Energy, and socioeconomic politics consists of trying to form a workable arrangement between the two.