| | Issues still remaining to be dealt with include eminent domain - one person or a group of persons using the fact that they are the last holdouts for an expensive road project to leverage land prices, rights to passage, uniform fees, etc. I don't understand this objection. Why shouldn't they have a right not to sell? It's their property. The implicit premise of your objection is that they are somehow obligated to sell for the sake of the common good, and that their right to hold out in order to "leverage" land prices interferes with their discharge of that "obligation." Under the absolutist concept of property rights derived from the Divine Right of Kings, to which, paradoxically, most Objectivists seem to subscribe, there is no easy solution. Check your premises! If one believes in individual rights, there is no "problem" that requires a solution. Once the property has been transferred to the road owners, then they can do what they will with it, including barring use (or charging exorbitant fees) by personal enemies, or people of the wrong religion, or skin color. This happened all over the deep South for about a century with regard to businesses such as retail stores and restaurants. You could make the same argument against all other privately owned and operated goods and services. The answer is that it's not in the owner's economic self-interest to behave in this arbitrary a manner.
Consider the railroads in the deep South, which were segregated by law, not by the railroads themselves, which opposed racial segregation. For example, railroad companies in Louisiana opposed the state's separate but equal accommodations law and rarely enforced it. In fact, in 1896, the Louisiana and Nashville Railroad agreed to assist in a test case challenging the law. The case, that of Plessy v. Ferguson, concerned an incident in which Homer Adolph Plessy, who was one-eighth black, bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway, and choose a seat reserved for whites. The case went to the Supreme Court which upheld the separate but equal law by ruling that it did not violate the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.
With the 14th Amendment now largely bereft of authority, Southern states could impose segregation virtually at will. Nevertheless, segregationist laws were as unpopular with the streetcar companies in other states as with those in Louisiana. As economic historian Jennifer Roback notes, opposition by the companies to separate seating laws spanned the entire geographic range of the South, including Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and Texas.
In 1891, five years before Plessy v. Ferguson, Georgia had passed a law requiring segregation on all railroads and streetcars within the state, but the law was ignored by the Augusta Railway and Electric Company until 1898 when the company was finally pressured into enforcing it.
There was similar opposition to segregated streetcars in Savannah, Georgia, where the City had ignored the state law for 15 years, until 1906. At that time, the following report appeared in the Atlanta Journal:
"The Savannah Electric Company of this city is now facing a boycott from the negroes (sic) on account of the putting into effect here yesterday of the law providing for the separation of the whites and blacks on streetcars. The action on the part of the company was not voluntary. The city council...passed a city ordinance forcing the company to separate the races on the cars." (Emphasis added)
In Houston, Texas, an ordinance was passed in 1903 requiring segregated streetcars, but a similar black boycott ensued, and a year later, the company petitioned for a change in the law. In Jacksonville, Florida, segregation was mandated in 1901, but the Jacksonville Street Railway Company did not enforce it until 1905, and only after political pressure was brought to bear. Montgomery, Alabama passed a municipal ordinance in 1900 requiring segregated streetcars. Two years later, after a black boycott caused a "25 to 47% loss of revenue", the streetcars were desegregated. Mobile, Alabama passed a segregation ordinance in 1902 which the Mobile Light and Railroad Company refused to enforce until its conductors were arrested for noncompliance. Tennessee passed a law in 1903 segregating streetcars, over the bitter opposition of the Memphis Street Railway which refused to enforce it. After the company was arrested, it challenged the law, and got the state courts to declare it unconstitutional.
Although popular demand had already caused railway companies to set aside segregated sections for smokers and non-smokers, there was no such demand for racially segregated sections, even by the white passengers. For that, it took a government mandate, which the white streetcar companies vigorously opposed, even to the point of civil disobedience.
Such opposition by the Southern streetcar companies to segregated streetcars is a little known fact -- even to economic historians. The only organized opposition to segregated public conveyances that most people are aware of is the black boycott sparked by Rosa Parks' celebrated refusal to sit in the back of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Note that there were competing restaurants. Thus, a white owner could open the door to blacks, at the risk of retaliation, including violence. However, often there were not competing restrooms or water fountains. That's because these segregated facilities were mandated by law. They had to be; otherwise the profit motive would have caused businesses to integrate voluntarily. For example, in 1922, the South Carolina Criminal Code §45 included the following provision:
"That it shall be unlawful for any person, firm or corporation engaged in the business of cottons textile manufacturing in this State to allow or permit operatives, help and labor of different races to labor and work together within the same room, or to use the same doors of entrance and exit at the same time, or . . . to use the same stairway and windows at the same time, or to use at any time the same lavoratories, toilets, drinking water buckets, pails, cups, dippers or glasses."
Installing separate facilities for blacks and whites, such as additional restrooms and water fountains, increases the cost of doing business and is therefore uneconomic. Moreover, Southern bureaucrats could, and often would coerce employers into racist hiring practices by threatening to deny them zoning permits or to close them down on the pretext of finding health and building code violations. And as if that weren't enough, there was the omnipresent threat of "nightriders" -- the Ku Klux Klan vandals and terrorists -- who would trash or torch any non-compliant business or establishment, while local authorities simply looked the other way.
Even in the heavily racist South, private businesses wouldn't have installed segregated facilities voluntarily. For that, it took the threat of force and violence, both by the government and by racist vigilantes. Imagine that you are black in a town connected to other towns via highways that forbid passage on non-motorized vehicles, such as a bicycle, and the only bus line is white only. You are effectively imprisoned. Now imagine that the owners of all or enough of the roads that happen to run through your neighborhood have effectively encircled your residence or neighborhood, such that you can no longer walk from one side of the road to the other - or at least without paying a substantial fee for use of the crosswalk. These and innumerable other conflicts are direct reflections of a faulty concept of property to begin with. Nonsense. That would never happen, especially in this day and age! It is a paranoid fantasy that is completely unrealistic. The same paranoia could be entertained under any other social system. Whoever is in charge of enforcing the laws could conceivably be bribed, could be corrupt and unscrupulous, etc. But what is true of any social system cannot be an objection to any social system. What is needed is a system that minimizes the incentives for that kind of arbitrary and unjust behavior. Capitalism and the absolutism of property rights does that better than any alternative. The reason the Divine Right model of property rights has worked, more or less, to date, is that it was employed in a context in which there was plenty of commons available and relatively few serious interactions between property uses. Thus, one person's claim to absolute ownership to a physical piece of land - probably understood to be a conic section to the center of the Earth - had little impact. A conic section to the center of the earth is not a proper concept of land rights. If the earth beneath of one's property can be mined without disturbing one's use of the property, there can be no objection to it. One does not automatically own the ground beneath one's property down to the very center of the earth. That's ridiculous! And to refer to the Objectivist concept of property as the "Divine Right" concept is equally ridiculous! Then, on space colony Earth, no physical "property" would be seen as absolute, yet the strictures and contracts applying to property rights could themselves be as objective as anything coming from the Divine Right concept.
Under this Common Law view of property, every property would embody constraints that derived from its source in the commons. Our free market road builder, for example, could not build roads that prevented people from following a passage from A to B that they had used previously. Instead, a legal, title mechanism or something similar would require that proper compensation and alternative routes be provided. True, but this does not gainsay the absolutism of property rights. Implicit in one's passage from A to B is the right to go from B to A. It's an implied contract or agreement. If I pay you a welcomed visit at your home, you cannot then deny me the right to leave, on the grounds that you own your own home and can therefore regulate the behavior of anyone on your property. That would be a perversion of the very concept of property rights. The general principle for morally valid property titles is that the property may not be stolen, in part or in whole. If it was stolen, then the ownership resides with the original owners, not the thief nor someone the thief has transferred the property to. The ownership starts with the commons and moves toward private ownership as people find uses that require exclusivity and are willing to pay the owners of the commons - everyone - for the right to restrict their usage. Ownership does not start with the commons. This is a collectivist view of property rights, if I ever heard one. Ownership starts with individual rights.
- Bill
|
|
