Pamphlet sur le contrat social et la redistribution

[A.B.]

Excellent et reminiscent de Bastiat !

Anthony de Jasay

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Jasaydog.html

Did you know that your dog owns your house, or rather some portion of it? If this is not immediately obvious to you, you will find it helpful to consider some aspects of the ethics and economics of redistribution.

Your dog is alert, plucky and a fearsome guardian of your property. For all we know, without his services, you would have been burgled over and over again. Your belongings would be depleted and the utility you derived from your home would be much reduced. The difference between the actual value of your home and its unguarded value is the contribution of your dog, and so is the difference between the respective utilities or satisfactions you derive from it. We do not know the exact figure, but the main thing is that there is one.

More thought is needed fully to unravel the question of who owns your house, and indeed the question of who owns anything. If there were no fire brigade, the whole street might have burned down and your house would no longer stand. The fire brigade has contributed something to its value, and some figure ought to be put against their name. The utilities should not be forgotten, for how would you like to live in a house without running water, electricity and so forth? Some tentative numbers had better be credited to them. Surely, however, you cannot just ignore the builder who erected the house, the lumberman, the brick factory, the cement works and all the other suppliers without whom the builder could not have erected it. They too must have their contribution recognized, even if it must be done in a rough-and ready fashion.

Is it right, though, to stop at this primary level of contributions?—should we not go beyond the cement works to the builder who built the kiln, the gas pipeline that feeds the fire , the workers who keep the process going? Tracing the ever more distant contributions at level after level, we get a manifold that is as complex as we care to make it, with a correspondingly complex jumble of numbers that purport to place rough-and-ready values on the contributions. We can count them moving sideways as well as backwards as far as the mind can reach, starting with that of your dog and ending (if you finally lose patience and decide to stop there) with the Founding Fathers or Christopher Columbus.

At this point, you give up and say that your house, and any other holdings you thought you owned, really belong to society as a whole, and so do the holdings of everyone else. Everybody has a rightful stake in your holdings and you have a rightful stake in everybody else's holdings. Society, that is "we" are alone entitled to decide how big everybody's stake ought to be. "We" are the rightful owners of everything, the masters of "our" universe. As such, "we" are entitled to take from Peter and give to Paul, as well as to regulate what Peter and Paul are allowed to do in matters of production, commerce and consumption.

A less thorough-going version of this argument, instead of crediting everyone for their direct and indirect contributions to the creation of everything of value, simply states that the security of tenure of all property depends on society maintaining public order. Without it, there would be "jungle law," and no one could enjoy their holdings. It follows that it is really society which lets you have them on a grace and favour basis. Society, that is "we," can revoke such grace and favour partly or wholly. Property can be re-allocated between grace-and-favour holders as "we" see fit in the public interest, promoting efficiency, equality or some judicious mix of both.

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Je me fendrai peut-être d'une traduction si je trouve le temps.

Je poste dans action car c'est typiquement le genre d'e-mail qui peut circuler, ou de texte qu'on peut faire lire.

[h16]

L'extrait que tu postes est intéressant, mais il aurait fallu y ajouter le démontage que l'auteur fait du raisonnement, ou, tout du moins, un petit extrait. Je le fais ici :

All contributions of others to the building of your house have been paid for at each link in the chain of production. All current contributions to its maintenance and security are likewise being paid for. Value has been and is being given for value received, even though the "value" is not always money and goods, but may sometimes be affection, loyalty or the discharge of duty. In the exchange relation, a giver is also a recipient, and of course vice versa.