| A Plan to Get Out of Iraq:
Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property
by Susan Shelley
It was January, and the United States Congress was
grappling with the problem of how to bring freedom to an oppressed people.
In spite of the decisive U.S. military victory, freedom was being undermined
by local leaders whose stubborn adherence to the old ways threatened the
success of the entire enterprise.
The year was 1866. The people were former slaves. The
country was the United States.
After the Civil War, it quickly became apparent that
the Thirteenth Amendment--which abolished slavery in the U.S. and all its
territories--would not be enough to guarantee freedom to the freed slaves.
The defeated Southern states were passing laws designed to keep the former
slaves in a condition as close to slavery as possible. These laws were known
generally as the Black Codes.
In Mississippi, for example, a new law required blacks
to contract to do a year's work, and to forfeit their entire year's wages
if they quit early. Employers had the legal right to recapture any worker
who deserted. The law banned blacks from owning land and even from renting
or leasing except in specific places controlled by local authorities.
When the 39th U.S. Congress convened, the first item
on its agenda was a federal civil rights bill that would abolish the Black
Codes, as well as a constitutional amendment that would echo the bill's
provisions and secure it from reversal by any future Congress.
House Judiciary Chairman James Wilson explained that
the intent of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 was to guarantee to the former
slaves all of Blackstone's fundamental rights. He was referring to Sir William
Blackstone, the 18th-century English legal scholar whose work was a major
influence on the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
Chairman Wilson stood on the floor of the House and
read Blackstone's definition of the absolute rights of individuals. These,
he quoted, "may be reduced to three principal or primary articles":
I. The right of personal security [consisting] in a
person's legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs...
II. ...the personal liberty of individuals... [consisting]
in the power of locomotion, of changing situations or moving one's person
to whatsoever place one's own inclination may direct, without imprisonment,
or restraint, unless by due course of law...
III. The third absolute right, inherent in every
Englishman...of property: which consists in the free use, enjoyment and disposal
of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by
the laws of the land.
What does this tell us about Iraq?
It tells us that if the Iraqi people had a nickel for
every time President Bush has said "The oil belongs to the Iraqi people,"
we'd be on the right track.
Blackstone tells us that property--not public schools
or health care services or even freedom of speech--is the essential foundation
of freedom. The missing link to freedom in Iraq is private property.
Currently, the oil reserves and the oil industry in
Iraq are state-owned enterprises. That means the group or sect or tribe that
controls the government controls virtually all the wealth of the
country.
In such a situation, what would you call people who
fight savagely for power, swearing blood loyalty to their leader, using every
tactic of brutality to hold down or wipe out rival groups?
You might call them perfectly rational.
After all, when the government owns the major industries
of the country, an individual who is part of a group that is out of power
can expect to struggle for economic survival, possibly for the rest of his
life. It will not win hearts and minds to promise another election soon.
The Iraqis will remember that Saddam Hussein was once re-elected with a one
hundred percent turnout and one hundred percent of the vote.
For the individuals in the group that is in power,
the news is not much better. They can expect financial security for themselves
and their family members only as long as their loyalty to the leader is not
in question. One wrong move, which is to say, one word or action that conflicts
with the will of the government, and starvation could be the least of their
problems.
In an economic system like that, of what use are individual
rights? How does freedom have any meaning for people whose economic survival
depends on unquestioned loyalty to the ruling party, to say nothing of what
they must do to make sure their party is ruling?
State ownership of Iraq's wealth is a formula for eternal
violence.
What would happen if the Iraqi oil reserves and the
oil industry were privatized? Suppose for a moment that the state-owned
enterprise was converted through the Mother of All IPOs into a shareholder-owned
enterprise, with a majority of the shares guaranteed to be held by Iraqi
citizens, and some foreign investment allowed in so that capital flows into
the country.
Suppose the compensation package for Iraqi police officers
and army recruits and teachers included both a salary and a private investment
account into which shares of Iraqi Oil Incorporated would be deposited.
Suppose the oil really did belong to the Iraqi
people.
It is not hard to imagine their reaction the next time
some band of thugs blows up a pipeline or takes down the telephone system.
Owners raise holy hell, not holy war.
People who own property need a system of government
that protects individual rights. Forty years of public school education will
not teach the love of freedom as effectively as a dividend check deposited
into a secure bank account.
The key is to spread the ownership of the oil industry
widely throughout the population, to make the barriers to entry very low
so that everyone can buy some shares, to provide access to private consumer
financial services that will permit men and women as individuals to acquire
property and perhaps eventually to become wealthy. The Iraqi people will
control their own economic futures and there will be no need to risk life
and limb to further the ambitions of a cleric or a thug.
The lethal mistake is to think that privatization must
wait for political stability. Privatization is the only route to political
stability.
May 22, 2004
© Copyright 2004 by Susan
Shelley
Source Notes:
On Mississippi's Black Code: Charles
Fairman, History of the Supreme Court of the United States, Volume VI,
Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864-88, Part One pp. 112-114 (New York,
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1971).
On the intention of the 39th Congress
to reverse the Black Codes with a civil rights bill and a constitutional
amendment: Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation
of the Fourteenth Amendment, Second Edition [paperback] pp. 32-33
(Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1997).
On Blackstone's Fundamental Rights
and the debate over the Civil Rights Bill of 1866: William Blackstone,
Commentaries on the Laws of England pp. 129, 134, 138 (1765-1769),
cited in Berger, Government by Judiciary pp. 30-31 (1997); see also
Raoul Berger, The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights p. 110
(Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).
On the proven and inevitable
incompatibility of state ownership with freedom: Isabel Paterson, The
God of the Machine (New York, Putnam, 1943).
For complete notes on the debate over
the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, please see the
appendix to The 37th Amendment, online at:
Or pick up the new and expanded
eBook edition at:
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