Based on what must have been the never-fail cinematic sensibilities of Reihan Salam, my wife and I watched Thomas McCarthy’s The Station Agent last night, and we really enjoyed it and are happy to give it a very enthusiastic recommendation of our own. But I don’t want to talk about movies, or dwarfs, or trains, or even Cuban hot dog vendors – I want to talk about private property and industrial capitalism.
One thing that the film’s main character likes to do is what train enthusiasts apparently call “walking the right of way” – basically, it’s just walking down the train tracks, but the phrase originates from the (non-fictional, so far as I know*) historical practice of government seizure of private land in order to lay down railroad tracks: the railroad industry and its clients, it was argued, deserved the right of way. (Can’t let those property rights get in the way of progress, you know?) Anyway, it’s a throwaway line in a small part of the film, but it made me wonder.
Are the Reason libertarians and others who unfailingly trumpet the goods of industrial capitalism and economies of scale aware of the very real irony in their presently – and properly, I think – unremitting defenses of property owners against eminent domain seizures and the like? Do they – or do we, I suppose – appreciate the extent to which the history of America is the history not only of the extermination of the native populations, the enslavement of blacks, and the exploitation of child factory workers, but also the state-sponsored and -mandated dispossession of the private lands of citizen property owners in the name of “progress” and economic “growth”? (And cf. Kevin Carson on peasants “forced to abandon subsistence farming, driven off the land by feudal landed oligarchs in collusion with agribusiness interests”.) Is it possible honestly and without self-delusion to cheer the goods of the industrial economy and the “free” market without facing up to the illiberal, anticapitalist, and downright statist interventions that got us here?
My purpose here is not – surely not – to dredge up a wave of libertarian guilt, nor is it to impugn the market economy or the genuine goods that have been brought to us by industrial capitalism, globalization, and economies of scale. Rather, it is simply to point out that the respective goods of freedom and economic growth are very often in tension with one another, and it is important to be clear on where we stand. Recognizing these chapters in our history for what they are – embarrassing, immoral, and by no means exceptional attempts to undermine liberty in the name of Something Greater – is a crucial step toward being more clear-headed about the similar struggles we face today. I know where I come down now, and I would certainly like to believe that, growth be damned, I would have stood side-by-side, shotguns a-blazin’, with any sufficiently contrarian landowner unlucky enough to have found himself in the path of Big Railroad a century and a half ago. Thinking this, while still thinking that the story of the American economy is a story of success in any halfway value-laden sense, is a bit of an awkward position to be in.
* Please do let me know if I’ve been duped.
Filed under: economics, government/law, libertarianism, transportation
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Surely, John, running people off of the land their families have worked for decades and confiscating property for the railroads (and interstates!) is a more than justifiable cost of moving forward.
That’s right, Nathan – of course it is! Did I give any sense that I thought otherwise? (*Looking over my shoulder to check for the Stasi.*)
It’s a bit troubling to realize that, would the trains start running again back home (something that I would not at all oppose), my father and grandfather likely could be compelled to give up railroad right-of-way land, strangled from the property once before, returned to my family after the tracks were pulled.
Troubling indeed. At one point I thought about trying to connect this issue to the controversy over turning US31 in Indiana into a limited-access interstate highway between South Bend and Indianapolis – a measure which, as I seem to recall, was going to leave several farmers along the way landlocked. Do you remember this from your days at ND? Do you remember how it turned out? I tried to Google a while back but couldn’t turn anything up.
Oh, I remember it. My home town is only about sixty miles from Notre Dame, so I continued to hear about it. Thus far, though, little has really happened. Eventually, I think, something will, and US 31-corridor farmers, well, they’ll just have to make sacrifices for the “greater good.”
I’ve actually seen some libertarians (of sorts) justify the Enclosures on the basis of their beneficial results, in language that sounds quite similar to that of those in favor of condemning property for economic development. Either that, or they use the bastard-Coasean argument that Enclosures and other expropriations don’t matter, because the land ends up in the “most efficient hands” one way or the other.
Those sorts being capitalists, whose “libertarianism” ends when government intervention benefits the capitalist class?
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