Against overlordship.

• Author: Klein, Daniel B.
• Position: Essay

Libertarians and conservatives say that Obamacare forces you to buy health insurance. Folks of the left are apt to shrug at calling it force. If they engage the matter and object to calling it "force," the objection entails something like the following : "No one is forcing you. If you don't want to buy health insurance, fine, leave the country. No one is stopping you."

The leftist may continue: "There are no natural property fights. Property is a set of permissions, a bundle of rights, determined by the government and delegated to you by the government. When a rearrangement of the bundles would be good, the government should make it. 'Your' property rights are simply whatever permissions result from the process."

Let us enter into this way of thinking, follow through on it, and expose its presuppositions.

Although progressives and social democrats may not be fully conscious of their statements' substance, they are saying something like the following: The state owns the substructure on which topsoil, buildings, and other things sit, and your property is enveloped in a contract with that substructure's collective owner. Simply by being in the United States, you voluntarily agree to all government rules.

In 1911, the influential British author L. T. Hobhouse explained: "The State is vested with a certain overlordship over property in general and a supervisory power over industry in general" ([1911] 1994, 209-10, emphasis added). In 1910, he wrote: "[T]he Progressive 'trend' is ... towards making England the property of the English nation ... by the ... application of the principle of public overlordship" (359, emphasis added).

The definition of overlord is "a person who is lord over another or over other lords," as in "to obey the will of one's sovereign and overlord." (1)

President Barack Obama sees himself as the duly appointed officer of the overlord, which is the collectivity called "the people" or "the state." The polity is one big voluntary club. Its officers are government officials. Its central apparatus consists of government institutions. Its official expression is government law: statutes, regulations, executive orders, and court rulings.

In a commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2010, President Obama explained: "[I]n our democracy, government is us. We, the people ... [applause] ... we, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws, and shape our own destiny."

The state's dominion is the entire polity. As long as you are in the United States, according to the progressives, you have a contractual obligation to abide by the rules. You believe in honoring contracts, don't you?

At the end of the nineteenth century, several factors debilitated liberalism and thrust collectivism forward. A new generation of writers openly declared state overlordship.

Ernest Belfort Bax, a British writer, wrote in his 1891 book Outlooks from the New Standpoint: "Liberty, in any society, is inseparable from property. Good, but this does not say it is inseparable from private property.... No! liberty may be inseparable from property, but nowadays it is assuredly inseparable from the common holding of property by the community" (81).

In his 1894 book The Sphere of the State, the American writer Frank Sargent Hoffman explained: "The natural right to property, therefore, is ultimately resolvable into a State right. The people, as an organic brotherhood, are to decide what disposition is to be made of all property.... The supreme ownership of all the natural sources of property is with the State. The land, the water, and the air, and all that they contain are the common possession of the race. They are under the supreme control of the whole people in their organic capacity as a State" (56-57).

Coming out of an age when liberal formulations were well established, the collectivists of 1890 had to state bluntly the key precept of their thinking.

In the 1882 book The Coming Democracy, British author George Harwood put the matter in this way: "As no man gave the land, so no man can be allowed to...