Ours. Peter Barnes
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Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the continued love and support of my partner, Cornelia Durrant.
Others who inspired me with ideas and feedback include Marcellus Andrews, William Arnone, Joseph Blasi, David Bollier, Matthew Bruenig, Robert Costanza, Gus diZerega, Layla Forrest-White, Natalie Foster, Robert Friedman, John Fullerton, John Garn, Sam Hammond, Robert Hockett, Alex Howlett, Chris Hughes, Edward Kirshner, George Lakoff, Mary Lehmann, Wendy McLaughlin, Christopher Mackin, Ioana Marinescu, David Morris, Griffin Murphy, Janelle Orsi, George Owers, Lenore Paladino, Richard Parker, Brent Ranalli, Mike Sandler, Scott Santens, Jeremy Sherman, Fraser Murison Smith, Gus Speth, Guy Standing, Marshall Steinbaum, Steve Randy Waldman, Karl Widerquist, and David Sloan Wilson. In addition, I am grateful to Tom White and the Vedanta Society of Northern California for providing me with beautiful spaces to think and write.
I am also deeply indebted to a long line of original thinkers, including Thomas Paine, Henry George, John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Pigou, James Meade, E. F. Schumacher, Louis Kelso, Herman Daly, and James Lovelock. And special thanks to James Boyce for years of friendship and intellectual collaboration.
Finally, as always, I am deeply grateful to my extended family: Zachary Barnes Miller, Eli Barnes, Leyna Bernstein, Pam Miller, Valerie Barnes Jordan, and Jess Almendarez.
Foreword
James K. Boyce
Ours introduces a transformative idea whose time is coming: universal property.
Universal property is a birthright belonging equally to all. It is individual, it is inalienable, and it is perfectly egalitarian. Unlike private property, universal property cannot be bought and sold, owned by corporations, or concentrated in a few hands. Unlike state property, income derived from the use of universal property flows not to governments but directly to the people themselves.
As Peter Barnes explains in this lucidly written book, universal property can help address some of the gravest failures in the functioning of markets and governments alike: above all, the growth of extreme inequalities of wealth and income and the destabilization of the Earth’s climate by rampant carbon emissions. We urgently need innovative solutions that will reduce inequality without increasing carbon emissions, and reduce carbon emissions without increasing inequality.
In making the case for universal property, Barnes breaks from the well-worn state-versus-market divide that has delimited conventional political discourse in the past two centuries. He offers a fresh vision for the twenty-first century that draws on the pioneering works of earlier writers like Thomas Paine and Henry George, who also defied the ideological boxes that today we call “left” and “right.”
At a time when inequality has metastasized – when twenty-five men in the world own more wealth than the bottom 4.5 billion – it is crucial that we create a more level playing field for all. Universal property is one way to move in this direction.
At a time when climate destabilization poses grave risks to millions of people here and now, and even graver risks to future generations, it is crucial to curtail the amount of fossil carbon we dump into the air, while at the same time protecting the real incomes of working families from increases in the prices of energy. Treating the limited capacity of the biosphere to absorb emissions as universal property is one way to do this.
At a time when many nations are sharply polarized along lines of race, ethnicity, class, and conflicting partisan loyalties, it is crucial to find shared interests and values that can help to unite us. Universal property is one way to build this common ground.
Offering a bold path to a more equitable, sustainable, and sane society, Ours will appeal to a readership as wide and diverse as the ownership of universal property itself.
Author’s Note
Keep your eyes on the stars but your feet on the ground.
Theodore Roosevelt
Over the decades I’ve studied our economy from inside and out. As a journalist, I often wrote about it from the outside. Later, I co-founded businesses that probed the limits of capitalism from within. One was a worker-owned cooperative that installed solar heating systems in the 1970s. Another was a socially screened money-market fund called Working Assets, and a third was a progressive phone company called Credo Mobile.
In all these ventures, profit was a goal but not my primary one. My primary goal was to see whether, and by how much, businesses could shift, in a positive way, the behavior of our larger economy. Could they model good corporate behaviour that would then be emulated? Could they challenge the dominant algorithm of corporations, maximize return to shareholders? Could they non-trivially alter the flow of money through our economy?
Sadly, after twenty years, my conclusion was that, while socially minded companies can do good things, they can’t change our economy by much; they are swimming against a tide that is too strong. What we need is not a few companies voluntarily behaving slightly better, but a system that makes all companies behave a lot better, whether intentionally or not. But how, very practically, could such a system be designed and installed?
More broadly, the need to repair or replace capitalism is now indisputable. This is not just because of the financial meltdown of 2008 or the Covid collapse of 2020. It is first and foremost because of markets’ built-in systemic flaws – ever-widening inequality and disruption of nature. Those trajectories cannot continue. They must be turned in their opposite directions – toward greater equality and alignment with nature. But again, the practical question is how.
Ruminating on these questions, I came to the realization that something important is missing from markets. Modern humans are heirs to a vast trove of naturally and socially created wealth. This wealth legitimately belongs to all of us together and equally. It also comes with a duty to be preserved, if not enhanced, for future generations. The problem – and it’s a huge one – is that this co-inherited cornucopia is simultaneously ignored, stolen, and destroyed by markets as structured today.
This is more than an intellectual failure; it is a real-world failure with vast social and planetary consequences. But the point of this book is that it can be fixed. If, through property rights, we recognize co-inherited wealth as assets to be preserved and beneficially owned by all persons equally, we could transform markets, societies, and our planet simultaneously. Instead of destroying nature, markets would protect it; instead of widening inequality, markets would reduce it. Yes, markets would do those things. And that would change everything.
With this realization in mind, I began putting together a mental model of an economy that retains the dynamism and efficiency of markets, but adds a new kind of property rights for large chunks of our co-inherited wealth. In this model, we would each inherit equal non-transferable shares of that co-inherited wealth and surrender them when we die. We would also co-inherit a legal obligation, administered by trustees, to preserve our