What if It's Worse than We Thought?

David Brin, the social scientist and science fiction author turned weblogger, has been posting a series of well-informed and well-articulated thoughts about what the Obama administration might consider tackling in its first months. He floated the idea of a "Truth and Reconciliation" commission earlier this month, and followed it up today with a provocative post on the possibility that the last eight years represented something more malicious than deliberate incompetence.

Along the way, Brin serves up a historical reminder of a simple action taken in 1775 that directed American society along a distinctly different course than its European counterparts. That action, simply put, was state laws managing the redistribution of wealth:

At around the time of the 1775 uprising that sparked the American Revolution, vast sections (up to half) of the colonies of Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were owned by individual families under charters granted by the British crown. The great landlords were mostly royal cronies - personal friends of the king - who never even visited their vast new fiefs. (Such cronyism was cited by Adam Smith as the great destroyer of free markets, rather than socialism, which he considered a much less worrisme threat.)

How did that earlier generation of Founders solve the problem? Certainly seizure of some Tory assets had a great deal to do with the breakup of those grossly unfair, unearned estates -- and such things might happen again, if the People must rise up against a new feudalism. Still, mass confiscation is a bludgeon, at-best unreliable. Often, it only leads to a new class of meddling masters, even worse than those who came before.
 
Fortunately the main rebalancing technique that was used, just after the revolution was far gentler and less socialistic. Across the 1780s and 1790s, many states passed laws against “primogeniture"... the automatic inheritance of all real property and titles by the eldest son.  

That was it.  Simple.  But it sufficed.

Recall that primogeniture had been a strong tradition, that let aristocratic wealth and power remain concentrated in a few families.  Hence, for a generation, American society (through consensus political action) stepped in to severely limit a landowner's right to decide which of his children would receive what. Instead, for a while, the law demanded equal distribution among all offspring.

It sounds meddlesome and anathema to libertarian principles. Yet, without such innovations, America would have started as a true feudal-oligarchy. But thanks to anti-primogeniture laws, within two generations all the remaining giant estates had broken down to fair economic units, without much actual confiscation, by simple division of inheritance among large families.

Brin posits that the current testing of our system of capital might force some similar creativity in the months and years to come -- and suggests we consider (again) taking a different course than our European cousins.