Private Property, Socialism, and the United Order

It has been difficult for many, including myself, to disentangle the differences between the United Order, which we expect to voluntary live at some future time, and communism, the political philosophy that has been tried again and again with very poor results.  I dedicate this post to this disentaglement.

In both the United Order and in communism, property rights are vastly different from the private property rules that we currently live by.  In these, property is, to a large extent, communal, gathered by a central governing organization, and redistributed as seen fit.  As a free market advocate, it seems inconceivable that God would endorse such an order, as it has proven disastrous throughout history (see Venezuela for the most recent example).  But once you understand the underlying mechanisms, we can begin to see how the United Order can work for a righteous people, and indeed may be superior to our current property rights system in terms of generating economic output, where communism instead has wildly underperformed the free market system.

The concept of property derives from the scarcity of goods.  If goods were not scarce, if there was such abundance that one's consumption of some portion of it would in no wise endanger the consumption (current and future) of anyone else, then there would be no need for property.  Consider air.  Air is so abundant and fungible (meaning that one puff of air is as good as the next) that there is no need to squabble over it.  We therefore do not assign property rights over air (no one owns the air they breathe).  But when goods become scarce, there must be some way to allocate them while somehow avoiding disputes.  Having some institutionally established and accepted rules are critical for a society to work.  

Historically, property rights have been allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.  Whoever finds the resources owns them.  Weak property rights protections generally lead to the strongest or most cunning to capture and control the most property.  In the modern era, we have found stronger protections that have allowed the hard workers, creative thinkers, and clever strategists to control more property.  Certainly, this system has proven more economically useful to society, as the "spoils go to victor" now means that the person who creates the most value for society gets rewarded, and not the most ruthless and destructive.

Communist proponents, however, point out that the first-come-first-served resource distribution may put resources in the hands of simply the more lucky and not the more worthy.  Actually, they take this further, claiming that all members of society, worthy or not, deserve the same resource allocation.  As such, they abolish private property rights, claiming all goods to be the property of the collective.  It should be clear by now why this doesn't work.  Without the incentives of being able to keep the benefits of one's own efforts, unmotivated workers produce a decreasing amount that is distributed among an increasing number of shirkers.

But the United Order employs a very different property system.  Rather than adopting a collectivist property rights policy, private property rights are maintained.  However, this property is voluntarily given up to the property manager (bishop).  But why??

The first-come-first-served system is fair inasmuch as there is no way to tell whether one obtained a resource by luck or by effort.  But such a system does not fully allocate resources toward their most productive uses.  Instead, the fortunate and lucky are often rewarded, while those that are more capable remain resource constrained and thereby unable to maximize their potential output.  

The United Order aims to resolve this drawback as much as is possible given the uncertainty of human output.  By redistributing resources both according to need and according to ability, appropriate resources are allocated to those who can create the greatest value with those resources.  Consider the parable of the talents.  While it's a good analogy to what we today call 'talents,' Christ was referring to money (talents were a denomination of money back then).  His conclusion of the parable was clear: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Matt 25:29).  He's talking about the United Order, which is an earthly representation of the divine order. The productive will be given stewardship over more resources, while the unproductive will be given fewer.  This way, as a whole, society produces more, and the economy grows even faster than a pure free market could.  But note the conditions necessary for such success to be obtained.  Participants must willingly give up their income.  The property of each, as distributed, must be accepted and respected.  And finally, the distribution allocated by the bishop must be graciously accepted.  Those who are less productive must be sufficiently humble to acknowledge their weakness and accept a reduced stipend.  This, I believe, will be the toughest for us to accept, and is why it didn't work the first time it was tried.  It is also likely why we're not ready for it yet.  We are a proud people, we like to feel competent, that we are better than others.  We have a hard time accepting criticism.  We offend easily.  Only when we can readily acknowledge that our gifts and weaknesses are of God, we can finally accept our place within this order and find successes as never before.

Why God Cannot Change

Most of us are familiar with the scriptures which inform us that God is unchanging.  Moroni goes so far as to explain that, if He changed, "God would cease to be God" (Mormon, 9:19).  But why?

A common explanation, and one that I myself have likely propagated, is that there is a Divine Order, and that He must necessarily follow that order strictly and never deviate so as to maintain His divinity.  Thus change is not allowable, for it would imply a departure from that strict adhesion to the proper order.  Alternatively, it might be supposed that He never changes for us, that constancy is strictly necessary for us to have faith in Him.  How can we put our full trust and reliance in one who is prone to change His mind?  

But change doesn't necessarily imply going back on one's word, or breaking any sort of rules.  Change can simply be different or novel.  Perhaps it might be explained by the fact that He need not change.  As a perfected being, would not any change be imperfection?  But, again, I don't think so.  Individual differences are not imperfections.  I don't believe at all that, once perfected, we will all be characteristically identical. I don't know about you, but my personality has changed over the years, which is not necessarily for better or worse.  Clearly, mortality is meant for development and change, but why would God cease to be God if he became a little more playful (what if His tender mercies became more like pranks every now and then?)?  Certain verses in the Old Testament certainly allude to the idea that God is not always constant (e.g. Jonah 3:10; Amos 7). 

Here's what I think.  God cannot change because of time.  

Consider this little excerpt from former economist Ludwig von Mises' classic, Human Action:

"The notion of change implies the notion of temporal sequence.  A rigid, eternally immutable universe would be out of time....  The concepts of change and of time are inseparably linked together."

Consider, we believe that, for God, all time is before Him.  He is out of time, rather than within time.  He experiences time as an observer, and not as a player.  

What does this mean for change?  Change, as Mises explains, is inextricably tied to the passage of time.  Change means that at one point in time it was this way, and at another point in time it was different. If there is no time, there cannot be change!  Where there is no time, time-based language such as always, never, old, new, different, etc. become meaningless.  It just is.  

Thus for God to change He would have to come into time, and thereby sacrifice the necessarily divine privilege of having all time before Him.