Recently a friend of mine told me about something he’d seen on television. The show was about how rich kids kill people on the roads. In particular, there was a story about a rich kid who hit someone and bought off the victim’s relatives for 4,000 hryvnias.
After lamenting the fate of the poor fellow, we—in true Ukrainian fashion—moved on to the question: “So what do we do?” And we concluded that the only solution is to legalize this state of affairs, following the actual “table of ranks.” That is, if someone crushes a person—he pays the victim’s relatives 4,000 hryvnias. If he crushes a guy—you pay 10,000; a respected person—50,000, and so on, all the way to the top. In such a system, a court and “law,” if needed at all, serve only to record the fact of the collision, the victim’s death, and to process the payment from the culprit. Everything else happens automatically, according to the price list.
And indeed, if you think about it, such a system—which existed in practically all early codes of the most diverse peoples—is far more humane than what we have now. After all, if we take an extreme case, like Ukraine, today a rich kid who hits someone gets off with a slap on the wrist or a bribe, and even if he does go to prison, what good is that? Why should the victim’s family also have to support the rich kid in prison, where he’ll most likely emerge an even bigger scoundrel?
And most importantly, when implementing this simple plan, mechanisms of social self-regulation kick in. Now people and rich kids become equal, despite the difference in the sums at which their lives are valued. Now it becomes clear how to deal with rich kids. For example, you can go to the Verkhovna Rada and wave a thick stack of bills in the hallways. Without saying anything, just smiling happily and winking at passing deputies. Or place an advertisement in the newspaper: “Collecting for Ivan Ivanovich Petrenko. Account number such and such.” Or organize a charity concert, all proceeds from which will go to Mykola Trokhymovych Pydlabuzhnyi. Or, say, you can wait for rich kids near the exit from a restaurant, then hastily start your car and meaningfully honk the horn. Now imagine the life of an unfortunate rich kid haunted at night by the brave Vasyl Cherevychkyn in his “Zhiguli” or an immortal grandfather in a “Zaporozhets” rattling bags of change in the trunk. Willingly or not, you’ll have to change something about your usual way of life and at least become more careful on the roads.
Note that in our thought experiment no one “fought corruption,” no revolutions or reforms were carried out, and yet everything suddenly changed radically. And the reason for this is property rights, or rather, certainty regarding property rights. If you look closely at the modern legal system, you will see that it is no longer a means of regulating legal relations between subjects. More often than not, this system actually implies that people are the property of the state. It regulates our behavior the way parents regulate the behavior of children, punishing deviations from “correct” behavior—clearly visible in legislation regulating victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, pornography, copyright, etc.), in “juvenile justice,” in the prohibition of smoking and alcohol. The state generally views men as cannon fodder that can be sent to death in some war at any moment. In general, property rights to oneself are not clearly defined in this system. And this means that whoever is closer to the state has a chance, “in case of something,” to receive, so to speak, greater legal capacity than whoever is farther from the state. Rich kids, even if they themselves are not officials, have “open access” to the state. Translating this circumstance into the language of property rights, one can say that they possess property rights to themselves, but you do not.
In a system with a price list, everything looks different. The state here is no longer the owner of your body. It effectively plays the role of a notary. The price list is the recognition of everyone’s property right to their own body, as listed in it; it establishes legal relations between participants, not between the state and everyone else.
Of course, my example is quite grotesque, but if we’re talking about real changes and not their imitation, the main direction is certainty regarding property rights. This certainty always causes positive consequences that go far beyond the changes undertaken. Look—we merely “introduced” in our minds a price list for buying one’s way out of murders on the roads, and as a result, violent corruption practically disappeared, pressure on the economy weakened, economic growth began, unemployment decreased, and so on. This thought experiment is understandable because most of those who read this note are well-versed in the issue at hand. But the same applies to property rights in any other sphere. And if we cannot immediately predict what specific consequences the legalization of property rights and certainty regarding them will bring, it is not because these consequences do not exist, but because we are incompetent in this matter.