Some items are associated with human rights and therefore need to be available to the general public. Since they are rights, the responsibility for providing such goods is shared between States, families, companies, etc.
In an ideal situation, where all UN objectives are met, no one would be excluded from accessing those rights. But we know that currently in the world there are billions of people who are excluded from this access.
The fact that there is already technical conditions to change this situation and make sure that everyone has access to the basic rights reveals that the nucleus of the problem is normative.
In other words, we need to change some of the ideas that guide global production.
The main source of the exclusion, and economic inequality, around the world is said to be the lack of sufficient distributive justice.
However, I want to access a moment before this kind of justice.
What should be the main source of primary goods?
If there are primary goods that the State has a duty to make available (either directly or indirectly), it must have the ability to guide the production of such goods. This is the question faced by Professor Lucas Stanczky, from Harvard, in the text Productive Justice.
Stanczyk suggests that the State has the means to justifiably determine the production of primary goods. Once the State build up the criteria to prevent the unfair distribution of the burden of compulsory labor, it can be used as a mean of producing the primary goods.
The basis of the author's argument is that, if its said that the State does not unfairly violate the basic liberties of the individuals through the imposition of compulsory labor in cases of external threat, the same can be applied to fight internal threats like extreme poverty.
Even if it immediately seems an extreme measure, compulsory work already exists in the form of restrictions on the emigration of recent graduates in strategic areas of federal universities, for example.
However, such argument does not end the problem since the exclusion continues to be a reality. Stanczyk's text warns us that before discussing the fair allocation of produced primary goods, it is important to define the criterion of fairness within its production.
In the absence of a justice criteria that helps us to evaluate productive arrangements, when discussing the distribution of goods, we'll end up hostage to premises such as scarcity.
Such premise may even be useful while debating the allocation of luxury goods or rare assets, for example, but when it comes to primary goods, such a premise cannot receive a kind of license against the fact that humanity (as a whole) already produces enough to feed everyone.
There is no scarcity of primary goods.
Let's take Brazil, for example, while being one of the largest food producers in the world, we're also the home of millions of families whose children faint from hunger in schools due to lack of nutrients.
Do the poor in Brazil does not contribute to the surplus production that makes our country a farm that feeds the whole world?
In concrete terms, discussing justice in production means reviewing, in the light of an ethical-normative criteria, how the burden of compulsory labor and production incentives are distributed.
If we do not discuss fairness in production, the debate about distributive justice will only produce palliative measures that will always be too late and too expensive, as it has been until now.
If the average Brazilian is not benefiting from the current productive arrangement, it is necessary that he be given the freedom to choose his own model based on his own premises.
We call such freedom, to choose between different productive arrangements, a productive freedom.
What the State cannot do, whether from a libertarian, classical liberal or even socialist perspective, is to impose on the producer-worker a productive arrangement that limits his potential and excludes him from enjoying the value of his work.
Productive Freedom
If productive justice concerns the conditions in which the social product is constituted, productive freedom concerns the space of choice available to individuals and communities to define the form and conditions of their contribution to the social product.
The allocation of such goods, then, concerns distributive justice.
As Frank Cunningham reminds us in the text Market Economies and Market Societies, while the market economy is efficient in allocating goods, a market society can be predatory in relation to any activity that is not industrial or financial.
The limit of productive freedom, regarding the decision on the value of your product, is found within the organic demand for the product. Hence, productive freedom is never absolute, since its limits are constituted in economic interactions.
The arbitrary violation of such freedom can arise from two sources: State abuse and structural inequalities. How to distinguish the typical action of the State and the natural market dispute in the private sector from the abuses of both parties is a issue on productive justice.
If productive justice concerns the origin of primary goods and productive freedom concerns the range of choice that each subject and community has over its production, the meeting between the two occurs in the hypothetical ideal situation.
In it, the conditions of supply of a primary good are constituted by discarding both the exclusion of access to some part of the population and the violent imposition of predatory productive arrangements.
In concrete terms, the normative suggestion we offer is that the State and Market have a responsibility to ensure that experimentalism, related to productive arrangements is not an exclusively luxury of financial elites.
Simply put: we must first consolidate a form of productive justice that prioritizes the discretion of those who produce, and then a form of freedom that allows producers to experiment with alternative productive arrangements.
Thus, we believe that the State will reduce the cost of managing the extreme poverty that arises from the current production arrangements.
Those arrangements do not guarantee productive freedom neither are efficient in making primary goods available to the entire population.
Instead of remedying mediocrity, we'll finally being able release the potential for innovation repressed by inequality, poverty, etc.
This paper was first published at Prensa.li