This shield called property rights

By J. Wroblewski

March 09, 2007

There's a witty saying to the effect that what goes without saying shouldn't be said. Sometimes that might be true. But other times, there are the blindingly obvious things that people are perpetually blind to, that need to be screamed from the rooftops nonstop. One of those things is the notion of Property Rights.

It has been observed many times that the intellectual founders of modern theories of Liberty, be they the philosophers of the Enlightenment or the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, did not pay much attention the importance of Property Rights. The standard explanation has been that that they took it to be so self-evident that no parchment need be wasted on proclaiming it. Perhaps that does reflect their thinking on the matter, but it does look like that was a major strategic mistake. It has turned out that this right is of paramount importance, and this should have been evident by 1776. Just think back to the experience of the Puritan colony of New England, which almost tanked because of collectivist practices, and saved itself only by adopting the principle of (you guessed it) Property Rights. Come to think of it, the World could have been saved a lot of grief if their lesson had been widely taken in. But instead, collectivist fantasies live on, while talk of rights to property are deemed the equal of a slave owner fighting to hang on to his slaves.

The first consequence of the fall of the notion of individual property is the morass of bungling that has been labeled the Tragedy of the Commons. This is simply put as the observation that if something belongs to "everybody" it really belongs to nobody. Goodbye wise stewardship and thrift, hello scoop up and run - and damn the consequences. The worst public washroom is the fitting metaphor for this. If only it stopped there...

The real hard landing that follows after the Tragedy of the Commons comes from the simple fact that a headless monster cannot live. Human affairs have to be arranged somehow, and if the distribution of goods can't be decided by individual ownership, then some sort of "collective ownership" has to be invoked. And the wisest amongst you are already rolling your eyes in disgust. "Collective ownership" really means dividing loot by the process of Politics. The game of Politics is usually won the craftiest manipulators, or the meanest brutes (often in collaboration), meaning the creation of a new property holding elite. In Orwell's famous novel 1984 a passage describes the real dynamics of ownership in the totalitarian super state - individually, the members of the ruling Inner Party only owned their modest possessions, but collectively, they owned all of Oceania. And in the real world, on paper the nomenklatura of the USSR drew only modest executive salaries, but in reality, they were the Red feudal lords of a vast Soviet estate. Did the peons who were the citizens of the USSR "own" the assets of the state? Please don't be foolish enough to say "yes!"

Sadly so many people see the notion of exploitation of property in terms of dusty old caricatures of medieval despots and comic book plutocrats. But those who claim control of the loot "for the greater good" are just chips off that old block. The sort of power that this sort of expropriation provides is mind-boggling. Grant anyone the theoretical right of speech, but deny him rights to the fruits of his labor, and that freedom of speech is gelded. Try seeing how long you can assert your rights without any claim to food, clothing, or shelter that you should have been able to claim by your efforts, and then gauge how free you really are. Abject beggars are impotent beings. That which goes without saying sometimes must be said. Property Rights are Liberty's shield.

J. Wroblewski lives in British Columbia, Canada.