Interesting Broken China post, as usual.
There were also dislocations when Britain (rather, Scotland) invented capitalism. The dismal child labor practices provided much material for Charles Dickens. All land was essentially owned by the King, but peasants were allowed to occupy it and make a fairly nice living. When they were needed to populate factories, it became illegal (punishable by death) to hunt on the King’s land or grow crops there, so that the peasants were forced into the factories.
This gave rise to the wonderful saying: “Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat.”
But at the end of the day, private property had great benefits. It was a concept that was new to the world, and the new American republic immortalized it in the Constitution.
“Pursuit of happiness” was a euphemism for “Pursuit of private property.”
With England’s 50-year head start into capitalism, they created a global empire.
Everywhere the right to own property went hand-in-hand with private ownership of guns. According to historian Carroll Quigley, the reason Russia stayed backward vis a vis Western Europe was that the wealth was not available for the peasants to own weapons when it came their turn to industrialize, and the Czarist government kept its monopoly on the guns and the power.
In America, on the other hand, any citizen who could afford a Colt 45 revolver and a Springfield rifle was as well-armed as the U.S. Army.
Freedom and capitalism go together. China’s experiment in capitalism without freedom may have been doomed from the start.
This post helps me understand one of the reasons for the 2nd amendment, along with the importance of private property among other things.
Might some of the gun-grabbers wonder a bit about being hung for poaching on the Laird’s lands, or grow crops? What to feed the wee bairns? Bugs?