Posted on 07/31/2002 5:35:10 PM PDT by Sir Gawain
without economic liberty, there is no other liberty. once your capital (private property) is controled, what else is there to control?
thanks for posting this article.
Under the market anarchy that Mr. Machan seems to be advocating, property rights would not exist.
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
--Thomas Jefferson: Batture at New Orleans, 1812. ME 18:45
The author of this article claims to be a "market fundamentalist", and yearns for an ideal society where individual sovereignty reigns unimpeded by the "tyranny" of government. He does so in the extreme, even to the point of demonizing democratic forms of government.
Yet, unless the author desires a market as primitive as that practiced by stone-age, Native-American tribes, he ignores that a more advanced definition of property rights are necessary for development of modern market economies. And as Jefferson so eloquently points out "Government must be established and laws provided... and determine the conditions of the grant" advance socio-economic development can occur.
Jefferson also provides more widely known commentary on this issue: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
In his denunciation of democracy, the author ignores this Jeffersonian Truth, and myopicly undercuts the foundation upon which the conditions of property rights are established.
You don't think "property rights" have anything to do with capitalism and "market fundamentalism"???
See this every day around here...losers want thought-job protection---promotions too!
Excellent. Reality is not what some imagine. This idea of public property is at the core of many of our arguments on FR. Probably 99% don't 'get' it. Some will wave the Constitution like a magic wand while displaying the 9th amendment and ignoring the 4th and 5th Amendments, which doesn't help at all.
Keep chipping away at it. Now and then a light will go on, and maybe the 99% will drop to 98%.
Perhaps if it had wheels.
Originally the word liberal meant social conservatives(no govt religion--none) who advocated growth and progress---mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality... UNDER GOD---the nature of GOD/man/govt. does not change. These were the Classical liberals...founding fathers-PRINCIPLES---stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress...moral/social character-values(private/personal) GROWTH
Yes, many narcissisticly assume that property rights are a given, and government only exists to protect those rights without any obligation on their part to contribute to the community which forms that government.
Jefferson refutes that assumption much more eloquently than I.
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