this is a topic I have been thinking about for quite a while now…
We in America have this vision that our activities lead to
the ultimate goal which is the house with a white picket fence,
a two car garage with a yard in back, two children and a dog and a cat…
that is the American dream…a lovely place in the suburbs where the sun shines
all day and the grass is mowed every Saturday morning…
however several questions come into mind while thinking about this American fantasy…
what if… what if this is just another false dream while the reality of our lives is something else?
to understand our love affair with private property… we find the philosopher for whom
the idea of private property was his ideal and that ideal was passed unto the middle class of
both the UK and the US…John Locke… his defense of property has passed into our
collective conscience and drive the middle and lower class to this day…
as we recall from a prior post, the founding fathers felt that there were inalienable
rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness… and these rights,
for the founding fathers, existed before government and was the reason for the creation of
government…now for the founding fathers “inalienable rights” were derived from Locke
who put property as the key feature that existed before the government and was the reason
for the creation of government, now the founding fathers took from Locke the idea that
the holding of property was the basis of freedom… you were free if you held property,
that was guaranteed to be held sacred from the government… for Locke, the main purpose
of government was to secured for the landowner his right to keep his property…
the only purpose of government was to maintain the landowner property as the landowner
property…to Locke this was the very definition of freedom… and the
founding fathers keep this purpose for government as the way to maintain private
property for landowners… to maintain it from other people attempting to take it and to
maintain it from the government taking his land… in large part, this is why the founding fathers
wanted a limited government… if you allow a strong government, it might be tempted to
take your land…you could almost make the argument the entire point of government for
the founding fathers was to protect property for the landowner…
the phase they used was life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…
with liberty being the holding of property and the pursuit of happiness
being the pursuit of property/land…
We have to this day kept this idea of property… but we do allow
another understanding of land… we have private property but
we also have public land… land that is held for all the people, by all the people…
we have parks both in cities and public parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone…
so we have expanded our concept of land to include public ownership of land…
we also have public domain ideas whereas the government can take private land for
public use… so we feel that at times the public need for private land out ways
the private need for the land…
we have expanded Locke’s idea to include the right of government to take land
that is necessary for the public good even though it damages the idea of private property…
situations and circumstances may require us to expand our idea’s of private and public
property…so it is under this idea that we examine the idea of property…
the notion of private property makes a whole lot more sense back in the day,
when 5 million people occupied the United States and we had an entire
continent to expand to… but the idea of the frontier disappeared when it was
decided that we no longer had a frontier and that date was in 1894…
(the government actually made this decision that there was no more frontier
in 1894, it became a legal fact)…
we no longer have the land that the founding father had to expand and explore…
and this is a crucial fact…given we have over 300 million citizens, we no longer have
the land needed to offer every single citizen the opportunity to hold private property…
the reality has changed and we must change with it…
but let us hold off on the practical realities of today and try something else…
let us explore this idea that the goal, purpose of human beings is to hold land/
property…we must understand that we exist in a different reality then generations
before us existed in… we are an age of limited resources and limited land…
we can no longer offer an ideal of private property… a house with a white picket fence
is no longer feasible given the realities of our time…
but this leads us to a even more basic idea… the idea that having property is
even a goal worth pursuing…or even that given history, that the idea
of private property was worth pursuing…
an brief look at history shows us that land is land and the creatures that
exist on the land had no sense of private property… even human beings
didn’t have a sense of private property until fairly recently in our history…
hunter/gatherers didn’t have private property… they simple moved with the
food… if the herd of deer moved, they moved with the deer to maintain the food
supply… land was simply not the resource as we think of it… it was just there…
feeding all creatures great and small…human beings have existed for
over a million years and it has only been in the last 10,000 years that we
have begun to understand private property as we do today…
the founding of cities and the creation of our agriculture society
begins that idea of private property…
so it is a relatively recent thought that brings us this idea of private property…
most of human history doesn’t have this idea…
now why this idea? by this I mean, think about it…
the concept of private property is really an artificial one…
how are we able to even tell which land is my land and which land
is your land? we have entire elaborate system to judge where my land
begins and your land ends…and we have fought wars, both private and public
to clear up this issue of where does my land begin and where does your land
end…wars fought over land has killed millions of people, almost as many
people who have died in religious wars…
but this land we fight over… we can’t even tell where one land begins and another ends…
drive over the border between say, Canada and the US… if you don’t know exactly which land is
which, you can’t even tell the difference between Canadian land and US land…
but we have one line being American and one line being Canadian and we can’t even tell
which is which… you’re being American and you’re being Canadian exists because
of an artificial border where you can’t even tell which land is which and private property
is the exact same thing… we fight wars and go to court and brawl over land in which
we can’t even tell which land is our land without appeals to surveyors and governments
and the court system…
this appeal of private property being our god given right and being the reason
for and the existence of government no longer stands…
we can no longer use of private property as being the basis of
our “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as we no longer
have the resources of land to promise everyone a chance
to afford buying land…
take a room… make it a moderate size room… put 5 people in that room…
then divide that room into parts where 2 people “own” 90 % of that room
and the other 3 share 10% of the room…upon which basis would you
divide that room into 90% and 10%? this is our modern world in a nutshell…
we have a small number of people owning a large share of land and upon
what basis do we allow this? Either they Inherited it or they bought it…
so those without money aren’t allow access to the land in any case…
so we have land divided up and we can’t even justify our reasoning for
this divided up the land… upon which basis would you divide up land
for the purpose of ownership of land? what logical reasons could you
use to justify ownership of land?
look at land and ask yourself, why does this land here belong to him
and that land belong to her and that land belong to them when the land
in question looks exactly the same? the owning of land, private property
is not a logical issue, it is an emotional issue… we feel justified to own land
based on emotional reasons, not on any logical or justified reasons…
we know that people and cultures in the past existed without recourse to the use
of private property… so this notion of private property being inherent in people
does not work… the ownership of private property is an artificial idea and any artificial
idea can be change or modified in whatever way deemed necessary given the changing
conditions … we have arrived at the point where we must, because of changing
conditions, change our ideas about owning private property…
Kropotkin