| The Prince William Times May 08, 2002 The Role of Private Property in Protecting Liberty Tom Bethel |
Recent initiatives in Virginia, such as the move toward urban planning and "smart
growth," or restricted growth, will weaken property rights in the commonwealth, and this,
in turn, will undermine our liberties.
People who live in societies where private property has historically been well protected
often fail to see the advantages of such a system, because they take them for granted.
They are as inconspicuous as the taste of water.
But such people are also good at visualizing some more perfect condition one in which
they do not have to spend so much time in traffic jams, for example. In using the political
system to advance such a goal, therefore, they may fail to anticipate the loss of benefits
they had never considered in the first place.
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the many advantages of a private property system were
hardly analyzed at all. You might say that private property was attacked by Karl Marx and
by many intellectuals since before it was defended. Among those benefits are justice,
peace, liberty and prosperity.
Consider justice briefly. A group of people goes to a restaurant and orders a meal. If the
bill is shared equally, those who ate hamburger will subsidize those who ate steak.
Separate checks would be a more just arrangement. Diners are billed in proportion to
their consumption.
In short, a communal system has been privatized, and justice has been introduced. "To
each his due" was the classical definition of justice, used by Saint Thomas Aquinas
before the dubious notion of "social justice" was introduced into Western thought.
When Plymouth Colony was founded in Massachusetts in 1620, the Pilgrims at first held
their property in common. They were on the verge of starvation when ownership was
privatized in 1623. The change succeeded. It "made all hands very industrious, so as
much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been," William Bradford
reported. The communal arrangement had
not worked because it "was thought injustice."
More recently, a vast experiment in life without private property was conducted in the
Soviet Union. It lasted for 74 years, and it conclusively showed that transferring the
control of property to the state is a formula for social impoverishment. There wasn't much
in the way of justice either. As for liberty, that was lost completely. An Iron Curtain had to
be constructed north-to-south in Eastern Europe, and a wall divided Berlin.
At tax time, it is worth reflecting that for the average Virginian, the most burdensome
abridgment of property rights is probably the income tax. Our income is our property, and
for young people and those with few assets, it may be the only way of saving enough to
buy real property.
The tax burden is a matter of degree. American now pay about 40 percent of their
earnings to governments at all levels. In most Western democracies, it is higher than
that. If the tax burden were to rise to 100 percent, we would labor wholly for the state and
would have been entirely deprived of our liberty. Under such conditions, of course, work
would be minimal and society impoverished.
Over the centuries, neighbors and strangers have often posed a more serious threat to
life and liberty than governments. It was for that reason that property rights were
instituted to provide individuals and their families with zones of privacy where they could
pursue their own initiatives, free from interference. That is the essence of liberty.
"There can be no liberty without private property," the economist Milton Friedman has
said. For this reason, the protection of property rights has historically been among the
most important functions of government, and to that end, laws and police forces were
instituted. If governments ceased protecting property rights, liberty would be gravely
threatened, at least until citizen groups formed their own protective militias.
Despite the failure of socialism however, governments at all levels continue to abridge
our freedoms almost as much as they protect them. And just as the inflation of the 1970s
moved people into higher tax brackets, so the environmentalism of the 1990s gave
government new rationales for controlling the use of our property.
We may believe that cleaner air or less traffic congestion will be the good effect, but we
may be sure that our liberties are also being restricted. Production and prosperity will
also tend to decline, and in the case of those people who bought land anticipating that
they would be able to develop it, but now find that they have paid a high price to keep it
idle, there is also manifest injustice. When our property rights are restricted, prosperity,
liberty and justice will all decline together.
Tom Bethel, an editor of the "American Spectator," is the author of "The Noblest Triumph:
Property and Prosperity through the Ages" (St. Martin's Press) and a member of the
board of governors of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, an education and research
organization headquartered in Potomac Falls.)
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