| By Gavin Chait,
on 15 January 2007
|
 The meaning of liberty
"The peasant who hires land, the manufacturer who borrows capital, the tax-payer who pays tolls, duties, patent and license fees, personal and property taxes, &c., and the deputy who votes for them, — all act neither intelligently nor freely. Their enemies are the proprietors, the capitalists, the government … instead of inferring from this that property should be shared by all, I demand, as a measure of general security, its entire abolition."
Since then a great deal of effort has been put in by communists, socialists, new-economists and trades unions to exercise exactly that.
Most recently, Cosatu's secretary in the Western Cape, Tony Ehrenreich, demanded that people living in an informal settlement in the luxury enclave of Hout Bay should rise up and take land away from those with property in the area. Some residents have threatened violent retribution if anyone attempts to act on this instruction.
We talk about the redistribution of land-based property as if this, somehow, makes people wealthy. The people who earn some of the highest salaries in the world today are hedge fund managers. The only property they need to perform their job is a cell phone and a computer. What would redistribution of these assets achieve?
The most important inalienable property that you own is your life. Your liberty is the freedom to use your life. No other person, or group of people, may own you. Neither do you own the lives of others. We have laws against slavery precisely because most modern societies recognise this right.
A product of your time and your liberty is your property. If someone offers to pay you for your time to perform work on their behalf then you have entered into a property transaction. You exchange some of your property – your time – for some of their property – their money. If they value your time at an amount that you are happy with then you will work for them. It is only under an autocratic system – one which sanctifies slavery – that you would be forced to work for an amount less than the value you place on your own time.
To take ((life)) is murder. To take ((liberty)) is slavery. To take ((property)) is theft. Everything with which you transact with others is property; from the clothes you wear, to the time spent on conversation. People who waste your time are, technically, stealing it.
It takes time and investment to learn things. I spend my time on myself to develop my own abilities. That time has value. Once I have learned sufficiently then I procure property that will assist me to earn a living. If I live in a society that doesn’t allow for the individual ownership of property, then I may never make that investment in the first place. I’ll wait in line to take the property I want away from someone else.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the recent civil war, live cows were worth significantly less than fresh beef. The reason was that marauding soldiers would attack farmers and kill them, then take their cows away. No-one wanted to own a live cow for fear of being killed. So the value of cows dropped. More importantly, since no-one wanted to invest their time in raising them, in many areas cows disappeared altogether.
The question to Tony Ehrenreich and others of his ilk is this: if you aren’t in favour of property ownership how can you have redistribution in the first place? If you abolish property rights so that you may own something not rightfully yours then there are no rights to protect your ownership of that property either. When property has no ownership then you lose even the most basic ownership of your own life and liberty.
Too many countries, in an effort to reduce very real poverty, abandon property rights and take wealth away from people who have it. Wealth generating individuals flee those countries and, as refugees, go and generate wealth elsewhere. Their home-countries are left bereft of talent and even more impoverished than before. Like the man who killed the golden goose, they discover that the wealth they wanted didn't come from ownership of other people's property.
Real development comes from respecting the property produced by others and giving individuals an incentive to create new property so that they may increase the overall wealth for everyone in that society.
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Keywords : property, ownership, wealth, liberty, life, redistribution, land, slavery, investment, theft, development |
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By: Simon Stewart on 16 January 2007
Hope someone in COSATU reads it.
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