RE: OWNERSHIP: Toward a Social Credit "Labor Theory of Property"??

["Ed Dodson" <ejdodson@comcast.net>]

Ed Dodson responding...
John Medaille wrote:

>
ED DODSON: The one observation about the early settlements is that "rent"
had not yet
>arisen because there was ample land of equal potential productivity to
>settle on and exploit. That happy situation eventually disappears; and, at
>some point, the "freely accessible" land will no longer yield even
>subsistence (given the knowledge level of the day and existing capital
>goods).

JOHN MEDAILLE: If this were true, one would expect to see "private property"
as a
characteristic of the most primitive societies. In fact, it never us. Land
for tribal peoples is communal, with the family appropriating to itself
only what it can work and only for as long as the family endures. There is
no notion of capital gains in the sale of property, and any such sale is
always a communal matter rather than a private one. private property is
always a feature of advanced societies where wealth is concentrated rather
than communal.

Ed Dodson here:
The important historical event is when formerly-migrating societies began to
settle down in a fixed location. From that point on, the society needed to
establish rules for allocating land (and water) to users. The economist
Michael Hudson has written extensively on these early societies; he provides
historical evidence that private property in land -- subject to varies forms
of community charges -- was quickly adopted. Our tendency is to look at the
historical record of empires and the post-Renaissance European
nation-states, where land ownership was initially vested in the sovereign
and nobles governed regions under feudal obligations to the crown.





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