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

[John Médaille <john@medaille.com>]

At 05:29 PM 7/4/2005 -0400, Ed Dodson wrote:

>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.

I don't think that migration has much to do with it. Even the semi-nomadic 
tribes have the same questions of allocation for as long as they occupy one 
spot. Further, we have any number of examples of "primitive" and tribal 
peoples, and out notions of private property simply do not apply. We can 
actually see early notions codified in the Sabbath codes of the Old 
Testament, where land cannot be alienated from the tribe, not even for the 
King (e.g., Nabooth's vineyard.) We can define a trajectory that all 
societies seem to follow: as power becomes more concentrated, property 
becomes less communal and more "private." It would be an interesting 
chicken-and-egg question is see whether it is the concentration of land 
that leads to concentration of power, or vice-versa.


John C. Médaille
www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm

Are we not, all unawares, objectively risking a shameless individualism
and selfishness when we seek to live in the Church in such a way as baldly
to arrange it to our own taste?
- Karl Rahner

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