Our Property

There is a case to be made for common property as opposed to private. We have property in common: there is traditional knowledge, the air we breathe, the roads, streets, and sidewalks, the parks, and the beaches --sometimes. In some cultures the land was common property, more or less.

But private property was a fact of life even among the Incas and the Mexicans because the two concepts interact. It is also true that we own property and we share it at the same time. In the case of land, the sense of property is probably an instinct; the territorial imperative, which shows us that even common property is not common to all. This is our country but it is cut into pieces belonging to different people, and the social order demands that this arrangement be respected. Its violation always has dire consequences. Owning something gives us a sense of security and there is nothing more threatening to our security than inroads into our property, especially when we have endeavored to acquire it; when it was not inherited.

For a person that I have recently seen here questioning the existence of common property rights to prove that all property is private, I have known dozens who question the right to private property of land "because land is productive". You can own your watch, your clothes, your car, your house, etc. they say, "because they are not productive", and they call these arguments "science". When I questioned this classification I was told it came from the science of agrarian law. The reader doubtless knows whence these scientific arguments came.

But these arguments are usually espoused by people who dislike the property of others. They want it to be common so that they may control it, make it theirs. This revisioning of private property is wielded as a pretext, and to the local standard bearer of this gospel it was a bonanza which made hito a potentate, and wealthy to boot.

A different thing is the aspiration that we may all own some land which therefore limits the amount of it we may own, but this does not come through some one administering the common property, and making it theirs.

My purpose here is then to discuss the hypocrisy that surrounds the revision of our property rights, which are written in the law of the land and therefore guaranteed. These rights are questioned, limited, and violated every day and with different pretexts, by those who want to limit them or make them void.

This appropriation was ruthlessly practised by the Communists in the Soviet Union for the benefit of the apparat (social cleansing) with predictable unsuccessful results. But they, of course, made no pretence of being a state of law. The practice was copied here by their sympathizers regarding the property of land --not other forms of property-- so that we have a schizoid attitude whereby a person may own all the property he may gather provided it is not...