Free People, Free Markets by George Melloan

Author:George Melloan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594039324
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2017-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Maggie and Deng

Bartley and I had similar views on most things, including the importance of property rights and the sanctity of private contracts, principles we shared with the Journal’s founder, Charles Dow. We occasionally had debates over the issue of separation of church and state, which I favored and Bob was more ambivalent about. He pointed out that there’s a reason “In God We Trust” is imprinted on our currency; religious belief was important to the founders. I argued that the mixing of politics and religion was more a threat to religion than politics, citing the decline of the state-subsidized churches of Germany and other parts of Europe. But we didn’t disagree on the role the concept of natural “God-given” rights had played in the advancement of western civilization.

The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke is usually credited with forming the idea that men and women are born with certain “natural rights” to life, liberty and property. He argued that God would not have created mankind without providing a means for man to subsist, and thus land ownership was an inherent right. The founders of the United States were familiar with and influenced by the Lockean rationale. Thomas Jefferson drew on Locke’s concepts in writing the Declaration of Independence. Although he substituted “pursuit of happiness” for “property,” probably to skirt the issue of slaves being property, there is plenty of evidence in the other writings of the Founding Fathers, in the Constitution for example, that they believed that the protection of private property should be guaranteed by law.

The economic importance of the broad exercise of the natural right to own property has been demonstrated repeatedly. “How Capitalism Saved America” is an interesting little book, published in 2004 and written by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. He writes that the early American colonists, who actually predated Locke, were forced by necessity to recognize property rights.

The early settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts originally organized communal settlements. Many died of starvation and disease, largely due to the lack of any recognition by the investors in these enterprises or their indentured servants that they individually must do the hard labor of clearing the land and tilling the soil. The investors felt themselves to be above that, and their servants had little incentive to do so, since they had only a limited stake of their own in reaping what was sowed.

The solution, finally arrived at by the Virginia Company and later William Bradford of the Plymouth colony, was to give the colonists title to small plots of land. In 1611, men in the Jamestown colony were allotted three acres each by the English high marshal, Sir Thomas Dale. “Private property was thus put into place and the colony immediately began to prosper,” writes DiLorenzo. “There was no more free riding because each individual himself bore the full consequences of any reduction in output. At the same time the individual had the incentive to increase his effort because he directly benefited from his own labor.

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