It Didn't Have to Be This Way by Harry C. Veryser

Author:Harry C. Veryser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497636330
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD)

these advantages can be attained only if private wealth is not drained away by crushing taxes of every kind. For since the right of possessing goods privately has been conferred not by man's law, but by nature, public authority cannot abolish it, but can only control its exercise and bring it into conformity with the commonweal. Public authority therefore would act unjustly and in an inhumane way, if in the name of taxes it should appropriate the property of private individuals more than is equitable.15

The government encroaches even further on property rights when it “nationalizes” businesses or even entire industries. Nationalization is simply a government takeover, which means outright seizure of private property. Protections against government seizure of property date back at least as far as the Magna Carta. As John Chamberlain observed in The Roots of Capitalism, the Magna Carta “was confirmed under Edward I, with a kingly admission that no seizures of goods would be made for the crown's use; and all through the later Middle Ages judges applied the rights of the Great Charter as the ‘law of the land.’” From the thirteenth century onward, Englishmen “held that rights came with birth and not from any permissive act of king or state.” It was the Tudor monarchs who broke with this concept, when, during the sixteenth century, they looted churches to pay the war expenses of Henry VIII.16

The government seizure of church property had far-reaching consequences. When the Tudors seized monasteries and distributed them among their court retainers, Chamberlain wrote, “this lawless act not only put the property right in question, but it also saddled the state with the necessity of caring for the indigent and aged who had hitherto been supported by the contributions of churchmen.”17 Nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli described the situation in England prior to the crown's theft of the monasteries: “The monks were, in short, in every district a point of refuge for all who needed succour, counsel, and protection; a body of individuals having no cares of their own, with wisdom to guide the inexperienced, with wealth to relieve the suffering, and often with power to protect the oppressed.”18 That vanished after the government took the monasteries away. Those who had been able to turn to the church for help now had to turn to government. The crown thus laid the groundwork for the modern welfare state.

For all these reasons, private property rights are a cornerstone of a stable and prosperous society. Securing these rights eliminates unnecessary uncertainty about the future, allowing human actors to make reasonable estimations of risk. With incentives to invest and to care for property, and with a stable social order, economic production will increase and prices will fall. Those increases in production and decreases in price will, by the principle of regressivity, benefit the poor most quickly.

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