Protect Property Rights

Thanks, Property Rights! Posted on December 1, 2014 Written by John Stossel, townhall.com

FA Note:  The inter­na­tional treaties and agree­ments cited in the ESA, which autho­rize the Act, were all nego­ti­ated to pro­tect each nation’s agri­cul­tural economies and the com­mu­ni­ties depen­dent on them. Sim­ple logic, and basic eco­nom­ics, both dic­tate — if a “mar­ket” exists/develops for any species, their num­bers will grow.

This Thanks­giv­ing, I give thanks for some­thing our fore­bears gave us: prop­erty rights. Peo­ple asso­ciate prop­erty rights with greed and self­ish­ness, but they are keys to our pros­per­ity. Things go wrong when resources are held in common.

Before the Pil­grims were able to hold the first Thanks­giv­ing, they nearly starved. Although they had inher­ited ideas about indi­vid­u­al­ism and prop­erty from the Eng­lish and Dutch trad­ing empires, they tried com­mu­nism when they arrived in the New World. They decreed that each fam­ily would get an equal share of food, no mat­ter how much work they did.

The results were dis­as­trous. Gov. William Brad­ford wrote, “Much was stolen both by night and day.” The same plan in Jamestown con­tributed to star­va­tion, can­ni­bal­ism and death of half the population.

So Brad­ford decreed that fam­i­lies should instead farm pri­vate plots. That quickly ended the suf­fer­ing. Brad­ford wrote that peo­ple now “went will­ingly into the field.” Soon, there was so much food that the Pil­grims and Indi­ans could cel­e­brate Thanksgiving.

There’s noth­ing like com­pe­ti­tion and self-interest to bring out the best in people. While prop­erty among the set­tlers began as an infor­mal sys­tem, with “tom­a­hawk rights” to land indi­cated by shav­ing off bits of sur­round­ing trees, or “corn rights” indi­cated by grow­ing corn, soon set­tlers were keep­ing track of con­tracts, fil­ing deeds and, alas, hir­ing lawyers to sue each other. Prop­erty rights don’t end all con­flict, but they cre­ate a bet­ter sys­tem for set­tling dis­putes than phys­i­cal combat.

Know­ing that your prop­erty is really yours makes it eas­ier to plant, grow, invest and prosper. In Brazil today, rain­forests are destroyed because no one really owns them. Log­gers take as many trees as they can because they know if they don’t, some­one else will. No one had much rea­son to pre­serve trees or plant new ones for future har­vests; although recently, some pri­vate con­ser­va­tion groups bought parcels of the Ama­zon in order to pro­tect trees.

The oceans are treated as a com­mons, and they are dif­fi­cult to pri­va­tize. For years, lack of own­er­ship led to over­fish­ing. Species will go extinct if they aren’t treated as prop­erty. Now a few places award fish­ing rights to pri­vate groups of fish­er­men. Canada pri­va­tized its Pacific fish­eries, sav­ing the hal­ibut from near col­lapse. When fish­er­men con­trol fish­ing rights, they care about pre­serv­ing fish.

Think about your Thanks­giv­ing turkey. We eat tons of them, but no one wor­ries that turkeys will go extinct. We know there will be more next year, since peo­ple profit from own­ing and rais­ing them.

As the 19th-century econ­o­mist Henry George said, “Both humans and hawks eat chick­ens — but the more hawks, the fewer chick­ens; while the more humans, the more chickens.”

(Sadly, even Henry George didn’t com­pletely believe in pri­vate prop­erty. He thought land should be unowned, since late­com­ers can’t pro­duce more of it. Had he seen how badly the com­monly owned rain­for­est is treated, he might’ve changed his mind.)

Her­nando de Soto (the con­tem­po­rary Peru­vian econ­o­mist, not the Span­ish con­quis­ta­dor) writes about the way clearly defined prop­erty rights spur growth in the devel­op­ing world. Places with­out clear prop­erty rights — much of the third world — suffer.

“About 4 bil­lion peo­ple in the world actu­ally build their homes and own their busi­nesses out­side the legal sys­tem,” de Soto told me. “It’s all hap­haz­ard and dis­or­ga­nized because of the lack of rule of law, the def­i­n­i­tion of who owns what. Because they don’t have (legally rec­og­nized) addresses, (they) can’t get credit.”

With­out deeds, they can’t make con­tracts with con­fi­dence. Eco­nomic activ­ity that can­not be legally pro­tected instead gets done on the black mar­ket, or on “gray mar­kets” in a murky legal limbo in between. In places such as Tan­za­nia, says de Soto, 90 per­cent of the econ­omy oper­ates out­side the legal system. So, few peo­ple expand homes or busi­nesses. Poor peo­ple stay poor.

This hol­i­day sea­son, give thanks for prop­erty rights and hope that your fam­ily will never have to relearn the eco­nomic les­son that nearly killed the Pilgrims.

Filed Under: Agriculture, Property Rights, Wildlands Network

Source:http://agenda21news.com/2014/12/thanks-property-rights/#more-3910