Saturday, August 04, 2007
Property Is “The Root Of All …”
…Actually, it’s not the root of anything. It just is. It’s as natural as a wolf pissing on the perimeter of its territory.
In certain circles of political delusion, property is “socially constructed” and is one part of an oppressive mechanism (“oppression” being the rule of law in a market society that outlaws theft).
There have been times that I’ve seen crows evenly spaced on a telephone wire and have noted the polite rearranging of their positions when one flies in to disrupt the property value of a perch. I wonder if the others are feeling “oppressed” by a newly arrived crow’s stake in a few cubic centimeters of crow real estate.
Property is natural. Things own other things. People own their own spirits, bodies, and values as well as more tangible "materialistic" things. That is, until the state or some other control clown or system seeks to seize them for “the good of” some collective abstraction like “the people,” “society,” or “the revolution.”
In Venezuela recently, Hugo Chavez, in characteristic Marxist fashion, has been pissing on large chunks of other people’s property and territory…for the “revolution.” This is just one example among many, though a textbook case of Marxist philosophy in action. The U.S. apparatus of state – the political class – has certainly seized its unfair “share” of other people’s stuff (property, body, and soul -- in the case of government schools).
Privately and individually owning stuff is natural. Its not a “root” of anything though it sometimes motivates the jealousy and avarice of some to steal what is not theirs. Trying to justify theft by saying that it’s for some imaginary collectivist cause or “redistribution” is no different than a mugging with a lighter blow to the head (actually, the “blow” has historically often been more lethal).
Property is the root of nothing…but clearly arrogance and hypocrisy are the root of all motivation and thought among some political ideologues.
