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Note #2: Some of our folks could use your help in the aftermath of the hurricane that hit parts of Appalachia. Here is a GoFundMe for a family that Pete Quinones knows who lost everything in the flood. Give what you can and post up others so people can pitch in to help our folks.
The reason the small groups of humans in the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution started working together was primarily safety. Two groups cooperating could not only better defend themselves from other groups, but they could defend the assets they shared from outsiders. That water source or the good hunting ground could not only be exploited through cooperation, but it could be defended and eventually cultivated by kin groups cooperating with one another.
We do not know why kin groups started to cooperate exactly, the above is logical speculation, but we do know that humans eventually settled down and eventually, the point of their organization was to guard their property. Whether it was to guard their hunting grounds or more easily guard the stuff they created with their labor, the point of organization was to protect the people and their stuff. From this stage forward, the point of human organization became property.
When exactly the concept of private property came into existence is impossible to know, but at some point, humans began to recognize ownership. Logically it started with what we now call personal property, the things that come from labor. Grog’s hunting kit was Grog’s hunting kit, and he had a right to defend it or give it away. Similarly, this land was the land of Grog’s people, and they defended it. Other groups made similar claims and before long their relations were based on respecting this.
Most likely, the concept of private ownership of land evolved from the ownership of personal goods, but we are left to guess. What we know is that as far back as we have records, human societies had sorted the difference between public ownership of land and private ownership of land. The Greeks and the Romans, for example, had laws governing private property. Plato was famously opposed to private property, while Aristotle was strongly in supported of it.
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, private property became the foundation for what would come next in Europe. Large landowners organized to defend their lands and eventually the feudal system evolved. Feudalism was the set of reciprocal relations between the warrior elite, who also happened to be the class who owned all of the land. It was the ownership of land that determined the new ruling elite that would eventually rule Europe.
The model of ownership in the medieval period was one where the king or prince owned the land but granted rights to it. Technically, all of the land in the kingdom was the property of the king, but most of it was controlled by lower members of the aristocratic order and the church. The king was, in effect, the most important landowner among the land-owning class. Property was the basis for relations among the ruling class and between the ruling class and the people over whom they ruled.
Property in the American sense of it has always been tied to labor. The Framers were not only influenced by Locke on this matter, but also by their society that was created by the individual labor of the people. Their reality was based on the observation that you own you and therefore you own your labor, which means by default you own the produce of your labor. In fact, the American concept of rights originates from this Lockean idea of self-ownership.
This is why in the fullness of time Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights will be viewed the same as we view Sulla’s march on Rome. It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. If there is no cost to breaking the most important rules, the future tyrant is born. There is a straight line from Sulla to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today.
We see this with the controversy over publishing the private information of J.D. Vance that was stolen from the Trump campaign. The FBI says it was Iran that stole it, which means it was not Iran that stole it. There is little doubt that the FBI has moles in the Trump campaign, stealing everything they find. It is also certainly the case that the secret police have gained access to their computers. The FBI no doubt handed this to the usual degenerates to publish online.
The “free speech” people argue that this is an essential role of journalism, so they should be free to publish it. In other words, there is a journalist exception to the most fundamental right of property. That is what they never want you to notice. The people trafficking in this sort of material are trafficking in stolen goods. The information in that dossier is the property of J.D. Vance. In good faith he permitted the Trump campaign to use it to evaluate his fitness for the running mate slot.
What “journalists” are claiming is a special right to steal your property and not only use it to profit themselves, but to harm you with it. Imagine you lend your car to a friend and Uber then steals it and uses it to deliver food. Then they claim Uber is an essential part of the economy, so they have a right to your car. You should have been more careful about who you let use it. In fact, because they gave your car to a black guy, you are a racist for wanting your car back.
What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.
In fact, privacy has now become a form of sumptuary law. If you are in favor with the powerful, you do not have to worry about free speech advocates rummaging through your garbage looking for dirt. Notice how so-called journalists are always the last to know about important things. On the other hand, if you are out of favor with powerful people, then you are subjected to the synopticon. The eyes of the regime pierce every aspect of your life, searching for what they can use to ruin you.
In the end, the reason America is increasingly tyrannical is the logic that flows the Lincoln exception to property rights. Once the principle was invented that you are no longer constrained by the ancient rights of property, if you can establish the moral high ground, the relationship between the American people and their government shifted from one of rights based in property to one of privileges based on whatever spurious moral claims are popular with the ruling class at the time.
This is how we got things like the Sullivan doctrine and the Brown standard from the Supreme Court. Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. In fact, you can no longer claim to own you, as “our democracy” might require the sacrifice of you, whether you like it or not. The moral tyrants get to decide these things and you have no choice in the matter.
Where this is heading is to a pre-modern concept of society. Instead of private property being the default and communal property as the necessary exception, we are heading to a world of communal property as the default. Everything about you is assumed to be property held in common. The exceptions are those things deemed necessary to keep society functioning. The goal is to narrow the exceptions until we reach some sort of communal singularity in which the individual is obliterated.
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