Del Beccaro: The Left’s War on Wealth – Why Your Private Property Matters
The Modern Democrat Party has become the Party of Class Warfare. They demonize wealth, tax it and seek to redistribute it at every turn. If successful, their policies would lead not only to the destruction of wealth, but will also reduce in the world’s standard of living and its freely elected governments.
Speaking about the Left, the great Thomas Sowell famously mused that,
“The political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.”
The short answer as to how it exists is because of the relatively new, by historical standards, institution of private property.
As I wrote in my book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, we must always remember that “throughout the vast majority of history, the lot of almost all human beings was one of persistent and often desperate poverty. Indeed, a remarkably tiny percentage of humans lived in the luxury of their time during the thousands upon thousands of years before the 1900s.”
Professor Steven M. Beaudoin, in his work Poverty in World History, noted that before Christ, “given the limitations on agricultural surpluses, the vast majority of the world’s population could easily slide” into what he termed “conjunctural poverty,” poverty brought on by circumstances.
Beaudoin further wrote that “the multitudes…lives weaved back and forth across the line separating hunger and subsistence.”
Moving on to medieval Europe, Professor Dorsey Armstrong notes that, in and around the year 1000, 90 to 95 percent of Europe’s inhabitants were dependent on “subsistence farming.” What that meant, according to Professor Armstrong, was that: “The margin between bounty and starvation was painfully razor thin.”
Throughout that history, significant private property for the multitudes was almost nonexistent.
That was because most lived in systems where those in political power—the kings, nobles, gentry, and even churches—owned the greatest accumulations of land, which was the wealth of those ages.
The poor were tied indefinitely to such lands to produce for those landowners and, nature permitting, to feed themselves. In exchange for that servitude, the poor putatively received protection from the roaming bandits and foreign armies of the age unless, of course, they were pressed into military service by their rulers thereby risking, if not losing, their lives.
Those circumstances were not confined to the West. Egypt, India, China and most everywhere in the world experienced some form of that political/economic structure.
It is also important to understand that, at their height, those systems jealously kept economic and political power among a very few. Wealth and power were redistributed among the rich and powerful—most often through inheritance, marriage or a war of conquest.
Under those pervasive circumstances, social mobility was beyond rare and, not surprisingly, almost all of the poor remained relatively poor—generation after generation after generation.
The emergence of private property changed that history.
