Own or be Owned
Nay, I believe we may advance one step farther, and affirm that the balance of power in a society, accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue, is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government. I believe these principles have been felt, if not understood, in the Massachusetts Bay, from the beginning . . .
(John Adams to James Sullivan May 26, 1776.)
Land, of course, was the principle form of the non-human factor of production at the time of America’s founding, and no doubt it seemed to the founding fathers that the open frontier beginning virtually at their feet ensured ownership of productive land to all who bestirred themselves to go forth and take it. They did not consider that they were being illiberal or repressive in limiting suffrage to landowners. They supposed they had executed a grand design for a generally affluent society in which their sons and grandsons might lead creative lives of leisure.
~ Louis O. Kelso, How to Turn Eighty Million Workers into Capitalists on Borrowed Money, 1967, p165.
On Cooking Eggs
The capitalist solution is to allow one man to own most of the hens and in turn distribute eggs to workers who prepare the nests for him. The Communist solution is putting all the eggs into the hands of a dictator cook, who makes an omelet which is bound to be unsatisfying because not all the people like omelets, and some do not like the way the dictator cook prepares them anyway. The Christian solution is to distribute the hens so that every man can cook his eggs the way he likes them, and even eat them raw if that is his definition of freedom. By distributing a wide mass of property owners throughout a country with their scattered powers, privileges and responsibilities, one creates the greatest resistance in the world to tyranny either political or economic, for just as man is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own, so he begins to be free on the outside, because he can call things his own. Then property becomes what it was always intended to be – the economic guarantee of human liberty. Deprive a man of his right to fashion things according to his own will, and you deprive him of the social basis of his freedom.
-†-Venerable, Fulton J. Sheen, ‘COMMUNISM and the CONSCIENCE of the WEST’ 1948, pg 129-130. [OWN or be OWNED]
