Property Rights: Do It for the World's Poor

One of the favorite mantras of the left is the need to protect people rather than property. But very often the best way to protect people is protect their property. Those with power and influence can steal what they want. Only when property rights are protected do average people have a shot at both liberty and prosperity. The question of property ownership goes far back into human history. Individual sovereignty over land was alien to hunter-gatherer societies, but they died out because they were "unsustainable," in current parlance. Larger populations required greater productivity, which required some form of property rights, even if by a tribe or some other group. The latter could sustain a certain level of life, but as peoples ancient through modern have discovered, collectivizing production inevitably limited available food and other goods. Rulers in a strong empire might succeed by plundering everyone else, but civilizations were unlikely to develop without a system of ownership which rewarded those who invested in developing and improving property. The right to private property evolved out of a basic moral notion. While one could argue endlessly about how to initially distribute unowned property -- Locke's picture of mixing one's labor with land was particularly influential in Britain and the American colonies -- land acquired through purchase and improved through work or expenditure embodied value based upon one's own efforts. Property owners also use knowledge, insight, and vision to enhance the worth of their assets. Although land and chattel long were the most important forms of property, today intellectual property has assumed much greater significance. The productive value of human creativity has expanded from hands to minds. The software programs on a computer, not the physical components of a computer, are that instrument's most productive property...American Spectator