The Myth of Private Property
A common position in discussions about capitalism, socialism, communism, etc., is that our government (in the USA) is not capitalist and that capitalism is a form of economy, not government. Yet the same people staking this position will describe the government of the USSR or China as socialist or communist, betraying their intellectual dishonesty in the debate and cherrypicking definitions to suit their argument and bias. To say that government is separate from economy is to be incredibly stupid because the primary function of all government is to administer economy. In the USA, government’s sole purpose is in service of capitalism, and the 800 military bases it maintains around the world is to ensure the free flow of goods and trade to maintain capitalist supply lines which serve corporations and stockholders in their daily pursuit of wealth and capital. Nearly every law that is passed contains language and functions which support, promote, and operate capitalism, and the very makeup of the structure of the government headed by the Executive Branch advised and restrained by a Congress is the very model of capitalist corporations.
One of the cornerstones of capitalism which is built into the foundation of the United States is the concept of private property. The Fifth Amendment in the Constitution states that the government cannot seize private property without fair market compensation, explicitly establishing the concept of private property as an enshrined principle of the country. The origins of this concept arise out of previous injustices suffered under feudalism in which the aristocracy and other elites could take property from those beneath them without much recourse for the offended persons. The right to be compensated was a relatively novel principle which helped move us from feudalism to the relative increase in freedom we enjoy today.
But while you who are reading this rationally consider private property to be things like your land or home (which most of you likely don’t own anyway), this concept was extended to ownership of people in the practice of slavery and land taken by force. When enslaved Haitians overthrew their enslavers at the start of the 19th century France demanded they pay their former enslavers for their lost ‘property’ in both land, which had been taken by force from the original Taino inhabitants, AND for the formerly enslaved people which the country of France considered property, a heinous act which France has never reconciled.
After Cuban revolutionaries won their freedom from the violent dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, similarly rich and corrupt former landowners who had taken and inherited property by force and had sustained indentured servitude and sharecropping of the impoverished population similarly demanded that Cuba compensate them for the ‘lost’ property. Hilariously, those owners had purposefully undervalued their holdings to evade taxes, so the new Cuban government offered to compensate them at those rates, at which they balked, and the former landlords and corrupt, corporate businessmen and their progeny who fled to the United States are still to this day trying to take back their ill-gotten monopolies and holdings which is why the current administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is starving Cuba with additional blockades on top of the original embargo the US placed on Cuba after the revolution, which has caused much death and suffering amongst the Cuban people.
Hartford, Connecticut freeway which destroyed thousands of homes, businesses, and neighborhoods and cut the city from the riverfront.
While the just concept of private property separate from such heinous concepts as owning people seems, without investigation, to be inherently good it is also a myth proven throughout the history of the United States to be immaterial to reality. In the USA people must pay taxes on their property that they supposedly ‘own,’ and failing to do this results in the government seizing your property even though you paid for it. In reality nobody actually owns their property in the USA, but rents it from the government, and if you do not pay that rent in the form of taxes the government takes it away from you, even if you are an 81-year-old grandma who ‘owns’ a little condo for 27 years and will be homeless.
The most apparent evidence that the concept of private property in capitalist countries is a complete myth meant to simply placate the people is the principle of eminent domain which gives the government the right to take your property for any reason they want. Eminent domain simply means that private property does not actually exist and that, like China, the government ultimately owns all the land and decides who lives where. Throughout the 20th century the US government seized the most private property from its inhabitants since its founding (which itself took land from the original Indigenous Americans while genociding them) to create the system of freeways we have today. Primarily property was taken from poorer people and disproportionately took from minority populations of Black people, Jews, Hispanics, and others and devastated cities and neighborhoods, specifically choosing to cut through communities instead of going around them.
The principle of private property is meant to promote and maintain stability, to prevent the chaos of government disruption of the lives of its people, but if the government can come and take your property to build or expand a freeway (which yes, still happens in the USA), to build a golf course, or even a shopping mall how real is that concept of private property? While China is a socialist country (communism is a form of socialism, but China is not yet actually communist and is in a transition stage to communism) 90% of the population of China own their own homes (the rate in the countryside is as high as 96%). Though they are impoverished by the US blockade, Cuba similarly has a homeownership rate of 85-90% while in the United States only 65% of people ‘own’ their home. China also has laws that limit the government from taking a person’s home if they absolutely refuse to move, and they’re called ‘nail houses’ and the government will build around them, unlike in the USA in which eminent domain is absolute. Chinese also DO NOT PAY PROPERTY TAXES on their homes which, in the USA, is the very excuse used to take homes and property.
Vienna, Austria in which 65% of residents live in government owned housing.
Vienna, Austria is one of the most beautiful cities on the planet and 65% of the residents live in government owned, social housing of exceptional quality, and while they do not personally own their homes the government is a democracy so each person technically owns all the social housing in the city, as a citizen of that city, and this system creates and maintains high quality, stable housing far more beautiful than anywhere in the United States. Recently in Salt Lake City, Utah the Mayor sold off an entire block owned by the city (owned by the RESIDENTS of the city) to private developers. Like many cities in the United States, Salt Lake is also suffering a housing crisis and although an apartment building spree over the last several years has alleviated some of that stress there is still a shortage and many homeless people, and the blocks in Salt Lake City are famously twice the size of normal cities and the City could have instead built more than a thousand units of high quality housing and ground floor commercial services which would have been an invaluable asset for the RESIDENTS OF THE CITY to own and help deal with the homeless crisis and possibly build something beautiful which improved the character of the city, but now it is owned by private developers who will build more gross, metaphorical sardine cans to rent at exorbitant prices to people who will never own their own property.
A social housing complex in Vienna, Austria.
Private property is often used as excuse for supporting capitalism but it is just a fanciful myth and private property is not actually real, and all governments regardless of their form and function hold eminent ownership of all land and property. In capitalist governments and economies the larger portion of land and homes are afforded to holders of capital. In socialist governments and economies it is afforded to the people.
Read more inThe Truth about Stocks and Economy, learn how to understand the present and future in Fate and Action, or how to get better at life in How To Adult.