Re: Fwd: [asa] Creation Care Magazine

At 01:02 PM 1/16/2008, j burg wrote:

>Janice wrote: "While it remained, was it not your own? .."
>
>I take it that your argument is that, based on that one verse in
>scripture, the Colismo quotation is negated. In the OT, God reminded
>the Hebrews that they were "tenants" in the land. So unless the NT
>trumps the OT, the argument fails. ~ jb

@ Sorry for the late reply - I have a lot of mail to go through and
just now saw your post.

You're wanting to talk about oranges when I'm talking about apples.

Ownership (apples) doesn't necessarily equate with sovereignty
(oranges). If ownership gave supreme authority it would be
sovereignty, not ownership.

One more example: The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2-17 / Deuteronomy
5:6-21) state that the Israelites were not to steal. This is a
blanket early protection of private property.

"..."Thou shalt not steal." Why not? As always, the left has found a
way out of this one by questioning its premise, i.e., the existence
of private property. For one way to eliminate theft is to eliminate
or at least question the legitimacy of private property, which
naturally ends with one big thief called "the government."

Property, according to
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375704477/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0375704477>Richard
Pipes, is "the key to the emergence of political and legal
institutions that guarantee liberty." Look at most anyplace in the
world where there is an absence of liberty, and you will find weak
property rights.

Liberals -- classical l iberals, anyway, not the misnamed leftist
kind -- have always understood that property is much more than
property. Rather, it is the cornerstone of freedom, its very enabler
and protector. And underneath property is the use of legitimate
violence to protect said property. For if ever there were "sacred
violence," it is the violence that ensures the protection of
property, for without property, humans cannot become fully human.

For one thing, property is simply a free and spontaneous expression
of "what people want," and to a large extent, what you want is who
you are, for better or worse. Therefore, property is an extension of
the person. I once read a description of this by the outstanding
psychoanalyst and writer, Christopher Bollas, who notes that the self
can never be perceived directly, only indirectly, largely through its
use of objects:

"Perhaps we need a new point of view in clinical psychoanalysis,
close to a form of person anthropology. We would pay acute attention
to all the objects selected by a patient and note the use made of
each object. The literature, films, and music a person selects would
be as valued a part of the fieldwork as the dream." In so doing, we
may "track the footsteps of the true self."

For me, if I go to someone's home, there are two things I am most
curious about: the books and music it contains. And the medicine
cabinet. Likewise, I should think that after I am gone, a
psychoanalytic fieldworker would be able to construct a fairly
accurate representation of me by merely rifling through my library,
and perhaps my priceless collection of Barbie Dolls.

Just consider the odd assortment of books in my sidebar. I am quite
sure that no one else on the planet has a matching list. There may
not be another person in history who has read and assimilated those
particular books. I am not saying that to boast, only to emphasize
the amazingly unique alchemy of choices we all embody when given the
opportunity to freely exercise those choices. As Petey once said,
"freedom is eccentricity lived," and he has a point. At the very
least, freedom is individuality lived, and it is very difficult to
live out your individuality without a range of choices before you.

I realize it's politically incorrect to say this, but in the course
of my work I have had the opportunity to evaluate a fair number of
people from second and third world cultures, and what always
impresses me about them is their essential sameness. Their life
stories are all remarkably similar, almost as if they were the same
person. And in a way they are, for they were not brought up in a
cultural space in which they could nurture and live out their own
metaphysical dream. Instead, their life is dreamt by others, either
vertically by a ruling class or horizontally by the collective. What
Bollas calls the person's "destiny drive" has been almost entirely
squelched. They do not live in a space of possibilities, only a sort
of invariant and unchanging now.

Pipes notes that "while property in some form is possible without
liberty, the contrary is inconceivable." And this is one thing that
frightens us about the illiberal left, for as we have said many
times, if you scratch a leftist, he will probably sue you. But
underneath the scratch, you will discover a conviction that your
property doesn't really belong to you, but to the collective. It is
simply a variation of the bald-faced assertion that "private property
is public theft." itself the absolute inversion of the seventh commandment.

Our most precious property is, of course, our own body. However, it
is amazing how late in history this idea emerged. For example, the
Islamic beasts we are fighting have no such notion. In their
cultures, your body belongs to the religious authorities, and only
they can dictate what you can and cannot do with it. For example, a
woman's body is certainly not her own. She has no choices (or only a
narrow range of choices established by others) of how to express it,
how to adorn it, and whom to share it with. (Memo to trolls -- please
don't even bother. The moral issue behind the abortion debate is not
whether a woman has a right to do whatever she pleases with her own
body, but whether she has that right over another's body. That's the
whole point.)

Slavery was still legal in parts of the Arab world as late as the
1960's, and widespread virtual slavery still exists today. This is
the ultimate theft, the theft of a human soul. But that is hardly the
only sort of soul-theft that goes on in the Islamic world. Again, the
idea that children are autonomous beings with their own inherent
rights and dignity is a very late historical development that has yet
to appear in most human cultures. Rather, children are "owned" by
their parents, which is a great barrier to psychohistorical
evolution. As a parent, your job is to create a space for your
child's true self to emerge, not to enforce your version of who your
child is and what he should be. Naturally this does not exclude
boundaries, discipline and values, but the point of these is to
facilitate true freedom, not to suppress it.

Most religions conceive of a mythical Golden Age, an edenic past in
which there was no private property. Likewise, they may speculate
about a hereafter in which there is no need for private property
because there is no lack of anything. But in between, in our embodied
state, there is a me and therefore a mine, a you and a yours. And
just as the development of individualism is facilitated by property,
property benefits from the arrangement as well. That is, most people
do not take proper care of things that do not belong to them. As they
say, no one ever took it upon himself to wash a rental car. Likewise,
"Primitive people are prone mindlessly to exterminate animals and
destroy forests, to the extent that they are physically able, without
any thought of the future" (Pipes). There is an obvious reason why
the most affluent countries with the strongest property rights also
have the best environmental records.

Likewise, only when one owns oneself will one feel compelled to
improve oneself. Here again, we see the left undermining this
fundamental assumption, with disastrous consequences. For the entire
basis of leftist victimology is that you are not sovereign over
yourself and are not responsible for your destiny. Rather, the
doctrine of victimology maintains that your life is directed by
others. If you are a woman, you are controlled by men. If you are
[ ], you are controlled by [ ] [ ]. If you are [ ], you are
controlled by "[ ]" In each case, personal agency is undermined and
replaced with a collective that, in the long run, will further erode
the liberty it claims to advance. [ ] quotas simply displace the
ceiling further down the road. For example, a recent study proved
that easing the standards for admitting [ ] to law school simply
results in [ ] lawyers with dead-end careers in which they never
make partner.

There are many "social justice" or "liberation theology" Christians
who maintain that Jesus was a sort of proto-communist, what with his
counsel to give to the poor. But there is a big difference between
voluntary renunciation of one's wealth and government seizure and
redistribution of one's wealth. Just as one must first be a man
before becoming a gentleman, one must first have sovereignty over
one's property before giving it away. And as a matter of fact,
statistics demonstrate that there is an inverse relationship between
high taxes and charitable giving. Those states with the lowest taxes
give the most, while those with the highest taxes-- "l iberal" places
such as Massachusetts -- give the least.

There is a reason why, say, China, has no qualms whatsoever about
stealing billions of dollars per year in American intellectual
property, for they now want the benefits of private property without
the sacred duty to protect it. For a Marxist, private property is
public theft, so when they steal American music, DVDs, and computer
programs, they're just doing what comes naturally to them. Clearly,
this is a perversion of private property that perhaps even Marx
didn't envision: "what's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine as well."

More: Click here and scroll down here to the seventh commandment
("property rights")
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/04/eighth-commandment-of-nihilism-whats.html

An argument fatal to the c ommunist theory, is suggested by the fact,
that a desire for property is one of the elements of our
nature. ~Herbert Spencer

So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that
it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the
general good of the whole community. ~William Blackstone

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally
said to have a property in his rights. ~James Madison

~ Janice

>
>On 1/15/08, Janice Matchett
><<mailto:janmatch@earthlink.net>janmatch@earthlink.net > wrote:
>At 05:48 PM 1/4/2008, j burg wrote:
>
>>Janice wrote: "who knows that one of the "good things" they hate is
>>private individual property rights."
>>
>>The Mexican statesman Colisimo once said: "We don't own land. We
>>just lease it from our grandchildren." I always thought that was a
>>good quote. That and similar statements got him assassinated, by
>>the way. ~ Burgy
>
>@ Let's see how that platitude -- I mean, "qood quote" works here:
>
>Acts 5: Barnabas sells a piece of property he owns and voluntarily
>gave all the money to the Apostles. Ananias and Saphira decided to
>do the same - except they sold a property ...and lied about how much
>they had been paid. Peter said, 'Ananias, why has Satan filled your
>heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and pretend that you were giving all
>the money you got from the sale to the church?... While it remained,
>was it not your own? .."
>
>Ananias and Saphira said, no it was not our own .. you know that we
>don't really own the land, we just lease it from our
>grandchildren. After all, we agree with the French socialist
>Proudhon who said, "Property is theft."
>
>~ Janice
>

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Received on Mon Jan 21 23:59:17 2008