government theory

Chapter 32 On Property (3)
41．Few tribes exemplify this more clearly than the American Indian.These tribes are rich in land but poor in life.Nature, as to any other people, has provided them with an abundance of goods--that which produces an abundance of food and clothing--fertile land, but as they do not labor to improve, they enjoy Our daily necessities are less than one percent of ours.There, a ruler with a large fertile land is not as good as a rough worker in England in terms of food, clothing and housing.

42．In order to make this clearer, we need only study the series of progress of a few objects of daily life before they come to our use, and see how much of their value is derived from human industry.Bread, wine, and cloth are daily necessities in great quantities.Yet, if labor could not furnish us with these more useful articles, our daily wants could be satisfied only by acorns, water, leaves, or hides.Bread is worth more than acorns, wine than water, cloth or silk more than leaves, hides, or moss, all by labor and industry.The one is what nature alone supplies us with; the other is what we get by our blood, sweat, and industry.Any one need only calculate the value of the latter, to see that it exceeds the former to a very great extent, and to see that labor is the greater part of the value of the things we enjoy in the world.We can hardly say that the land which produces these means occupies any part of its value, at most it occupies a very small part; and its value is so small that we even call land that is left to its own accord and is not grazed, cultivated or cultivated. Badlands, otherwise, we'll find that its benefits are next to zero.

This proves that a large population is better than a large territory, and that the improvement and proper use of land is an important art of government.If a monarch is as wise as a god, and uses the established laws of freedom to protect and encourage the legitimate labor of human beings, and opposes the oppression of power and the partiality of parties, then his neighboring countries will soon feel the pressure.We will discuss this issue further below.Now back to the ongoing argument.

43．An acre of land which here yields twenty bushels of wheat a year, will undoubtedly have the same natural fixed value as another acre in America, which, if cultivated in the same manner, would yield the same crop.Whereas the man's gain from this land is five pounds a year, that from that land may be nothing, if all that an Indian gains is valued and sold here; to one-thousandth of the income of the locals.It can be seen that it is labor that adds most of the value to the land. Without labor, the land is almost worthless.By labour, we obtain the greatest part of all the useful products of the land.For the stalks, husks, and bread of an acre of wheat are worth more than the produce of an acre of equally fertile and barren land, all due to labour.

Not only the labor of the plowman, the toil of the reaper and the thresher, and the sweat of the baker are counted in the bread we eat, even those who domesticate the cattle, dig and smelt iron and ore, cut and prepare The labor of those who use wood to make plows, millstones, ovens, or many other implements, so long as the work necessary from the sowing of the seed to the making of the bread, is accounted for as labour, and admitted to have such effects.Nature and land provide only data of little value in themselves.Every loaf of bread requires labor before it can be eaten, and if we could trace its origins, it would be a strange list of items—iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, brick, coal, Lime, cloth, dyes, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials used on board (the ships brought all the items used by the workers in various parts of the work), and the like, are too numerous to list, or at least too tedious.

44．It can be seen from this that although natural things are shared by people, since people are their own masters, rulers of themselves and their own actions or labor, they themselves have the basis of property.While invention and art improve life, and provide conveniences of every kind, most of what he employs for his own subsistence or enjoyment is not in common with other men, but entirely his own.

45．Therefore, at the beginning, as long as someone is willing to exert labor on the things that were originally shared, labor will give him property rights; but for a long time, most things are still shared, and it is still more expensive than what humans can use. many.In the early days of human beings, in most cases, they were only satisfied with the unprocessed necessities provided by nature.Later in some parts of the world (where, due to the increase of population and domestic animals, and the use of money, the land was not enough, so it had some value), some societies established their own boundaries and regulated by their internal laws. Property, by contract and agreement, establishes property created by labor.Some countries expressly or tacitly renounce all rights to the land occupied by each other through the conclusion of a covenant, thereby giving up their claims to the original and natural public rights of those countries according to a common agreement. There are individual parts and regions of the globe that have codified property rights between them - having said that, there are still large tracts of land (where the inhabitants have not yet agreed to share their common currency with others) that are barren , more than can be reclaimed or used by the people who live on it, so they are still public.However, this hardly happens among those who have agreed to use money.

46．The great majority of things which are of real use to human life, and the necessaries of existence which were first sought after by men in the commons, as are now sought after by the Americans, are generally not durable unless they are put to use. Consume it, and it will rot and destroy itself.Gold, silver, and diamonds are valued more by the inclinations or agreements of men than by their practical usefulness and necessities of life.Of those good things which nature has provided for all, every man has, as has been said, a right to possess as much as he can use, and he has a property right to all that is affected by his labor; Everything that alters nature from its original state, insofar as it exists, belongs to him.Whoever gathers a hundred bushels of acorns or apples acquires a property right in them; as soon as they are gathered they become the property of man.

He must take care to use them before they rot, or else he takes more than his due, and robs others; indeed, it is folly and dishonesty to hoard more than he can use. .If he gives away the surplus, so that it does not rot in vain in his possession, he makes use of it; The dried fruit that can be preserved for a year has not damaged anything.As long as nothing was wasted in his hands, he did not spoil common property, nor destroy what belonged to other people.And if he would exchange his nuts for a piece of metal of the color he likes, his sheep for some shells, or his wool for a shining pebble or a diamond, to be kept in his lifetime collection, he would not infringe on the rights of others. right.He could pile up as much as he liked of these durable things.Whether it exceeds the scope of his legitimate property does not depend on how much he possesses, but whether there is anything that will be destroyed in his hands.

47．That's how money became popular—a durable thing that people could keep without breaking, and they agreed to exchange it for really useful but perishable necessities.

48．Different degrees of hard work will result in people acquiring different amounts of property. Similarly, the invention of money has given people the opportunity to continue to accumulate and expand wealth.Suppose there were such an island, cut off from all possible commerce in the rest of the world, containing only a hundred families, but possessing sheep, horses, cows, and other useful animals, nutritious fruit, and capable of producing Land with enough grain to feed a thousand times as many people.But everything on the island is either too common or fragile to be used as currency.What reason would a man there have to increase his property, either in what his labor produced, or in exchanging with others for equally perishable and useful goods, when the supplies for his household and consumption were plentiful?As long as there is nothing durable and rare and at the same time very valuable to be accumulated, men will certainly enlarge their possessions, which are freely available to them, and which are so fertile.Now, if a man owns ten thousand or one hundred thousand acres of good land in the middle of America, he cultivates it well, and has plenty of cattle and sheep, but he cannot trade with the rest of the world, and by selling the produce he cannot What would he think of the land in exchange for currency?Obviously, enclosing this kind of land is not cost-effective.We shall see him retaining only a portion of the land that would provide for himself and his family, and returning the excess to the natural wilderness.

49．Therefore, the world was like America in the early days, and it was like America before, because there was no such thing as currency anywhere at that time.As soon as any one finds among his neighbors something that can be used as money or has money value, he will immediately begin to enlarge his land.

50．But since gold and silver are of little use to human life, compared with clothing, food, chariots, and horses, and their value comes only from the agreement of men, and depends largely on the scale of labour, we can easily understand that people have allowed Unequal and unequal possession of land.They found a way, by tacit and voluntary agreement, to enable a man to possess more land than his own consumption, by exchanging the surplus produce for gold and silver which could be hoarded without harming anyone; These metals do not perish in the hands of the possessor.The reason why people can go beyond the scope of society, without having to turn things into unequal private property through social contracts, is only because they assign a value to gold and silver and acquiesce in the use of money.While the government stipulates property rights by law, the possession of land is determined by a written constitution.

51．On this, I think it is not difficult to see how labor can establish property in the original natural commons, and how it can be limited to the point where it is consumed to satisfy our wants; Dispute is possible, and there can be no doubt as to how much property the right of property permits.Rights and necessities of life go hand in hand; for a man is entitled to all that he can exert his labor on, and at the same time he will not expend his labor on what he cannot enjoy.This will not let people have any disputes about property rights, and will not allow things that infringe on the rights of others.That part of a man's appropriation is easy to see, and it is useless and dishonest to take too much, or to take more than he needs.

(End of this chapter)