The calendar year 2021 has been about sounding the alarm. Global interests may be trying to confiscate the very property we own and manage.
Let’s just get right into the writing of Silvio Gesell from his 1906 series called “The National Economic Order”:
“The long and murderous civil war in the United States was simply a struggle against landlords. The opposition to every kind of progress proceeds from the landlords; if it depended on them, freedom of movement and settlement and universal suffrage would long since have been sacrificed for the benefit of rent on land. Schools, universities and the Church were from the outset subordinated to the landowners’ interests.
“With nationalisation of the land all these troubles instantaneously disappear. Agrarian politics will melt like snow in the sun of liberation of the soil. With the abolition of private property in land every private pecuniary interest in politics vanishes into thin air. No one will be able to fill his pockets in Parliament. And politics that are no longer inspired by private interests, but by solicitude for the common weal, are not politics but, as we said, applied science. The representatives of the people will go deeply into the affairs of the State; they will be obliged to adopt methods of work which rule out passion and to examine sober matters soberly with the help of expert knowledge and statistics.”
The long and the short of the thought process of Silvio Gesell was clearly that the accumulation of anything of value would lead to conflict. He believed and promoted that currency must have an expiration date. The fact that a family could acquire cash or land would only lead to problems. If you look at the current situation we all find ourselves in today in the United States, we attempt to build equity in our operation simply by building value in the land that we are stewards of.
So whether you inherit the land or purchase the land, you struggle to pay property tax each year just to say you own it. Then if you pass it on, your kids can’t afford to inherit the land because the federal government is going to be standing there with their hand out to take the first 60% if you are lucky or perhaps even more.
Let’s explore the theory that land ownership by individuals actually leads to conflict. Ironically or not, I am writing this piece on what is officially Columbus Day 2021. We might want to take a realistic look at the warring tribes. According to any search from a reliable source of information, the wars between tribes before European settlement were anything but neighborly.
“While eastern Indians fought almost exclusively to achieve retribution, southwestern Indians clashed with their neighbors both to avenge previous wrongs and to loot them of material possessions. Apaches and Navajos, for example, raided both each other and the sedentary Pueblo Indian tribes in an effort to acquire goods through plunder.”
At the end of the day, so many among us wish to convince others that working for the common good is the premier system. In my opinion, socialism, communism and tyranny continue to be killers of mankind in the history of the world, too. When it comes to property rights, I will continue to use the Bible as my reference. God, on several occasions, shares with us that personal ownership is the very fundamental measure to each individual’s ability to express their best reflection of man made in God’s image.
Editor’s note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the views of High Plains Journal. Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].