One of the most evil works of collectivism — whether it be called communism, state capitalism, socialism, "people’s democracy," or what you will — is the destruction of true private property. For the longing of man to have something genuinely his own goes back beyond the roots of civilization.
In the Nazi and communist concentration camps, the wretched prisoners clung, as their last hope, to some particular patch of floor in cell or barracks, where they could sleep every night and crouch during the day. The most extreme cruelty which their jailer could contrive was to shift their victims, frequently, from spot to spot or building, so that even this last show of private property was denied them. They had nothing to call their own.
As the bull, doomed in the ring, returns after every charge to his little patch of stamping ground, so man requires innately some tiny territory that is his. This point is made sagaciously by Mr. Robert Ardrey in his book, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man.
In man, as in most other animals (not counting insects), Mr. Ardrey points out the instinct for status and one’s own domain is stronger even than the appetite for sex. It is this fact which Marxists and other utopian reformers ignore, to the great suffering of modern mankind.
"We, the approximate Class of 1930," Mr. Ardrey writes, "today furnish trusted and vital leadership to world thought, world politics, world society, and to whatever may exist of world hope. But we do not know that the human drive to acquire possession is the simple expression of an animal instinct many hundreds of times older than the human race itself." The rediscovery of this fact, Ardrey goes on to explain, refutes Marxism.
Nearly 90 years ago the great legal authority, Henry Maine, declared that civilization is the product of personal property. This thesis is reaffirmed in our time by Dr. Gottfried Dietze, in his slim, important book, In Defense of Property. If you deprive man of true property, you work for the destruction of culture and a just civil social order.
Human nature is constant. We moderns are not really different, in longing and character, from the ancient Egyptians whose hopes and lamentations we can read in their tombs. And if we deprive modern humanity of one of its natural satisfactions and supports, we reduce mankind to something less than it ought to be.
So it is necessarily evil to be rootless, to own nothing, to be simply a little insecure speck in a kind of tapioca pudding society. And the more personal a piece of property is, the healthier for man it becomes. Merely owning a stock certificate or a bond or a deposit book does not satisfy the instinct for property — though doubtless this is better than no property at all.
Thus the crofter in the Hebrides, or the Portuguese fisherman in his tiny cottage, in one considerable sense is a happier and truer man than the most successful industrial manager in Soviet Russia. He possesses his own little domain, while the industrial commissar is lost in an impersonal, propertyless, gray insect world.
(Copyright 1964, General Features Corp.)
***
Abraham Lincoln
Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is house-less pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built. I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.
Address to the Working Men’s Association of New York, 1864