Property rights in the west are predominantly rights to property created by the people concerned. Property rights in ye olde worlde were rights of conquest to property which was naturally occurring, such as forests, fisheries, gold, oil, land, lookouts.
When somebody buys land in a city, the land intrinsically is worth nothing more than land out in the sticks, but because the city has been created out of people's efforts, the right to occupy land is of high value.
So 'western' property rights represent something quite different to the right to found wealth, such as oil, though there are plenty of found-wealth property rights in the west too, though far less important than the oil found in the Saudi Arabia for example.
The transition from found wealth to Libertarian wealth based on free and voluntary exchange of value has been a long, arduous and bloody effort, still very far from complete, though progress is constant.
Note that the richest people these days depend not at all on found wealth. Gates, Buffett, Ellison, the Google Guys and so on are all purely 'creative efforts' rich. None of them found and conquered wealth.
Even the British royal family's conquered and inherited wealth is also-ran stuff these days.
Mqurice |
