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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (8007)	4/13/2006 4:23:41 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

I'm glad you brought up the Romans. Both the British and the Romans had more sophisticated private property laws than their neighbors and both prospered tremendously because of this. Becoming wealthy was a consequence of owning their own and their wealth was used to conquer other lands. As in our own legal system, much of Roman law revolves around settling disputes around property. For many years it was illegal to build houses with common walls because it was thought it would be impossible to settle a dispute on property that was commonly held. But in Rome, only citizens of Rome had full property rights and protection under Roman law and at the highest ebb of the Roman empire only 25% of the population were citizens. As the empire grew, so did the number of slaves captured from conquered lands. At the height, they had more slaves than citizens. Laws that applied to citizens did not apply to slaves nor those who were not citizens. If they had the rule of law, it certainly didn't pass the test of being applied blindly to everyone equally. They in fact discouraged owning property unless you were rich enough to employ slave labor because some fairness seeking politician thought it horrible that returning soldiers were without property, wandering from place to place without a home, so they passed laws to redistribute property to those who had served (sound familiar, it was the first in a long series of land reforms throughout history that involved taking land from those who owned it, improved it and giving it to some more "deserving" group) This made the politician very popular but he was soon found dead floating down the river. The redistribution didn't have fairness as it's goal, but was used as a way to bolster the legions. The only obligation to these land grants were that you had to continue to serve in the almost continual military engagements. Hard to farm when you are thousands of miles away. Some eventually ditched their property and hid out in the slums to avoid endless military service. The point is, you can't have laws that provide for the sanctity and security of private property and then turn around on a popular whim and steal that property to give away to some other group (no matter how noble the cause) without making some serious enemies as well as destroying that security. Without some assurance that what you work and slave for will remain yours, why bother? Notice how I'm putting the Austrians including Von Mises, Von Hayek, and Friedman, on their heads And they'd call for yours in a nano second if they were in the room.