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Collectivizing Private Property Lowell Ponte Most of us recognize private property as a cornerstone of our free capitalist society. So does Venezuela's Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, who in recent days reaffirmed his policy to create "collective property" that in the past five years has expropriated 4.6 million acres of "idle" or "underutilized" private land. This land, Chavez says, is being "redistributed" to the poor as state collective farms to undermine capitalism. This, said an Investor's Business Daily editorial last Tuesday, "is a political move. Chavez is going after these ranches in the same raw way Stalin went after the Kulaks – to consolidate power in a top-down communist state." Much the same has happened in Africa under racist Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe, who confiscated white-owned farmlands in the name of helping poor blacks – and then redistributed them to his cronies, and the best to his own wife. Result: food shortages and poverty. South Africa's far-left government, violating its promises, in recent days has begun the same sort of property confiscation. (Will Oprah's posh new private school there be next?) Chavez doubtless learned from his mentor Fidel Castro, who after expropriating the estates of Cuban sugar barons redistributed six of their biggest mansions to himself. One of America's two major political parties almost openly embraces Chavez's and Castro's ideology. American socialists who dishonestly expropriated for themselves the labels "liberal" or "progressive" are eager to impose such anti-private property, anti-capitalist policies, whole or piecemeal, in the United States. Today's "Liberalism," as the luminous P.J. O'Rourke so rightly observed, "is just Marxism sold by the drink." Story Continues Below
Recently in liberal Democrat-voting Seattle, teachers at Hilltop Children's Center took away Lego building blocks from young students. The reason: some of the enterprising students had built an elaborate "Legotown" and were developing pro-capitalist, pro-private property ideas. (Full disclosure: I dwell in the American hometown of Legoland.) After "Legotown" was accidentally destroyed, these students were eager to rebuild it as before. But as two of the teachers involved wrote in "Why We Banned Legos" in the Winter 2006 issue of Rethinking Schools Online: "We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded. "Our intention," wrote teachers Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin, "was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation." The elitist, private Hilltop Children's Center is supposed to use the teaching methods of schools of Reggio Emilia, which became an Italian "commune" eight centuries ago and long has been a seedbed of communist-socialist ideas in leftist northern Italy. Reggio Emilia's approach, writes Wikipedia, "expands on Italy's view of children as the collective responsibility of the state." But the idealistic "socializing" pedagogy of Reggio Emilia that emerged following World War II is not necessarily socialist. It uses whatever enthuses students as a doorway to help them discover new thoughts and explore ideas. Teachers in this method are supposed to be open-minded and to become "students" themselves, to let the ideas of students teach them. The method is to trust students to work out their own relationships with peers; to involve the input of parents and the community; and to be free-thinking, the opposite of ideological indoctrination by Politically Correct authoritarian teachers as was practiced in fascist Italy. Pelo and Pelojoaquin, with their apparent aim of anti-private property, pro-collectivist indoctrination, therefore violated the most basic ideals they were supposed to practice. The Legos were returned only after the young children agreed that each house in Legotown would be "a community house," that everybody's house would be "equal" and of "standard sizes," and that all would "have the same amount of power" over property. This Euro-socialist "social democracy" was imposed through what radical Noam Chomsky might call Pelo and Pelojoaquin's arm-twisting "manufacturing of consent." As the Heartland Institute's Maureen Martin indicated about this last February 28 in TCSDaily.com, Democrat-dominated Washington State has more of this kind of private property expropriation via eminent domain than most other states. But Washington State is not alone in its lust to confiscate private property. On March 28 a report in the liberal Cincinnati Enquirer groused about a new Quinnipiac University poll showing that "two-thirds of Ohio voters would ban the government taking of private property." This is terrible, suggested reporter Gregory Korte, because "so many functions of government – like roads, sewers, schools, parks – rely on eminent domain." But use of this power for such legitimate, traditional public purposes is not what has outraged most Americans. The outrage has come from governments, as in the Kelo case in Connecticut, using eminent domain merely to boost tax revenues by forcibly transferring property from one private owner to another – and that "other" often being a crony or campaign donor of the politicians wielding eminent domain. In effect, all property is becoming de facto government property over which politicians act as the "owners." Or to paraphrase Communist Woody Guthrie: "Your land is my land." Now you must pay fees to visit "your" collective property, the national parks, at least when and where enviro-tyrants such as Al Gore permit visitors. The always-contemptible Senator Joseph Biden (D.-Delaware) in 1991 attacked Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas for carrying a copy of University of Chicago legal scholar Richard Epstein's brilliant book Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain. Taxes used to redistribute wealth from one citizen to another, argues Epstein, are also property "takings" subject to 5th Amendment requirements for compensation. No wonder Democrats hate him as they plan the biggest tax increase in American history, to be justified by a growing "wealth gap" between rich and poor. Is any nation expanding private property rights? In theory, one – Communist China – although its new law affirming urban (but not rural) private property rights will be interpreted by its judges, all of whom are Communist Party members who follow government orders. Communist China, unlike the "capitalist" United States, also lets its citizens privately invest a portion of their Social Security. © NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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