Dear Friends,
It seems to me, one thing that is known but not spoken, is if you steal a big thing from a small person, there will be little chance of facing consequences, but if you steal a small thing from a big person, you will most certainly be punished severely for it. We all know this yet no one speaks of it. Is this a good thing, that those with little property are less entitled to it, than people with an abundance of property? Our government, culture and society seem to believe that is the case. Yet, I don’t believe we as a society have had the debate necessary to determine, if that is the kind of society we want to live in. Perhaps it is a good thing that society values the property of the rich far more than that of the poor, although, I tend to think that all property should be equally valued because of natural law.
My yard stick for all new ideas, is the Golden Rule, how does a novel idea comport with that measure of human heartedness? The Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have others do unto you, keep the fences to the right as you would have your neighbor to the left keep his, “the treatment you would not have for yourself, do not hand out to others,” etc… there are as many ways to describe the Golden Rule as there are ways to implement it. As a measure of the human heartedness of any word, thought or action, there is none better than to think how would you feel if someone else were saying, thinking or doing what you are doing, thinking, saying to you? People who embrace this Rule live better lives than those who don’t, but those who don’t argue their lives are theirs to live… and I agree.
For a society to be free it must live under natural law, or as close as possible, since natural law is the law God, or the Universe, placed us in the state of nature. The farther a society gets from natural law necessarily, the more despotic it becomes. Because it moves the individual away from the state of nature, (perfect liberty). Under natural law all men are equal as is their property. If two men owned similar implements made of iron, and they placed those implements outside in the rain for a year, would the tool of the wealthier man corrode less? Would the tool of the poorer man corrode more? No, all other things being equal, the tools will corrode at the same rate. This is common sense. Therefore, nature itself does not draw a distinction, between the property of the wealthy to that of the poor.
How do we know that poor people’s property is less valued by society, than that of the rich, by example, if a homeless man comes to a police station and reports he has been robbed of everything he has but the clothes on his back, (and those are shabby), he can further identify the perpetrator and his property… will he be taken as seriously as a man in a thousand dollar suit, who claims to have been pick pocketed out of fifty bucks? Maybe it’s a good thing the police are more interested in the pickpocket rather than the two homeless fighting over trash in a stolen shopping cart? Or is it? I am sure you can think of dozens of ways the property of the poor is less valued by government, culture and our society… than that of the rich.
So maybe we should think this through, and decide as a society, if we want all people’s property to be valued equally. Maybe we don’t? The argument would probably follow two tracks. The human hearted and the pragmatic. While they would appear to be at odds, I would argue they are one in the same. To value the property of one over another is clearly a violation of natural law. Moreover, the market itself is based on the concept that all property is valued equally. If one person’s ounce of gold is worth more than another’s, by dint of wealth, than the market must cease to function. Those are both pragmatic arguments. Plus, to value one person’s property less than that of another, is to hold that person as less than the other… which is counter to the Golden Rule by any measure.
Sincerely
John Pepin
