FACES AND PLACES: The noblest triumph (08/22/99)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

The noblest triumph

Although Natalia Vitrenko, Marxism's latest poster-girl, has recently dropped to second place in the most recent presidential poll in Ukraine, she remains a formidable force. She calls herself a "true Marxist" and like other candidates of the left - Oleksander Tkachenko, Oleksander Moroz and Petro Symonenko - she is committed to Ukraine's Soviet traditions.

Leonid Kuchma may be still leading in the polls, but leftist ideas dominate. Realizing this, Mr. Kuchma continues to list leftward toward the Stalinist past by clamping down on the press and nudging Ukraine towards a kissy-kissy relationship with Russia. As the political landscape heats up, Ukraine's real needs are being neglected.

The people of Ukraine will remain in bondage until the government meets two significant milestones as it slouches towards a democratic market economy: the establishment of the rule of law and the sanctification of private property. Although the importance of legal contracts in a market economy has been given lip service by some Western advisors, private ownership is rarely mentioned as a precondition for individual liberty.

The importance of individual property rights is reviewed by Tom Bethell in "The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages," an engrossing analysis of the symbiotic relationship between private ownership and liberty. Put simply, no private property, no freedom.

Part of the reason that Western advisors, especially Americans, remain skittish about the concept of private property in developing nations is their schooling. "In economics, best-selling textbooks by Paul Samuelson and others either skirted questions of ownership or relegated them to a paragraph under the rubric 'capitalist ideology,' " writes Mr. Bethell. "Since World War II, almost all such texts have argued that a more rapid growth could be attained with state ownership than with private property," he notes. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics, believed that "private property is theft" and that "the institution of private property has to keep proving itself." For Harvard professor John Rawls, private property can lead to economic inequalities that are undeserved and call for "redress."

A somewhat simplified way to divide historical thinking regarding property is to divide it between two opposing views of human nature: the "future perfect" romantics who believe human nature can be substantially changed and avarice erased; and the "present imperfect" realists who argue that despite great technological changes human nature has remained essentially the same for centuries.

The father of future perfect thought in the West is Plato, who described an ideal society in "The Republic." In his perfect world, property would be communal.

For Plato and other utopians, human perfectibility could be achieved through mass education, a concept popularized during the Enlightenment. John Locke believed man was a "tabula rasa" when born and could be molded by the learning environment. "Education can be anything" declared Claude Helvetius, a French philosophe. It was 18th century French thought, especially the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that spawned the Jacobins, bloody revolutionaries who planned to create a new society by forcibly destroying all vestiges of the old. Thousands of innocent lives were sacrificed to this ideal before the Jacobins self-destructed.

Although not as bloody, Americans have also had their share of utopian failures. Both the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, initially established on the principle of common ownership, did not begin to prosper until private ownership was introduced. Communes later emerged in Bishop Hill, Ill., Oneida, N.Y., and Amana, Iowa. The most infamous of American communes was Indiana's New Harmony colony, established by British millionaire Robert Owen in 1824. He believed that marriage, religion and private property represented the "trinity of evil" that prevented humanity from experiencing sublime bliss on earth. All of the communes eventually disbanded, some after causing much pain and uncertainty to their inhabitants. Interestingly, the Oneida and Amana colonies eventually became free-enterprise zones that today produce flatware and electric household items, respectively.

Although it lasted for only three years, Karl Marx was impressed by Robert Owen's Indiana experiment, especially his perception of private property. Vladimir Lenin managed to eradicate two of Robert Owen's three "evils" and even took a stab at eliminating formal marriage. The formation of Homo Sovieticus became the goal of all Soviet institutions, beginning with the schools. Millions of innocent lives were lost before the great Soviet experiment was relegated to the trash heap of history.

Among past imperfect thinkers one finds Aristotle, Plato's pupil ("what is common to the greater number gets the least amount of care"), Edmund Burke ("the power of perpetuating our property tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself"), 18th century economist Adam Smith (property that is earned is "the most sacred and inviolable"), Abraham Lincoln ("I take it that it is best for all to leave each man to acquire property as fast as he can") and such Nobel prize economists as Friedrich von Hayek ("when it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself") and Milton Friedman ("you cannot have a free society without private property").

John Stuart Mill, an 18th century economist summarized the sanctity of private property by quoting writer Arthur Young: "Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine-year lease of a garden and he will convert it into a desert." It is a universal truth that people will not exert themselves when they cannot reap the benefits of their individual labors.

"Private property," writes Mr. Bethell, empowers people because it "builds a domain of autonomy around individuals, permitting them to aspire to something more than obedience. Because they can secure the fruits of efforts, they can make long-range plans."

This is exactly what Ms. Vitrenko and her Neanderthal colleagues in the Ukrainian Parliament fear the most. Securing property rights means more power to the people, the end of a slave mentality, and the disappearance of the parasitic Soviet way. Unless these miscreants are swept out of office, Ukraine will continue to be ruled by opportunism, lies and thuggery.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: mbkuropas@compuserve.com

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