(Not So Brief) Thought #7: Property Rights and Human Resources

One of the essential ingredients for economic development, in tribes and nations, is a fair and reliable set of property rights. If nobody feels secure in their possessions, nobody will produce anything or build any wealth. We must exercise control and ownership over the fruits of our labors. Otherwise, whatever we produce may be stolen from us without recourse.

In an earlier article, I mentioned that in a tribal economic system, a tribe’s greatest economic resource is its human resources. Many people can get much work done, both for their own benefit, and for the benefit of their neighbors, and ultimately mankind. However, if nobody feels secure in their rights to associate, and particularly their right to associate with their family, then nobody will take the initiative to develop those human resources.

Insecurity can take different forms. If there is no protection against wild animals or criminals, then our tribe’s members may be kidnapped, or torn by beasts. Alternatively, if another group of people claims a superior right of authority to our tribal members, they can be conscripted into the service of others. Only if the members of a tribe are allowed an unconditional right to associate as they choose, can the tribe feel at ease to develop its resources to their highest potential.

In twenty countries around the world, children are pressed into military service, including combat. In many of these places, they are abducted or otherwise given no choice. In some cases, the ruling class claims a superior right over the children of the ruled underclass and conscripts the children by right. This ensures that the poorest members of the society remain poor, as they do not have the benefit of increasingly empowered generations to improve their family’s position. The idea of training children for a better life simply does not compute.

Perhaps as disturbing as the forced military conscription of children, and every bit as damaging to a tribe’s human resources, are the xenophobic and imperialist actions of some groups to control the religion, culture, and society, of everyone around them. Imagine the following scenario:

Imagine a group of people living by themselves away from the mainstream society. They don’t interact with people outside their group. They are suspicious of outsiders. They live differently. They wear strange clothes and sing strange songs. They don’t even talk the same way as those outside the group. They have a peculiar religion which nobody else understands. The little bit that people do understand of their religion, they find utterly appalling. Some of them even have strange marriage practices including polygamy. They are thought of as a dangerous cult. They have one leader who dictates to them the way they should live. Many of them are directly descended from their leader. They have peculiar customs. In fact, their customs are considered abusive by the outside society, and those outside believe that these customs will mean hell and eternal damnation for the people in the group. They just aren’t “Christian.” (Read: they don’t conform to the dominant society’s vision of “God’s Law.”) Even worse, they provide living proof that it is possible to live a different lifestyle than what is mainstream. This is highly embarrassing to the outside culture which feels that its ways are ideal.

Now the dominant society feels so threatened by the few people living in this group, that it decides the group must be assimilated. The children are separated from their parents because they are the easiest members to re-educate. The society believes it is “rescuing” the children from lives of oppression, depravity, and deprivation.  The adults are given up as a lost cause and any more children they may sire and bear are likewise taken away. The children are given to strangers and sent to a public school far away from their homes where they cannot contact their families or friends. They are raised in the traditions of the dominant culture. They are forced to wear the clothes of the dominant culture and practice the religious traditions of the dominant culture. They are forbidden to practice the religion of their parents. They are taught that their former way of life was primitive and inferior to that of the dominant culture, and that their families and anyone else who continue in the old ways are “stupid, dirty, and backwards.” They are told that the outside society is going to teach them a better way of life, one that will give them more choices and opportunities. If they express a desire to return to their parents, they are shamed and humiliated. All of this is done “in the best interests of the children.” It is for their own good, and it is believed that they will be thankful later for it. Some day they will realize just how savage, neglectful, and abusive their former culture was.

It is the hope of the dominant society that years later, when the children are finally allowed to seek out their parents after a full indoctrination into the mainstream culture, the children will not return to the ways of their parents, and indeed they won’t even fit in with the old culture. Their new society has changed them, and now owns them. The way of their tribe is lost forever.

Does this scenario seem familiar? Is it even possible in a free society? I am, of course, speaking of the American Indian Assimilation Policy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. This policy had a devastating effect on the Indian tribes. They lost a whole generation of their members. They lost human resources. And they continue to be among the most impoverished peoples on the North American continent. This is one more example of the ruling class claiming a superior right to the children of the ruled underclass. As long as the underclass cannot feel secure even in its families, there can be no economic development within the tribe.

Could history repeat itself? Students of history know that history always repeats itself. People do not learn the lessons of history and they continue to make the same mistakes, over and over and over again. Stay tuned. Again, unconditional freedom to associate with one’s family is an essential ingredient for human resource development within the tribe. If we take away that family security, we take away all incentives to develop the family. If we take away that security and those rights for only a small group within society, we take it away for everyone. “Nobody is free until everybody is free.” We must not imagine that because we are not the target group today, that our freedom is assured tomorrow. And we should not imagine that if we had lived one hundred years ago, that we would have been more sensitive and left that strange culture alone.