HiPointDem (1,142 posts) Profile Journal Send DU Mail Ignore
Privatizing The Commons
As we're going through a period of renewed privatization of the commons, I thought these articles had some interesting historical background.
The Things We Forgot to Remember
Nearly 800 years after it was signed, Magna Carta is still venerated as the bedrock of English justice and liberty. Yet its impact was a good deal less far-reaching than is popularly believed. Another document, signed two years after Magna Carta, was the true charter for the common man.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/thingsweforgottoremember/pip/8lj9c/
The Charter of the Forest
The Charter of the Forest is a charter originally sealed in England by the young King Henry III...the charter re-established rights of access to the royal forest for free men that had been eroded by the Conqueror and his heirs...the royal forests were the most important potential source of fuel...pasture...turf... this charter was almost unique in providing a degree of economic protection for free men...
The Charter provided a right of common access to (royal) private lands... It also rolled back the area encompassed by the designation "forest" to that of Henry II's time, essentially freeing up lands that had become more and more restricted as King Richard and King John designated greater and greater areas of land to become royal forest...."forest" in this context didn't necessarily mean treed areas, but could include fields, moor or even farms and villages...
It repealed the death penalty for stealing venison... it also abolished mutilation as a lesser punishment...some clauses in the Laws of Forests remained in force until the 1970s...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_Forest
Privatization of the Commons
For centuries the Open Field System was the dominant economic agriculture system of England (and most other places in Europe). Resources were shared in the community and the community regulated its uses....So what brought this system to an end? Contrary to what some would have you believe, it didn't die on its own...it was knifed in the back. And the hundreds of thousands that depended on this system had their livelihoods destroyed...leaving a huge swath of the population homeless, penniless, and without means to feed their families...
When Henry VIII was crowned King in 1509 the country's treasury was in fine shape.... By the 1530's the country was nearly broke. It just so happens that 1531 was the year that Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England...The following year the Dissolution of the Monasteries became law, as their property was confiscated... Henry...turned around and sold the land to the wealthy Tudor gentry at bargain basement prices...
(note: Every instance of privatizing public assets that I have ever read about, led to those assets being sold at pennies on the dollar to the politically connected wealthy...)
The abbeys were one of the primary sources of charity and medical care in the country, thus gutting the weak safety net that was in place....Henry VIII, now flush with quick cash went on an empire building spree. For two centuries the Irish had been driving the English back towards Dublin...by 1541 the English controlled only an area of 20 miles in radius...The Pale. But that year Henry crowned himself King of Ireland... Combined with the process of buying off Irish Lords, Ireland soon become part of the English Empire...
All of this war is expensive, and by 1542 the treasury was in danger of depletion yet again.... Known simply as The Great Debasement, Henry did...the modern equivalent of adding zeros to today's fiat currency....For the poor, all they saw was rapidly increasing prices without a similar increase in wages...the wealthy landlords...saw a decrease in the value of the rents they charged....
But the wealthy gentry had a way out. For more than a century the price of sheep's wool had been increasing because of strong demand on the continent (i.e. turning exports into hard currency). What stood in the way... was thousands of subsistence farmers (tenants) on their lands....the farmers were evicted, the former farming lands were enclosed...the fields were turned to pasture for the sheep...What's more, the wealthy... started enclosing land that didn't belong to them... These enclosures turned common land into owned land...
...in 1549, when the first round of full-scale enclosure riots began...the economic situation in Britain had become intolerable. Poverty rates which were normally around 20% had spiked to over 50%.... (the turmoil resulted in the Levellers movement...)
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/privatizing-commons
I hadn't known that Henry VIII's war spending was the proximate cause of the Enclosures in England.
What I see is an unchecked executive using bureaucratic mission-creep to confiscate ever larger swathes of private property for his own use. I see a war on the traditional church and the nationalization of private assets to be doled out to select cronies. I see tax law written to distort markets.
What I don't see is a government leaving people the **** alone in their homes, jobs or churches.
IOW: this smells exactly like the Stimulus, Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, Solyndra, the EPA, the NLRB and "We Can't Wait."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002658073
