tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post1515437437099259135..comments2023-10-25T08:46:20.242-05:00Comments on The Distributist Review: Bear Stearns and the Moral HazardJohn Médaillehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16463267750952578888noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-83806823104783170882008-03-23T07:48:00.000-05:002008-03-23T07:48:00.000-05:00"It wasn't the purchase of land, it was the theft ..."It wasn't the purchase of land, it was the theft of it. It was the enclosure of the commons, the seizure of the monasteries and the guild lands and the turning of them over to a new class. The land was taken from peasants by the king, and from the king by the capitalists. It was the switch from land widely distributed by tenancy and fief, to land held in alodium..."<BR/><BR/>There are several dubious points here, some of them rather academic like the difference between an alligator and a crocodile:-<BR/><BR/>- Although English law recognises the concept of allody, no allods were ever actually created; after the Norman Conquest all lands were ultimately the King's. So, technically, none of this was theft, just seizure without just compensation. For simplicity, elsewhere in this post I will call it "theft" even though that is inaccurate.<BR/><BR/>- No allods were created when these lands were released either, though de facto control lapsed and many associated property rights were indeed transferred.<BR/><BR/>- Seizing monasteries was "theft", but the clock doesn't start there; land had passed to monasteries in various ways that were often improper and could be called theft or fraud with equal justice (see the <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutes_of_Mortmain" REL="nofollow">Statutes of Mortmain</A>). Usually, that too led to peasants being turned loose, though in smaller total numbers and over a longer period of time, since monasteries didn't need peasants for a militia base. No <I>further</I> injustice was done by seizing these monastery lands; this land was <I>not</I> taken from the peasants then, that had been done during the Norman Conquest if not earlier (in fact, no English peasant had <I>any</I> better ultimate claim than conquest anyway - how do you think they got there in the first place? Cornwall and Wales may have been different, of course). The real harm done to the peasants was of a different sort, i.e. being deprived of their livelihoods without compensation.<BR/><BR/>"...the creation of the landless proletariat, who crowded the cities looking for work" - no, they mostly became "sturdy beggars" roaming the country from town to town (<I>not</I> cities, usually), looking for food and shelter rather than work, as commemorated in the rhyme "Hark, hark, the dogs do bark / The beggars are coming to town...". They certainly didn't stay put; each lot's bargaining chip for begging was that they would leave if helped.<BR/><BR/>"It was the collapse of the wage system for the worker and the craftsman, whose wages did not recover for three centuries"; actually, that had a completely different cause, the Spanish new world driven silver inflation. What the lower bargaining power did was prevent market mechanisms restoring the real wage level - it didn't make it crash in the first place.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-78260315118762277312008-03-22T00:06:00.000-05:002008-03-22T00:06:00.000-05:00Viking,It wasn't the purchase of land, it was the ...Viking,<BR/>It <I>wasn't</I> the purchase of land, it was the <I>theft</I> of it. It was the enclosure of the commons, the seizure of the monasteries and the guild lands and the turning of them over to a new class. The land was taken from peasants by the king, and from the king by the capitalists. It was the switch from land widely distributed by tenancy and fief, to land held in alodium, in freehold and free of social obligations. It was the switch from a system of customary and fixed rents to "economic rent," or what the market could bear. It was the dispossession of the peasant and the creation of the landless proletariat, who crowded the cities looking for work. It was the collapse of the wage system for the worker and the craftsman, whose wages did not recover for three centuries. <BR/><BR/>The balance of power changed completely, dispossessing, in the end, both peasant and king.<BR/><BR/>As far as machinery goes, it was an age of machines; the Englishman thought he lived in a marvelous new age. Already, by the time of the Doomsday book (1086), there were 5,600 water and tidal mills in England, used in every aspect of industry: grain, fulling of wool, metals. After the change, the pace of innovation slowed and almost stopped, and would not recover until the 18th century. <BR/><BR/>You can find traces of capitalism in any age in which you care to look for it. But you cannot find it taking over power so quickly and so completely. As far as communism having a starting date, you have a starting date for a communist government, but not a communist system, since such a system is impossible; it cannot feed the people. The best you can do is state capitalism.John Médaillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16463267750952578888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-64520081783908071762008-03-21T22:57:00.000-05:002008-03-21T22:57:00.000-05:00I'm a bit confused here. I haven't read enough of...I'm a bit confused here. I haven't read enough of the history involved to comment on that, but how does the purchase of LAND make the buyer a capitalist? I'd thought that would make him a landlord (or her a landlady, not that that was likely particularly common at the time). To be a capitalist, my belief was that one had to own productive machinery, and for there to be enough such people for them together to control the economy, there had to be a source of power which wasn't available in Henry VIII's time. Such a source only came into widespread enough use in the late 18th century with the harnessing of steam power.<BR/><BR/>Btw, wouldn't Marxian socialism be another such system having a fixed starting date, beginning in late 1917?<BR/><BR/>VikingVikinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06660688426762417651noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-56354055414573543832008-03-21T19:12:00.000-05:002008-03-21T19:12:00.000-05:00Think it through. Henry VIII needed funds, but the...Think it through. Henry VIII needed funds, but the trick he worked needed people with funds already around. Fiat currency let first the French revolutionaries and then Napoleon work the trick, first in France and then in the countries they occupied or hegemonised, but that wasn't available to Henry VIII. Henry VII had stabilised the weak economy he found by ending the inflationary use of tally stick fiat currency (they were released at a discount as tax prepayments), and that could only have been restarted with a huge discount because of inflationary expectations that had built up after the earlier use - it would have cost too much.<BR/><BR/>So, there had to have been enough development already in place in England by 1535 for fund owners to be able to come forward at all. Sir Thomas More's account shows the capitalism process at work building that, in 1516.<BR/><BR/>Yes, the dissolution of the monasteries accelerated things. No, it does <I>not</I> mark the beginning of capitalism in England - because it shows us that a pool of capital had already arrived by then. It marks a point within an established capital base. Call it a turning point if you like - it was that - but not a beginning. For what it's worth, the dissolution proceeded in stages, which makes it harder to pin down a specific date even as a turning point. It's quite possible that later tranches took up capital that earlier ones allowed to develop - but there was some around to begin with.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-58061974785843735652008-03-21T09:45:00.000-05:002008-03-21T09:45:00.000-05:00P. M.: I grant you the first point; I should have ...P. M.: I grant you the first point; I should have said "England" rather than "Britain."<BR/><BR/>As to points two and three, the question is not whether you can find pockets of capitalist ownership here and there, but whether you can find a moment when capitalism becomes the dominant form of ownership. That moment in English history is the seizure of the monasteries. Freehold ownership had, of course, existed for centuries, but it was a subordinate and disadvantaged form of ownership. At one instant, everything changed. True, it was not until the "Glorious Revolution" that the new class could claim a complete victory, but effective power passed to this class under Henry VIII. <BR/><BR/>By the way, it was not so much the seizure of the land that was the problem, but its re-sale--at bargain prices--to a new group of owners that effected real change. If Henry had kept the land, nothing much would have changed. The copyholders would have paid their fiefs to officers of the crown rather than officers of the Church, but the form of ownership would have remained. But Henry had a revolution to finance, and revolutions are expensive. Each of the Parliamentarians and their allies had a price, and the price was some bit of property that they had coveted.<BR/><BR/>As for Marx, I don't have much of a problem with the Marxist analysis, just with the Marxist synthesis. They often ask the right questions; they rarely give the right answers.John Médaillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16463267750952578888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-91848089843751510662008-03-21T07:08:00.000-05:002008-03-21T07:08:00.000-05:00"Capitalism is the one system which has a fixed st..."Capitalism is the one system which has a fixed starting date, 1535. This is the date that the monastery lands (and later the guild lands) were seized by the British Crown and transferred to private owners, usually for pennies on the pound, immediately creating a new class of capitalists with decisive power over economic and political affairs."<BR/><BR/>There are at least three things wrong with this:-<BR/><BR/>- "British" had only a geographical and not a political meaning then (there hadn't even been the union of the crowns of England and Scotland of 1603, let alone the Act of Union of 1707);<BR/><BR/>- Capitalism also emerged elsewhere in Europe, frequently earlier than in England;<BR/><BR/>- All this was well under way twenty years earlier than the dissolution of the monasteries (as attested by the comparative material Sir Thomas More provides in his 1516 work <I>Utopia</I>), I suspect as part of the peace dividend after the Wars of the Roses when magnates no longer needed tenants to draw on for fighting, although the dissolution of the monasteries did accelerate matters (Sir Thomas More does point out who was doing the enclosing and evicting, specifically mentioning that some abbots were doing these things, so privatising monasteries was only one factor - had there been no dissolution sooner or later all monastic lands would have had such abbots, and if anything monastic lands had had less need of a tenantry in war and so had always had a higher proportion of sheep to people than comparable secular estates had had).<BR/><BR/>Oddly enough, as Brad Delong has just acknowledged, Karl Marx was prety good as an economic historian for the period from the late middle ages until his day. If you just take the material and not the interpretations and conclusions, you could do a lot worse.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com