Our dangerous distance between the private and the commons

Private property couldn't exist without a society that honors and protects it. The value of property derives largely from the efforts of others, or gifts of nature. Take a Park Avenue apartment, or a Cape Cod cottage, put it in a cornfield or urban slum, and you'd better reduce the asking price. The structure is the same; the difference is what's around it. The real estate mantra "location, location, location" really means "gifts, gifts, gifts" - of society and nature. This is true of financial assets as well as real estate. In fact, it's true to a degree of all human production and creation. Every invention, business technique, story, and song draws on what has come before. I couldn't write this, nor you read it, without the English language - a gift to both of us. We all stand on many shoulders; and earlier concepts of property acknowledged this.

Nowhere was this thinking more evident than in the realm of invention and ideas. America itself is an idea, the first nation so conceived; so the views of the Founders on this point are especially telling. Jefferson and Madison considered the mind to be the mother lode of freedom, and they wanted no restrictions - private or public - on its fruits. The copyright and patent clause of the Constitution generally restricts these private monopolies to limited times; and this provision is of a piece with the First Amendment protections of freedom of speech.

Benjamin Franklin was no slouch when it came to a dollar - yet he didn't seek patents for his numerous inventions. "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad to serve others by any invention of ours," he said.

There were contrary views, of course, and these soon gained the upper hand, being more congenial to moneyed interest. But the sense of affiliation with a whole persisted, in folkways as well as public policy. There were the frontier barn raisings and harvest bees in which work and time became a commons neighbors could draw from. There was the Main Street culture that combined the commercial with the social and civic. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held their famous debates at county fairgrounds and town squares throughout Illinois.

Democracy wasn't separate from the setting in which it occurred; and farmers and townspeople, many with little formal schooling, sat in the baking sun for hours to listen.

The next hundred years brought unprecedented change. Yet even as the new commercial culture wove webs of self- obsession, residues of the older thinking remained. People shopped on Main Streets. They visited with neighbors on stoops and porches. Entertainment was a social experience, at bowling alleys, movie theaters, and ball parks. Such remnants were a resource on which the nation could draw in times of need, such as World War II. When FDR declared that sacrifice in the cause of freedom was a "privilege," and that he stood for "equality of privilege," his words touched something Americans already believed. The top income tax bracket went up to over 90 percent, and ordinary workers paid the tax for the first time. Young men were subject to a universal draft. Millions grew vegetables in Victory Gardens and turned in used cooking oil and old pots and pans to supply war materiel.

There was grumbling and cheating to be sure. But the residents of one Kansas town probably echoed the prevailing view when they observed in a newsletter to their sons on the front: "We do not have everything we want. We do have everything we need."

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