Economic encroachment

Economic encroachment is the act of encroaching upon another individual's (or a group of individuals lumped together) money or other product of their time and effort. Whether the encroachment is committed by an individual upon another individual, a group of individuals upon a single individual, or a single individual upon a group of individuals, the definition remains the same. Economic encroachment has a history as old as man. As long as human beings have been producing, they have also been encroaching upon what other humans produce.

Slavery

Slavery is traditionally associated with specific periods of history such as the Hebrew captivity in Egypt, the forced labor of Native Americans at the hand of other Native tribes or Europeans, and also the enslavement of African people for sale in Africa, Europe, Arabia, and the Americas. While these are the classic unfortunate examples of economic encroachment, there are many other nontraditional examples of slavery in human history and in the present. For instance, in 2006 the International Labor Organization estimated there are at least 2.5 million forced laborers who are victims of human trafficking at any given time. Individuals are enticed to destinations such as London, England. Many end up sex slaves, forced domestic servants, put into hard conditions within factories, or sent to work at plantations. As of 2006 the slave trade brought in 30 billion US dollars a year. Some of these numbers may be askew, but human trafficking absolutely exists today.

"The White Man's Burden" is an example of an ideology which seeks to justify economic encroachment. The White Man's Burden During the Age of Imperialism at the turn of the 19th century, Rudyard Kipling wrote a satiric response to the US conquest of the Philippines. The phrase caught on as Washington employed the phrase to convey noble intent as they began to utilize raw materials in the Philippines, such as rubber.

Slavery has not and is not limited to peoples of color, however. In 1857, a man named Christian Heusser submitted a report to Zurich police in Switzerland regarding abuses suffered by Swiss migrant workers in the region of Sao Paolo, Brazil. A popular magazine at the time, Der Kolonist, sported advertisements by emigration agencies who were looking for "undernourished" individuals to come to a land of plenty. Immigrants sought to escape a sense of economic servitude within Europe. However, their indentured servant status in impossible circumstances brought them down lower into debt, this debt literally imprisoning them as slaves to the masters who controlled their very lives.

Other nations engaging in slavery include Sparta whose resident slaves enabled the infamous great warrior class possible. Athenian slaves were actually encouraged to save up in order to purchase their freedom. There became a time of disturbance in Athenian history when debtors began putting themselves up as collateral on loans. When their debt came due, they then became slaves. The genius of a diplomat named Solon put an end to this practice. Muslims and Christians have both accepted slavery and slavery has been prevalent on every continent but Antarctica.

Feudalism

This word usually conjures up images of the Medieval serf. The Medieval serf came into being through the fall of the Roman Empire. Under Augustus' flat and predictable taxes which did not include an income tax, and small social programs such as free grain (which he paid for out of his own pocket), Rome flourished. Within a few hundred years it had implemented an income tax, had extended the handouts to pork and wine, and had become an economic shell where farmers and artisans could no longer make a living. Rome eventually held individuals to work at their given places of employment and remain in the same occupation, with little freedom to change jobs or move. Their children would be tied to their own occupations. 'Even soldiers were required to remain soldiers for life, and their sons compelled to follow them. The remaining members of the upper classes were pressed into providing municipal services, such as tax collection, without pay. And should tax collections fall short of the state's demands, they were required to make up the difference themselves. This led to further efforts to hide whatever wealth remained in the Empire, especially among those who still found ways of becoming rich. Ordinarily, they would have celebrated their new-found wealth; now they made every effort to appear as poor as everyone else, lest they become responsible for providing municipal services out of their own pocket.'

The result of this increasing encroachment of the state into the economy 'eroded growth'. Feudalization of the economy was made possible by the breakdown of a middle class and lack of opportunity for personal advancement. '. People fled to the countryside and took up subsistence farming or attached themselves to the estates of the wealthy, which operated as much as possible as closed systems, providing for all their own needs and not engaging in trade at all. Meanwhile, much land was abandoned and remained fallow or fell into the hands of the state, whose mismanagement generally led to a decline in production.'

Socialism

Socialism was prevalent during the Old Babylonia Period dating from the time of the Kudurmabug Dynasty based on documents from Larsa and Ur. 'Arable land in the state sector seems to have been divided into three main categories: (1) land from which the harvest went to satisfy the needs of the king and his family; (2) land given out for service to dependents, a.sasuku; (3) fields cultivated by dependent workers (sabu and sometimes slaves), who received grain rations but yielded the major part of the crop to the state. Additional workers were hired for these fields during harvesting time; these evidently belonged to neighboring rural communities.' It is to fields of the third category that most sources of information concerning the state agricultural production refer.' jstor Most were limited to a barter and trade exchange for obtaining goods. Only those with an excess of goods could engage in commerce. That is, in large temple estates, the palace estate, and in accounts of higher bureaucrats. Silver was limited. However, there seems to have been differing amounts of weights and measurements. It appears that fiat currency did not exist. N.V. Kozyreva classifies this as a "state economy". This may be an accurate view when one considers that the peoples' product resulting from their labor was taken beyond landlord taxes for the existence of the state. The state took the products of individual labor, and then redistributed them to bureaucratic officials and dependents.

Communism
Jon Maynard Keynes
Central Banking
Fiat Money
Free Markets and Free Enterprise
Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations
Ludwig von Mises

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msS1.html#Part%20I,Ch.1]

Joint property cannot abolish ownership in consumption goods. It can only distribute ownership in a way which would not otherwise have existed. Joint property restricts itself, like all other reforms which stop short at consumption goods, to effecting a different distribution of the existing stock of consumption goods. When this stock is exhausted its work is done. It cannot refill the empty storehouses. Only those who direct the disposal of production goods and labour can do this. If they are not satisfied with what they are offered, the flow of goods which is to replenish stocks ceases. Therefore, any attempt to alter the distribution of consumption goods must in the last resort depend on the power to dispose of the means of production.

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