Money Fights

     If you’re around my age, and have had a lifelong addiction to the printed word, you might remember the halcyon days of the “advice columnists.” Mostly, if memory serves, they advised individuals with individual concerns. The quality of the advice was irregular, but in the Fifties and Sixties the subjects on which people sought their counsel were a concentrated few. (No: they didn’t advise their correspondents on which toothpaste would renew their love lives. They left that to the Madison Avenue crowd.)

     One of the most popular subjects was how married couples should manage their money. Occasionally, amid the scattered practical recommendations, some helpful columnist would recommend a regularly scheduled “money fight.” It was intended to be a good-humored, largely facetious exchange between him and her over their respective spending habits. Perhaps it worked, for some. But it had risks that could emerge unexpectedly, with consequent destruction. One of the worst was a segue from spending to earning.

     Remember, Gentle Reader: those were the days of the single-income household. In such a household, only one member earned; therefore only one member could be attacked for not earning enough. Need I detail just how much marital carnage could result?

     Well, for better or worse (and for richer or poorer), those days are behind us. Most families are two-income households today. But fighting over who earns how much and what he could do to increase it is still massively destructive. I’ve seen the consequences up close. It should be avoided for the sake of… well, a lot of things.

     And from that we turn to money fights in the news!

     The big one, of course, which could touch every White American alive today, is the fight over “reparations.” Let me be absolutely candid here:

Not one Negro in these United States,
No matter the identities of his forebears,
Deserves one cent from anyone
Because of “slavery” or on any other grounds.

     The black grifters screeching for “reparations” are morally no better than pickpockets. They deserve to be ridiculed, then ignored. The same treatment should be awarded to any White man who claims they have a case.

     I could go into detail here, but it’s not necessary. What is necessary is some thought about what those black grifters hope to accomplish. I’m fairly sure it isn’t a huge cash windfall from the federal treasury.

     They’re getting a lot of publicity from the legacy media. Publicity can be converted into cash, in specific cases. But that cash is far more likely to come from a distributed set of private pockets. Beyond immediate bundles of cash, there are opportunities, with the help of compliant media, to become very well known, and thus to obtain entry to circles that might otherwise not have them. Such circles are themselves entry points to gainful things. And of course, political prospects often flow from notoriety. The machinations deserve to be watched.

     Of less immediate but greater ultimate impact is the outpouring of resentment and disparagement aimed at Elon Musk. Yes, in purely paper terms, Musk has attained trillionaire status. Those who think he can open a checkbook or a bank’s website and gaze upon a cash balance of $1,000,000,000,000 are of course deluded. Given the way the equities markets work, it wouldn’t be possible for him to convert his stock and other paper possessions into that amount of cash no matter how hard he might try.

     That having been said, Elon Musk controls a lot of capital. He can put that capital to many uses, just as he’s done to date. What will matter to the rest of us non-trillionaires is what uses he chooses to address. And the Left, which hates private wealth, is determined to take Musk’s choices, and his capital, away from him. Recent emissions from the detestable Elizabeth Warren and the odious Bernie Sanders are clear indicators.

     Don’t think it can’t happen. There’s a huge wave of envy-powered politics in motion. The “blue” states’ governments, ever hungry for more revenue, are hatching schemes that would catch Musk in their jaws. I wrote about one such scheme just yesterday. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that some future federal administration with a solid backing in Congress won’t take aim at Musk’s fortune, on the grounds of “equity” and “fairness.”

     Remain alert to the patterns. Government always grows until it’s destroyed by a revolution or an internal collapse. As it grows, it consumes ever more of our substance. Leftist “intellectuals” will provide the rationales for advancing taxation and confiscation. Here’s one that should not be forgotten. It got respectable attention from a significant number of Congressvermin.

     Envy is among the strongest political motivators. Expect the screws on private accumulations of wealth to be tightened as the years pass. The defenders of property rights have been lax for quite a while. It’s time to awaken and remobilize them – and ourselves.

Our Friends, The Record-Keepers

     I just stumbled over this gem:

People who don’t write down their history get discovered by people who do. https://t.co/1gyjF7Z1E0

— Kitler (@Kitler512) October 15, 2025

     As I’m fascinated by moral theory, including the theory of natural rights, it got me going immediately: Is the practice of recording events in an enduring form a prerequisite for the emergence and acceptance of property rights?

     Think about it for a moment.

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     Two old sayings come to mind:

• “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
• “If you don’t write it down, it never happened.”

     Those are not unquestionable truths that express aspects of objective reality. They’re summaries of why and how people remember, think, and act. Just as the concept of identity depends upon continuity over an interval of time, the concept of property cannot be fathomed without duration. The origin of property in land, or “real property” as the lawyers say, was tenancy rather than any legal procedure or fiction. “That’s Smith’s land. His father and grandfather lived there.” Consider in that light the old term for a tract of land with a recognized owner: a freehold.

     But tenancy, to be recognized as such, requires memory. Human memories shift and fade. The keeping of records – the less perishable, the better – obviates the need for people to remember the details of a particular person’s tenancy over a particular tract. Whether they’re kept in cuneiform or in cursive, such records establish the tenancy required confirm Smith’s ownership of “Smith’s land.”

     Contrast that with property in things other than land: “movable property.” You have no deed to your clothing, your tools, or any of the other items you regard as yours. They pass far more easily from your ownership to that of another, whether with or without your assent – and if they do, there’s no record by which you can claim that they’re rightfully yours, barring supporting evidence that must be introduced in a court fight. That makes your ownership less “real” than that of the land you own.

     (There is an exception, of course: the motor vehicle, for which the State now demands that you acquire a deed from the State. But let’s defer that subject to another screed.)

     So record-keeping is the indispensable support to property claims, and to the concept of property itself.

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     A humorous anecdote about our seventh president bears upon property concepts in an illuminating way:

     In 1813, in a fight with Thomas Hart Benton and his brother Jesse, Jackson received a bullet which remained in his left arm for years. When in 1832 he finally had a surgeon remove the bullet, someone suggested giving it back to Benton, now a Senator from Missouri and a warm supporter of Jackson. Benton declined the offer, however, pointing out that twenty years' possession made the bullet Jackson's property. Told that it was only nineteen years, Benton said, "Oh, well, in consideration of the extra care he has taken of it-keeping it constantly about his person, and so on-I'll waive the odd year."
     Benton used to tell people: "General Jackson was a very great man. I shot him, sir." "Yes," he liked to say, "I had a fight with Jackson. A fellow was hardly in the fashion who didn't."

     [Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Anecdotes]

     That was “adverse possession law” as it applied to movable property in the Nineteenth Century. Twenty years’ adverse possession of an object was held to transfer the property rights over that object to the adverse possessor. But even that long a duration had to be supported by testimony: usually the testimony of the previous owner.

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     When European colonists arrived in the New World, they brought the concept of property with them. The Amerinds lacked any such concept. Thus, when the settlers started staking out tracts for themselves and farming them, nearby Amerind tribes didn’t automatically accept that those tracts were “owned.” They felt free to forage the farmed tracts of the Europeans, for in their minds land could never be owned by an individual. At most it was a tribal possession, and not all Amerind tribes accepted that. That was the source of many of the early grievances between the two peoples.

     The establishment of land registries and officials to supervise and maintain them was the settlers’ response... but once again, the Amerinds failed to accept land claims. “Writing? Paper? What is this magic with which you seek to confound us?” Not until European supremacy in war over the Amerind tribes had been conclusively demonstrated did the survivors bend the knee to the new concept.

     So it appears that until writing and record-keeping – the basis of history – should emerge, the seemingly natural concept of property will be slow to gain acceptance... indeed, if it’s accepted at all.

Enemies Of Freedom

     The word freedom is rather frequently abused – perverted away from its actual meaning and made to serve an ideological agenda – by persons on the political Left. Marx started the “tradition” by redefining freedom as an absence of tension and conflict. Leftists who’ve come after him have taken that ball and run with it to the furthest reaches of totalitarian imaginings.

     It’s no coincidence that the Left is rabidly opposed to private property rights. The right of private property is the indispensable prerequisite to freedom. As Robert Anton Wilson put it in the Illuminatus! trilogy, without private property there can be no private decisions. There can be no privacy of any sort. Indeed, one cannot defend the right to life in the absence of private property.

     Yet throughout post-Enlightenment history there have been “thinkers” straining to condemn private property and all that goes with it. Most Gentle Readers will be familiar with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s statement that “Property is theft.” Where he got such an idea, I cannot imagine. The concept of theft is incomprehensible without an understanding of property rights; the two are the absolute antitheses of one another.

     Respect for property rights enabled the West to rise from the squalor that originally enmeshed all of Mankind, while the rest of the world wallowed therein. To be an enemy of property is to be an enemy of human flourishing, and of freedom itself. Despite that, the Leftist will posture as your intellectual and moral superior because of his opposition to the property-rights-based economy of capitalism. He maintains that it marks him as “compassionate.”

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     Three relevant articles have found their ways to me this morning:

• Pope Francis condemns free market
• Child Regicide and Jacobin
• Corrective action.

     The first two articles illustrate the Leftist ideology without any of its “compassionate” disguises. Pope Francis, an unabashed Marxist, has said innumerable things of the sort reported in the first article. He’s relentless in promoting Leftist causes, every one of which involves the destruction of the right of private property and of human freedom. The second article, which appears at first to be about a “democratic socialist” publication (Jacobin magazine), is really about the Left’s complete dismissal of all rights. As this tweet from Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara makes clear:

     ...that dismissal extends even to the right to life of innocent children, should they happen to have been born into the “wrong class.”

     Such defenses of atrocities are typical among open Leftists. They know that they cannot have the sort of society they want unless they first eliminate the concept of inviolable individual rights. For it is that concept that forbids them to expropriate and impoverish without constraint. They can’t proceed with that unless they first liquidate all opposition, including the immature children of whatever adults have opposed them.

     The third article illustrates the corrective available to us poor downtrodden serfs in a private-property / capitalist economy: the choice to go elsewhere:

     After spending some time at our local Freedom Fest, surrounded by like-minded people enjoying a beautiful autumn day, we headed to our local Regal Cinema to see Infidel. Our preference was to see it at our locally owned independent theater, but it only showed for two days there, and we missed our opportunity to support Hayden Discount Theater. (Update: just discovered Infidel will be playing at HDT through Thursday.)

     When we arrived at Regal Riverstone, they were setting up their mask table in front. I approached the nice young people charged with dealing with the public, and said that neither my husband or myself was allowed to wear a mask. The young lady was only able to say, "Unfortunately", before I said, "Thank you, we're gone."

     I'm well aware there will be peripheral blow back; thousands of people losing their jobs and businesses, who rely in part on the movie crowd to support them such as restaurants and other venues around the theater. I feel badly for these people.

     However, (always pay attention to what follows "however" or "but") this scamdemic has opened the eyes of untold millions of people to certain facts. Most important is we don't need you. We don't need your over-priced immoral Hollywood dreck to entertain us.

     Or, as Lenny Bruce once said, quite memorably:

     Capitalism is the best. It’s free enterprise. Barter. Gimbels, if I get really rank with the clerk, “Well I don’t like this”, how I can resolve it? If it really gets ridiculous, I go, “Frig it, man, I walk.” What can this guy do at Gimbels, even if he was the president of Gimbels? He can always reject me from that store, but I can always go to Macy’s. He can’t really hurt me. Communism is like one big phone company. Government control, man. And if I get too rank with that phone company, where can I go? I’ll end up like a schmuck with a dixie cup on a thread.

     (Gimbels was still around in Bruce’s time. Also, there was only one phone company. Imagine trying to explain that to your teenagers.)

     There are no comparable corrective mechanisms under a socialist regime. The State controls everything. The public has no alternatives, nor any means by which to resist the State. Any attempt to resist, even by expressing an opinion contrary to the socialist line, is met with “re-education,” imprisonment, or – for the really recalcitrant and “ineducable” – execution.

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     The crowning irony of the anti-property-rights / socialist ideology is this: The proponents all claim to be pursuing “freedom.” Incredible. How free are you if you have no right to the fruits of your own labor? How free are you if you are forbidden to trade the products of your labor with others? How free are you if you’re not allowed to speak your mind – if your life can be extinguished whenever the State pleases, for the heinous crime of disagreeing with it?

     Of course, this is in accord with the Marxist redefinition of “freedom” as the absence of tension and conflict...as long as you buy into the notion that once the State controls everything, all tension and conflict will magically vanish. But the history of socialist regimes makes plain that under socialism, the common man will know nothing but tension and conflict: the tension of being watched for signs of rebellion, and the conflict between what he desires and what the State will allow him:

     Freedom is the opposite of socialist compulsion and prohibition. The socialist ideologues roaming among us want to deflect you from grasping that. Dare to mention it and they’ll call you everything but white.

     They are the enemies of freedom.