单项选择题
| Is it possible that the ideas we have
today about ownership and property rights have been so universal in the human
mind that it is truly as if they had sprung from the mind of God By no means.
The idea of owning and property emerged in the mists of unrecorded history. The
ancient Jews, for one, had a very different outlook on property and ownership,
viewing it as something much more temporary and’ tentative than we do. The ideas we have in America about the private ownership of productive property as a natural and universal right of mankind, perhaps of divine origin, are by no means universal and must be viewed as an invention of man rather than an order of God. Of course, we are completely trained to accept the idea of ownership of the earth and its products, raw and transformed. It seems not at all strange; in fact, it is quite difficult to imagine a society without such arrangements. If someone, some individuals, didn’t own that plot of land, that house, that factory, that machine, that tower of wheat, how would we function What would the rules be Whom would we buy from and how would we sell It is important to acknowledge a significant difference between achieving ownership simply by taking or claiming property and owning what we tend to call the "fruit of labor." If I, alone or together with my family, work on the land and raise crops, or if I make something useful out of natural material, it seems reasonable and fair to claim that the crops or the objects belong to me or my family, are my property, at least in the sense that I have first claim on them. Hardly anyone would dispute that. In fact, some of the early radical workingmen’s movements made (an ownership) claim on those very grounds. As industrial organization became more complex, however, such issues became vastly more intricate. It must be clear that in modem society the social heritage of knowledge and technology and the social organization of manufacture and exchange account for far more of the productivity of industry and the value of what is produced than can be accounted for by the labor of any number of individuals. Hardly any person can now point and say, "That--that right there--is the fruit of my labor." We can say, as a society, as a nation--as a world, really--that what is produced is the fruit of our labor, the product of the whole society as a collectivity. We have to recognize that the right of private individual ownership of property is man-made and constantly dependent on the extent to which those without property believe that the owner can make his claim, dependent on the extent to which those without stick. |