Are we returning to medieval royal charters?

The increasing intrusion of city, state, and federal government into market activity makes some wonder if the progressive mindset is really retrograde in nature. Read Phil Gramm and Michael Solon in the Wall Street Journal here.

Enlightenment philosophers recognized that the crown, guild, church, and village sometimes acted as rent-seekers stripping away the rewards for work, thrift, and innovation, and in the process inhibiting productive effort and progress. The Enlightenment established the principle that labor and capital are private property and not communal assets subject to involuntary sharing, and thus unleashed the explosion of knowledge and production that drives human flourishing to this day.

Extraordinarily in America, the crown jewel and greatest beneficiary of the Enlightenment, political movements are afoot that seek to overturn the individual economic rights secured in the Enlightenment and return to a medieval world of subjects and subjugation. …

Whereas the Enlightenment was based on the principle that people own the fruits of their labor and thrift, “accountable capitalism” and similar proposals to force the sharing of economic rewards return the economy to the medieval concept of communal property. That system allows the powerful few to extort part of the fruits of your labor and capital because, as President Obama would say, if you own a business, “you didn’t build that.”

While this debate will play out in elections over the next decade, a more imminent threat to the Enlightenment’s economic legacy comes from the surreptitious battle being waged in shareholder meetings and corporate boardrooms across America. Political activists are pressuring companies to adopt political, social and environmental policies that would subvert earnings that rightly belong to labor and capital.

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Read the whole thing here.

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