Look in the media and you will see article after article detailing bitter disagreements about what we as a nation should do about our problems, and how we can solve them with our tax dollars.

Common property (things like like Social Security, schools, and federal land) is painted as a good thing, but in reality it is a disaster.

Right now Trump’s proposed budget is in all the headlines. What are WE going to do with OUR tax money as a single unit called a nation?

It’s hard to believe people disagree over what is funded and what is not… right?

What should we do about OUR healthcare?

Who should we let on OUR property we call the United States?

The whole problem is that we have property in common in the first place. When you have multiple owners of the same property, problems will inevitably arise.

If we have common problems that need solving, there are ways to come together voluntarily while still preserving individual interests.

That’s why companies sell shares; the shareholder gets a say in the company based on his stake. If he doesn’t like the direction the company is going, he can sell his stake in it.

Josiah Warren (1798-1874) was an early American free thinker, and abolitionist who believed in voluntary government, and actually set up and lived in various towns with ideals of freedom governing the microcosms.

In a version of his works called The Practical Anarchist edited by Crispin Sartwell, Warren gives two examples (not from the towns he founded) of a schoolhouse that was built by the community as common property.

In one case the people who had pleasantly joined together to build the school erupted into a feud about who to hire as the teacher, almost immediately after finishing the project. Someone involved burnt the schoolhouse down in the night to “solve” the dispute.

In the other case, the people also could not agree on how to govern the school. One man took a team of oxen and dragged a log from the school, which of course destroyed the building. But the log was his contribution to the building of the school, and it wasn’t going to be run the way he wanted, so he divested himself.

If the school had simply been set up as a business it would have been up to the owner how to run it, and he probably would have based those decisions on what his customers wanted out of  school. This same community could have gotten a school house, and a way to govern its use by individual interest.

They still would have come together for the common goal, but each interested party could make the decision with his own property. The school owner may still have alienated some with how he decided to run the business, but instead of them coming to retrieve “their” log from the side of the building, they could have simply chosen not to send their child to his school.

That is why when things are commonly owned, like a business, you must have a prescribed way to divest yourself, as with shares, to avoid the bitter disputes which end in destruction of the commonly owned property.

And what is happening right now in America? People are figuratively pulling our the logs they gave to build the schoolhouse, and they are burning down the schoolhouse in the night.

Some want to sabotage Trump, others want their fair share based on what they contributed, and some are ready at this point to just watch the world burn, because of the betrayal they feel in how their common property is being governed.

People cannot properly organize when property is held in common. Individual interest creates order out of this chaos, because it shows clearly who is in charge under given circumstances.

“Responsibility must be individual, or there is no responsibility at all.”