Differences in Viewpoint

One of my favorite readers (not an American) made a comment that contained the following paragraph:

No-one owns the land. We may have pieces of paper that give us the man-made legal right to live on it, we may pass that paper down to our children but, in the end, we do not own the land. The land belongs to the planet and the planet belongs to everyone.

There is a vast gulf between that viewpoint and the one I was raised with. I was raised to take responsibility for my actions and to look after the rights of others.

If the planet belongs to everyone, then no one owns anything. The Soviet Union and every other effort at diminishing personal ownership and responsibility has show the results of collectivism to be uniformly unfortunate for all concerned.

If you want current examples of this, look at the abysmal record of Federal housing. Nobody cares if they have no stake in the results.

The big difference between failing economies and successful economies is individual ownership and the pride that comes with that.