Just as we don’t do a lot of just-a-link posts around here, we don’t do a lot of just-a-quote posts, either. But as I was preparing for class today, I came across this wonderful quote from David Schmidtz’s essay, “Equal Respect and Equal Shares,” and thought that BHL readers might appreciate it.

The context is a defense of a rule of first possession for property acquisition, as opposed to a policy of allocating property on a more egalitarian basis.

 An overlooked virtue of first possession is that it lets us live together without having to view newcomers as a threat, whereas a rule of equal shares does not. If we were to regard every newcomer as having a claim to an equal share of our holdings, the arrival of newcomers would be inherently threatening. Imagine another thought experiment: A town has one hundred people. Each has a lot that is one hundred feet wide. Every time someone new shows up, we redraw property lines. Each lot shrinks by the amount needed to make room for the new person’ s equal share. Question: how friendly will this town be? Even now, in our world, people who see the world in zero-sum terms tend to despise immigrants. The point is not that xenophobia has moral weight, of course, but rather that it is real, a variable we want to minimize if we can. Recognizing first possession helps, compared to redistributing according to an equal-shares principle. To say the least, it would not help to tell people that newly arriving immigrants have a right to an equal share. At first, members of the community would clamor for a wall to stop people from getting in. Eventually, the point of the wall would be to stop people from getting out.

The whole essay is well worth reading.