hydrarchist writes:
"Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the
Disappearance of the Public Domain"
James Boyle
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
This poem is one of the pithiest condemnations of the English enclosure
movement, the process of fencing off
common land and turning it into private
property. (Although we refer to it as 'the
enclosure movement', it was actually a
series of enclosures that started in the
fifteenth century and went on, with differing means, ends, and varieties of state
involvement, until the nineteenth.) The
poem manages in a few lines to criticize
double standards, expose the artificial
and controversial nature of property
rights, and take a slap at the legitimacy
of state power. And it does it all with
humor, without jargon, and in rhyming
couplets.