Private Property

Coming from a former communist country in the heart of Eastern Europe, I cannot dismiss the importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 on the modern history of Europe. This revolution marked the transition from a totalitarian regime to a democratic way of government throughout Eastern and Central Europe, brought the consolidation of Eastern and Western Germany and most importantly the fall of the Iron Curtain, which prevented Eastern Europe from developing in step with Western Europe and the US for approximately 50 years. Jeff Goodwin thought that revolutions entail “not only mass mobilization and regime change , but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic and/or cultural change, during or soon after the struggle for state power ." The change of 1989 fully exemplified Goodwin’s definition.
The conflation of private and social life was the most daunting feature of socialism. One of the detrimental mistakes the Soviet Union and Communist Europe made was the state’s monopoly over every single aspect of life. Colin Barker in Marxism and the Revolution of 1989 argued that “the classic Stalinist regimes yoked together government, state and enterprise in a single framework”.
The transfer of state ownership into private hands was one of the most crucial changes to take place after the demise of the Soviet Union economic and political model personal incentive and private property are at the crux of entrepreneurship and the establishment of SME (small and medium size) enterprises. Many debates have been led whether state enterprises are more efficient than privately owned ones..Despite the efficiencies of state monopolies in many industries like railroads, airspace etc, the term state or public ownership in the Soviet context is just a façade hiding the true owner that is Politburo, the Communist Party etc. In a situation of state ownership prices are artificially suppressed by the government (as inflation does exist), output decisions are taken by the Soviet elite; monitoring costs are excessively high, too, just to name a few of the pitfalls in the system.
Questions have been raised about the ethics behind the claims over property and its restoration to its pre 1945-1948 owners. Hans-Hermman Hoppe in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property defends his position that a property right in one’s own body must be justified apriori. Furthermore, his work supports the idea of private property as a trigger of a person’s actions. He writes, “Any propositional exchange requires a proposition maker’s exclusive control (property) over some scarce means. Noone can propose possibly anything and no one can possibly become convinced of any proposition if one’s right to make exclusive use of one’s physical body were not already presupposed.” Therefore, without property to rely upon anyone should feel that they have their hands tied and cannot take action to release their ideas.
The property rights in the former Soviet Union block countries have been enforced by the rule of law over time. However, the management of this same property has turned problematic. It has been an imperative to put socio-political reforms in tact with the required economic changes to ensure the necessary environment for private investment to grow and stir economic development. Victor Nee, Daniel Stark, and Mark Seldan in Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism consider the fact that “the reform process has created or strengthened a large variety of non-state ownership forms and activities”. They also acknowledge as a great merit of the reformers that they “allowed or initiated such experimentation [in the variety of ownership forms] with courage and open minds”. I agree that this is a benefit and look forward to seeing how the wheel of change would be stirred over the next decade