Do you own your house? Your car? Your idea? Your labor?
If no one disputes your right to have and to sell, no problem. The rule in English law is “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” That is, if nothing changes, if you do not want to sell your house, or to work, or to get a patent on your idea, fine. But people change. And modern states alter their rules frequently. No proper papers mean chaos. A worker is forced into the large informal economy of Brazil.
Nowadays the state is big and getting bigger. It requires papers, proofs of property or citizenship, by the ton. That gives rise to the problem of what the Greek-American economist Elena Panaritis calls “informality.” In her book, Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, she points to the papers required for the two sides of ownership—for the thing itself such as a piece of land with buildings on it, and for the person or other legal entity selling its services or buying the land. From her massive research in many countries, she has found that in the era of the mega-state both sides are often chaotic. Unless the state keeps a complete registry of property, or if as in the U.S. the seller performs an expensive “title search” proving he owns it, troubles arise. They’re big troubles for a startlingly high share of the world’s property, and for its owners and especially workers. Who owns the Amazon forest? The Brazilian state? First nations? The logging company that can get to the hardwood first? Chaos.
At the other end of the spectrum is light government. Some states were once that way. My Irish great-great grandfather bearing my last name went to Canada in the 1830s with no papers, because Ireland and Canada were in the British Empire. After the U.S. Civil War, he walked across the border into the U.S. Still no papers. Liberal countries such as the U.S., the U.K., and France, by contrast to the German or Austrian or Russian empires, did not even have passports until 1914.
Panaritis’ conclusion? If people are not to live in chaos, mega-states need mega efforts to make the paper easy and trustworthy. Is your country or mine doing so?
No.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.