The family and the tribe

It's never the people who have the private property. They always share what they have with those they love. It's corporations who get to have private property, who get to own to the exclusion of others and to not care that others have been excluded. 

The government and the merchants combined to invent the kind of private property that is easy to trade in markets. To accomplish those trades, the governments and the merchants combined to devise corporations so as to be able to own the property without having to share it, without having to subject the property to the dictates of custom and to the dictates of a God-fearing state, which would have made it, indeed, which had in the past made it less like private property and more like common property. 

That the Bible distributed the land to the families of the tribes of Israel, and that it then went on to entail the land from being able to be sold for longer than fifty years delimited the role of the state in the administration of the land. The land could never belong to the monarchs nor could it ever be accumulated by any corporate entity. The ownership of the land had to revert to the family and to the tribe, and that reversion was ineradicable. 

Land ownership defines the relations of the people to the state and to each other. By lodging land ownership permanently neither in the individual nor in the state, the Bible was forcing the ownership of the land into those entities that were intrinsically relational. The family is the relational manifestation of the individual, while the tribe is the relational manifestation of the state. By putting the ownership into the interests that are intrinsically relational, the Bible is forcing land to serve that relational function and, in effect, prohibiting it from ever supporting the workings of the market. 

Corporations, in the biblical system, simply couldn't own land. The basis of habitation and food and transportation could all only reside in the hands of the families and the tribes. The state and the corporations are interested in extraction while the families and the tribes are interested in creation; and the state/corporate axis favors the market while the family/tribe axis favors the covenant. 

The shape of the social and economic and political system could either favor the one configuration or the other. The state/corporate configuration has been prevailing for much of a millennium. Now that the collapse of the industrial era is approaching, it might be time to rethink the social order and to try to implement a configuration that favored the family/tribe interests.