An old English protest verse exposes the unfair asymmetry of laws by describing a goose.

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from 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 person who takes a goose meets the full weight of the criminal law. The person who takes the common on which the goose was fed receives an Act of Parliament for the trouble. Petty theft is a hanging offense, while grand theft is a civic act.

The lines are anonymous, probably by design to protect those who recognize the meaning. They came during the “enclosure-era”, first printed in The Tickler in 1821.

The target of rhyme is the philosopher Locke. His Second Treatise grounds property in labor, where a man acquires a parcel by his work being recognized among the common stock. Enclosure reversed the rights. The labor that converted a common right into a private title was simply the drafting of a statute, while the men who performed the labor saw their result called someone else’s property.

The same integrity challenge, in the same decades, was the abolitionist debate on slavery. Somerset secured his freedom from slavery in 1772, and then Parliament abolished the trade in 1807 and the institution itself in 1833. In the UK. America did the opposite. The Somerset ruling of 1772 and Dunmore’s promise of freedom in 1775 turned the slavery-promoting southern colonies into radical militant resistance to freedom under the crown. An American federal ban on slave imports took effect in 1808, meaning state-sanctioned domestic rape treating rapid human offspring as a property boom. In December 1835 President Jackson asked Congress to inspect mail to protect “property” by censoring abolitionist publications. When the bill failed, his postmasters suppressed thought regardless, and mobs were setup to torture and kill Americans caught with abolitionist content. Lovejoy was shot to death in 1837 while defending his fourth printing machine from being destroyed.

Both abolition and enclosure shared a mechanism. The law decided what may be owned and therefore what would count as theft. Property in persons was being ended, with a Civil War even, yet it was being taken up in the commons. Human ownership was fought at high expense out of existence, while another ownership was being simply legislated into it.

The radical tradition understood. Thomas Spence built his programme on the theft of the common, and Marx would later file enclosure under primitive accumulation, the system’s founding expropriation conducted as if just law. The anonymous poem had offered the same conclusion a century earlier, and with greater economy.

Theft was, and still is, defined by who is authorized to hold the pen that writes the law. Enclosure is an old term now, barely recognized. Today it means filing a patent, or scraping data. In other words, AI.