How Did Everything Come to Cost Money?

The Question

“How did everything come to cost money?”

It sounds like a child’s question. The kind that gets a vague answer (“that’s just how things work”) because the adult being asked has stopped wondering about it themselves. But it’s not childish. It’s the right question. And it has a specific answer.

Water running through a pipe, a seed planted in the ground, the knowledge to heal a person, the care of a child: all of these require going through a third party today. All of them were available directly, without going through anyone, for most of human history. Each one stopped being available that way on a specific date, through a specific legal act, to serve a specific set of interests. None of it was inevitable. None of it was natural. Each one was a decision.

Here is how that decision kept getting made.

What People Had

Before the mechanism: a description of what existed before it ran. Not a romantic past. Just what was there.

Land was used collectively. Communities farmed it, grazed animals on it, gathered from it. No individual owned it in the sense we mean now. Rivers and aquifers were used directly; you went to them. Healing knowledge about which plants addressed which conditions, how to assist a birth, how to set a bone, was held by people within communities and passed between them. Seeds from this year’s harvest became next year’s crop. Children were raised by the people who happened to be around: neighbors, extended family, the community itself.

None of this required anyone’s permission. None of it required going through a third party who would grant access in exchange for something. People had direct access to what they needed.

The word for this arrangement is “commons.” Not a political ideology. Just: things people had together, that no individual owned, that were available to anyone who needed them.

The Two Moves

Here is what happened to the commons. Not all at once, and not in one place. But the same sequence kept appearing, with different instruments, in different centuries. Two moves, always in this order.

Consider what the British found when they arrived in Southern and East Africa in the 19th century. Communities with land that fed them, water they used directly, knowledge and structures that sustained them. Everything required to live without entering any exchange with the British at all. The British needed bodies in mines and on farms. The problem: people who had everything they needed had no reason to enter a mine.

The first move: create a requirement. The British imposed what they called a hut tax: a fixed annual sum, owed by every household, denominated in British pounds. British pounds were available from exactly one source: British employers. To meet the requirement, you had to work for the people collecting it. So people went to work, obtained what was owed, and returned to their lives. A partial obligation, but not yet control. The exit still existed. The land, the water, the community — all still there.

So the second move: close the exit.

Through a series of legal acts, most land was reclassified as Crown Land, belonging to the colonial government, available to white settlers. Africans were moved into designated areas called reserves, deliberately sized too small to grow a family’s food on. The thing that had made the first move manageable, the life you could return to, was removed by law. Not through violence alone, though violence was present. Through the reclassification of what belonged to whom.

The alternative to entering the colonial economy was no longer a life on one’s own land. It was slow starvation on a reserve. The obligation was now total.

The British did not invent these two moves in Africa. They had already run them at home, over three centuries.

Beginning in the 16th century, the English Parliament passed hundreds of individual Enclosure Acts, each one converting a specific piece of common land into private property. The people who had farmed and grazed and gathered from it for generations had no legal recourse. They were not offered a trade. The access was simply removed. By the time the wave of enclosures had finished in the early 19th century, roughly a quarter of all cultivated land in England had been converted from commons to private ownership.

This is where the industrial labor force came from. Not from people who chose factory work. From people who no longer had an alternative. To eat, you needed wages. Wages came from whoever owned the factory or the land. That person could set whatever conditions they wanted: hours, wages, safety. Because the alternative to accepting those conditions was not a life on common land. It was nothing.

Two moves. First: create a requirement that can only be met one way. Second: remove every other way of meeting your needs. After both moves, you are no longer a person with options. Whoever controls that one channel is between you and everything.

The Same Moves, Everywhere

Once you see the sequence, you see it everywhere.

Seeds. For the entire history of agriculture (roughly ten thousand years), a farmer’s harvest included what they would plant the following year. You kept the seeds. You planted them. You shared them with neighbors. No third party involved. Then, through a series of expansions to patent law across the 20th century, corporations claimed ownership over specific plant varieties through patent law. A farmer who saved seeds from a patented crop and replanted them was now a defendant. Ten thousand years of practice became, by specific legal acts, infringement. To plant: obtain seeds from the corporation. Every year. The ancient alternative was not seized by force. It was converted into infringement by law. And the only way to obtain those seeds now is through money — created out of thin air by private banks, only available if you work for the corporations that now hold the patent on what you used to grow yourself. The same entities that took the seeds now control the only instrument through which you can buy them back.

Healing knowledge. Knowledge about which plants addressed which conditions, how to assist a difficult birth, how to treat a wound, circulated in communities for most of human history, primarily among women. It was not owned. It was not behind a credential. You learned it from someone who knew it. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, state licensing laws were introduced requiring formal certification to practice medicine. Then a 1910 report backed by the American Medical Association recommended closing the majority of medical schools, and within a decade, roughly half had closed, along with nearly every school of midwifery. Midwife-attended births fell from about half of all US births to about one in seven within a generation. The knowledge itself was not destroyed. What changed was who was legally permitted to use it. The midwife, the herbalist, the community healer — all became, by law, people you were not permitted to consult for medical care. The alternative was closed. The licensed practitioner became the gatekeeper. The visit is billable. And the only way to make that visit is through money — created out of thin air by private banks, only available if you work for an employer who now owns what used to circulate freely. The same class of entities that enclosed the knowledge controls the only instrument through which you can access it.

Water. Water that falls from the sky, runs through rivers, sits in aquifers; humans used it directly for the entire existence of the species. In 2000, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a US-backed corporation was granted exclusive rights to the city’s water supply, including water in community wells that communities had built themselves, and raised rates until families earning around $100 a month were spending a fifth of their income on water alone. The city rose up. On April 8, a seventeen-year-old named Victor Hugo Daza was shot in the face by a soldier and killed. Two days later, the government cancelled the contract. The mechanism the city had just lived through: establish the legal claim, remove the alternatives. This is not unique to Bolivia. In some US states today, collecting rainwater that falls on your own roof requires a permit — and permits cost money. Money created out of thin air by private banks, only available if you work for an employer who owns what used to be yours to drink from. Water that falls from the sky now requires a token produced by the same class of entities that decided water should be a market.

Care. Communities raised children. Extended families, neighbors, the web of people around a family: this was not supplemental to child-rearing, it was child-rearing. That web was not dismantled by a single law. It was dismantled by the accumulation of all the other enclosures: land enclosure forced people into cities and away from communities they had grown up in; industrial work schedules made mutual care between neighbors impossible; the conversion of the household into a unit that needed to obtain tokens to survive turned care from a community function into either unpaid labor extracted from women, or a service you hired, which required tokens, which required employment. The need for care didn’t change. The commons that had met it was made structurally impossible. What replaced it was the market. And the market runs on money — created out of thin air by private banks, only available if you work for the same employers whose schedules dismantled the community that used to do this work for free. The same entities that made mutual care impossible now control the only instrument through which care can be obtained.

Every Cost Has an Origin

Here is what all of this adds up to.

Every cost that doesn’t feel like it should be there is not a mystery. There is a specific legal act. A specific set of interests that lobbied for it. A specific date it took effect.

The water running through your pipes was a river or aquifer nobody owned. The seed in the packet was someone’s harvest. The certification your job requires represents knowledge that circulated freely. The childcare you hire was once the work of a neighborhood. Each had a commons. The commons was enclosed: converted from something people had together into something held by an entity that could grant or deny access. The need stayed. The direct access was removed. What replaced it was a requirement. And the token required to meet it is one you cannot produce yourself — produced out of thin air by banks, distributed by elites, controlled by the same class of entities that converted the commons into the thing you now need the token to access.

The same two moves are being made right now in every budget that eliminates a public service and leaves the need intact. The public university is defunded; the need for education remains; a bank creates a loan and collects interest on the need you always had. The hospital is privatized; the need for care remains; an insurer collects premiums on the need you always had. The need didn’t change. The commons was enclosed. And now someone is collecting on the gap where the commons used to be.

The enclosure didn’t end. It just got better at looking like the way things have always been.

Common Questions