Property Rights = Civil Rights

Some months ago I discovered that my wife keeps a large supply of cash in a secret location. She does this to be prepared for emergency's. One of those emergency's is the possibility of leaving me and having to leave immediately. I was not particularly threatened by this revelation and jokingly acted hurt that she might abandon me in some tragedy or that she thought I would transform into some raging monster after we have been together for almost 10 years. I also was not threatened because it is a sensible plan and I wholly endorse this for all women. Not that I need to, because as I look around and ask women I know and my female relatives they all have an escape fund. It seems like most modern western women have the good sense to be financially independent from their men or to preserve the ability to sever the financial connection on short notice.

It seems related to some of the conclusions reached by the UN Commission on the Status of Women. I paraphrase; they found that due to the vast imbalance in earning power and property ownership of women relative to their percentage of the world population and the percentage of the worlds labor performed by women that efforts should be taken to improve the equality of women's property rights worldwide as that inequality tends to multiply the terrible consequences of tragedy's like war and natural disaster, leading to increase in HIV infection among other things.

To spell out what that means, after a mudslide or tornado or flood damages a village some of the women might be left without their husbands due to deaths in the tragedy. Because they cannot earn as much from their labor or perhaps because they cannot claim ownership of their dead husband's property they are forced into prostitution in order to make enough money to survive or to keep their children alive. This would be bad enough if it didn't also obviously increase the spread of STDs and increase violence against these women, amplifying the personal tragedy set in motion by a natural disaster.

If the personal tragedy of each individual were not enough there is the social cost. With property rights or equal earning potential, these women could continue to be productive members of society, producing value through their labor through farming, or producing other tangible goods. Instead they end their lives destitute, in medical care funded by charity, government spending, and privately subsidized medicine. This cost is shifted to some degree on to western persons through government aid and pharmaceutical companies selling novelty lifestyle drugs for erections and sleep aids at overinflated prices to recoup the costs of the discount AIDS medication they sell to African countries and charities.

In this way, the very real costs of human tragedies on the other side of the world financially impact the life of every American such that even the most cynical and selfish should care for real equality. Even if just out of concern for the cost of their next 4 hour erection.