Historically, the boundary fence has not been fixed. Its shape and size have shifted with social and economic forces. These changes in the boundary between makers and takers can be seen just as clearly in the past as in the modern era. In the eighteenth century there was an outcry when the physiocrats, an early school of economists, called landlords ‘unproductive’. This was an attack on the ruling class of a mainly rural Europe. The politically explosive question was whether landlords were just abusing their power to extract part of the wealth created by their tenant farmers, or whether their
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