The Dragon - An Unexpected Property Owner

 

I saw the film pictured above (The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey) yesterday and it left me more worried about the power of metaphor in literature than the worth of contract between warring fictional species. This is interesting as it can be missed how funny the joke of a dragon owning property is, especially when the dragon is considerable as a metaphor for all the jealously guarded gold in the world, all in a room doing nothing.

Yet that it is the cause of such misery, retrospectively, and such antagonism, contemporarily, not to mention all that moves for good and evil to restore any balance, the mood of any legal discussion seems condemned, if not to be condemning. Its stance is forced to seem aloof and oblvious to the implications, at one and the same time, of its lack of stance in a real world, a world where gold still has the same useless meaning as it does in the fiction, whether its value is real or not.

If it seems ridiculous that a dragon can have property, and there is even the slightest suggestion that law ought not recognise its property rights, then by implication -considering the metaphor- the legal stance ought be reflected upon for what this implicates in real life economics, and all in the good time of its own progress, of course. A legal stance ought not affirm a place for any economic system -encroaching on the otherwise scientific value of any such element of the periodic table - for a monetary value as something law would openly condone (rather than hesitantly be forced to deal with if at all).

This is all while its monetary value - being an economic fiction - in such a hypothetical scientific context viewed is of a different concern in deciding its stance than is law's. The various realities of others valuing our work done, economically, and profiting from it, the universe making sense, scientifically, and what we can say about these such things, legally, making sense, needn't be stances as are each so wary of one another's main concerns in order to get their own job done.

Legalities needn’t exist in the scientific world dictating what is scientifically possible within bounds of heresy. Science needn’t exist in the legal world dictating what is legally possible within bounds of revolution. Economics needn’t exist in the world of science and law, forever balancing such a relationship, and calling that such balance, if only but figuratively referring to it, limitingly, the price of gold.

[First posted as response to the following article on the irish website for human rights, Cearta.ie: <http://www.cearta.ie/2012/12/the-contract-in-the-hobbit/>]