"We" have been here before. Politics never seems to change. The following is a very loose description of a complex process over a few hundred years. It's hardly exact history, but it's reasonably true and close enough for government work.
Somewhere between 1750 and 1850 the Brits invented the Enclosure Acts as a way of throwing people off the "commons" (and off of their own property). It's not the only time when this occurred, but it was significant.
The dumbed-down version is that to keep the crappy little piece of land that had been in your family for a couple of centuries you had to build a fence or plant a hedge around it. Of course the cost of either of these was more than the value of the land.
A lot of people became dispossessed and their decedents wandered the roads of Great Brotain for two or three generations begging and starving. The smart guys sold out for the few pennies they could get and bought a boat ticket to the colonies.
When they arrived, many of them had one simple goal - to find a piece of ground, draw a circle around it, and make sure that no one ever gor to f%ck with them again.
The Native Americans never had a chance.
For those who need the still more dumbed-down version: The 16th and 17th Century British Aristocracy invented property and made sure that they got to keep most of it. Currently, Corporate America invented "Intellectual Property". In order to do this they corrupted the Patent Office and the Patent Court.
Prior to the Enclosure Acts, any peasant could raise a goat or a cow on the commons. It was part of their livelihood for a lot of years. Once they got thrown off their own land and the common land the got the "opportunity" of working for one of the pre-industrial revolution factories.
By the time of the American Revolution, British Manufacturing had become so sophisticated that no one in the colonies had a chance of setting up a competing factory. (Kind of like us and China btw).
And all this intellectual property crap does make a difference. When Lotus sued Borland, claiming that Borland's Quattro Pro spreadsheet emulated the "look and feel" of Lotus 1-2-3, it took ten years to get the judgment overthrown. During that period of time, one of the most creative companies in the US was unable to get financing. The couldn't even sell the company.
By the time they got out from under the judgment, the bean counters wound up in charge of Borland and Microsoft had moved on to the .Net platform. Borland's Delphi was a significantly better RAD development tool than Microsoft ever dreamed of, but by the time Borland was again able to compete, it was too late.