Life, Liberty, and Property Come From God

Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Frederic Bastiat

All Freedoms Begin With Free Economy

A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master, they are the essence of a free economy, and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.

Margaret Thatcher

One is a Slave When There Are No Property Rights

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.  Since man has to sustain life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.  The man who produces, while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Ayn Rand, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” cited by Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, p.79

Why We Need Property Rights

The ultimate consummation of the legal trends toward reducing property rights as restrictions on government action came with the 2005 case of Kelo v New London, in which the Constitution’s provision that private property could be taken for “public use” was expanded to mean that such property could be taken for a “public purpose”.  While a public use would include such things as the government’s building a reservoir, a bridge, a highway or some other such facility, “public purpose” could mean almost anything -- and in the Kelo case it meant confiscating people’s homes to turn the property over to developers who would build various upscale facilities.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.280

The Erosion of Property Rights

Those who take this dismissive view of property rights not only promote their own vision but often also filter out the opposite vision of property rights, or distort it as just a defense of existing “entrenched wealth,” so that much of the public does not even learn what the issue is, making the question of how to resolve the issue moot.  Once property rights are reduced by verbal virtuosity to simply a special benefit for a privileged few, these rights are then seen as less important than benefits to the larger society.  It follows from this that property rights must often give way in clashes with other rights, when the issue is posed as opposing courts’ exalting “property rights over human rights” or posed as property rights versus “the public interest.”

Such arguments, however, make sense only within the framework of the vision of the anointed.  Otherwise, there is no clash between property rights and human rights because (1) property itself has no rights and (2) only human beings have rights.  Any clash is between different sets of human beings.  Property rights are legal barriers to politicians, judges or bureaucrats arbitrarily seizing the assets of some human beings to transfer those assets to other human beings.

Those who see surrogate decision-makers with both the right and the duty to make “income distribution” more equal or more just see property rights as a barrier that should not stand in the way of that over-riding goal.  As the ideas of the Progressive era intellectuals became dominant in the law schools and in the courts during the second half of the twentieth century, property rights have been eroded by judicial decisions, and the ability of government officials to over-ride the rights of property owners has been justified on grounds of a greater public interest, supposedly for the benefit of the less fortunate.  However, here as elsewhere, because certain notions fit the vision there has been remarkably little attention to whether they also fit the facts.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.279

The Importance of Property Rights

Property rights are seen in radically different terms by those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed.  Those with the tragic vision of human flaws and failings see property rights as necessary limitations on the power of government officials to seize the belongings of the populace, whether for their own use or for dispersal as largesse to various constituencies whose political or financial support the politicians seek. ... Those who founded the United States of America, and wrote the Constitution, saw property rights as essential for safeguarding all other rights.  The right to free speech, for example, would be meaningless if criticisms of the authorities could lead to whatever you owned being seized in retaliation.

Economists have seen property rights as essential to (1) keeping economic decision-making in the hands of private individuals -- that is, out of the hands of politicians, and (2) maintaining incentives for private individuals to invest time, talents and resources, in the expectation of being able to reap and retain the rewards for their efforts.  However, those with the vision of the anointed, in which surrogate decision-makers are better equipped than others to make wise decisions, see property rights as obstacles to the achievement of various desirable goals through government action. Property rights simply protect those individuals fortunate enough to own substantial property from the greater interests of society at large, according to those with this vision.  Professor Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, for example, said that property rights represent simply an individual benefit to “entrenched wealth.”

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.278