Part I: Core Principles of Freedom
Chapter 2:
Property Rights and Personal Freedom
"Morality stems from Property & Property Rights, and the clear separation between 'Mine' and 'Yours' "
The second fundamental law talks about property: "Do not encroach upon another person or their property".
Strange as it may seem to some, property and its ownership are the fundamental bases for all personal freedoms. Without the right to own property, there can be no freedom, only slavery.
Most living creatures are extremely acquisitive and territorial. Deer fight battles for territory. A female won't mate with a male who has no territory. The male must be "rich" in territory or she can't raise her family.
Human beings share this same hard-coded DNA to own "property" (a form of "territory"). Even among children raised in the Israeli socialist Kibbutz or the experimental youth camps of the USSR, one of the first words that children learn is "mine".
Acknowledging this innate natural law of property, governments create laws to recognize the existence of property and to establish a set of just rules to protect the ownership of property. This includes its creation, transfer, use and destruction. Property can also be shared between two parties who agree in how to share it. For example, a landlord might rent his property to a tenant, and a software might license his property to a user.
Very quickly, as a person grows up, he comes to understand that there are various forms of property, and they form a hierarchy of sorts.
"Primordial" property that an individual possesses is given to each of us by our Creator. It is our own body. This is the highest property right. Only you own your life.
As an adult, you are responsible for your actions. While your parents brought you into this world and raised you as a child, upon reaching adulthood, your life is yours to do with as only you please. You can squander it or treasure it. You can even end it. But it is your property only. This is what the Founders meant when they wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident...", that men "...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life...".
It's really quite simple. In a moral or just society, no one has the right to own another person. Slavery is illegal. In a just society, the State does not have a right to own your life either. Thus, there can be no conscription, no forced draft to serve the King or dictator or government. To be just, such service must be voluntary.
When a person owns his own life, he naturally owns the ideas of his own mind. For example, a person can envision building a log cabin in the woods. He can see the trees cut down in his mind, vision the logs being laid together, and living in the home with his family. Given a bit of time, and a bit of strength, he can clear an acre of land and in a few months his mental vision will become a physical reality.
The vision of a log cabin is a new form of property. This is the primary property of your ideas, the fruit of your mental thoughts.
As before, a just society recognizes these rights too. We call them “intellectual property rights”. People are creative beings. We talk and sing and draw and dance and invent machines. Modern intellectual property rights therefore take various forms: copyright to protect our writings, patents to protect our inventions, trademarks to protect our unique identities, and trade secrets and processes to protect our more complex creations.
But what about the real log cabin itself?
The actual log cabin is a form of secondary property. These are physical things that you can build with your brawn and your tools, using the natural resources available at hand. The original log cabin can catch on fire and burn down, but the vision of the log cabin in the builder’s mind hasn’t been destroyed. Given enough time, a new, even better log cabin can rise up from the ashes.
So, secondary property is a form of property that comes into existence from our primary property, the ideas of our brains. A just society recognizes ownership of secondary property such as real estate (land and buildings), machinery and human constructions or other physical artifacts like cars, TV sets and books.
Lastly, there is a third and final form of property, tertiary property.
Perhaps you and your brother work together to build houses for your two families. It turns out that you are really good at it. A neighboring farmer asks you to build one for him, in return for a life supply of fresh milk. And soon another neighbor swaps some chickens for a house. And so it goes down the years. You and your brother’s reputations have grown throughout the land and your home construction services are always in demand. Eventually, you want to retire and pass the business on to your only son. Your brother wants to do the same with his two children. So you two draw up an agreement of sorts, a contract that passes your rights to own your business to the next generation.
A just society recognizes these property rights as well. Forms of partnership interests, corporation shares, bonds and IOU’s, and other abstract financial instruments are written into laws that respect and protect the owners of these properties. And this new tertiary property is also being invented all the time. This means that new wealth is being created all the time too.
Think about Google. It is a fabulously wealthy company. But what does it do? It provides a support service to expand the powers of your mind, a form of mental tool that didn’t even exist a decade ago. Google has made millions of shareholder-owners wealthy. And the gross domestic product of the United States has grown tremendously through the creation of similar new companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and E-Bay.
Remember, property rights flow downward from our Creator through each individual and onward. And in this way, they form the basis of basic morality: the relationship between God and man, and the relationship between one man and another.
For ten thousand years of human existence, both philosophers and ordinary folk have recognized the natural order of property and its rights. The old Mesopotamia tablets dug up at the gates of Babylon show property contracts between buyers and sellers. These anticipate the truths taught by the nomadic tribes of wandering Jews and the Bible by thousands of years.
Over time an entire body of corporate law has emerged which deals with the recognition of all three forms of property, which might have originally been created many decades or even hundreds of years ago. The oldest corporate organization on the Earth has had its property protected by successive waves of civil governments for almost 2,000 years. It’s called the Roman Catholic Church.
Let’s do a short mind experiment.
Suppose that there was only one person living in the world. Would there be a need for property? Like the unborn baby in the womb, this sole person would assume “it’s all mine”. More likely, since “you” and “yours” wouldn’t exist, such a thought wouldn’t even arise.
Yet once we are born into a world with but one more person in it, a clear and moral separation of “mine” and “yours” is the only way to define relations between you and me. The toddler first learns this playing withothers in the sandbox. My “right” to punch you in the nose stops at the tip of your nose. Most wars have been fought over this problem of property rights. “What I want, I take”, say’s the dictator. Of course, we all learned the Golden Rule as a child: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
Some people still get confused about all of this.
Some people think that they have the “right” to take your property and give it to someone else. Most people would call this stealing. Progressives call it “redistribution”. It sounds better.
Perhaps Marxists and Progressives never learned to understand the difference between “mine” and “yours” when they were growing up. Bullies and mass murderers often suffer from the same problem. Psychiatrists tell us that a psychopathic killer has no moral problem “taking the life” of another person, because to him, that person has no right, primordial or otherwise, to his own life. It’s really that simple.
What Marxists and Progressives refuse to see is that freedom is greatest when a society has a strong sense of property rights. When property rights are weak, especially when the government justifies the arbitrary use of force of its guns to take an individual’s property away, freedom is lost. The immoral ability of the King to steal the property of the colonists was eloquently written down in the Declaration of Independence, and is the basis on which a rag-tag group of Patriots fought a war against England, the most powerful empire on Earth at that time. In other words, the battle for our freedoms was fought over our property rights.
Read the Declaration of Independence: The King had “plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People”. Line-after-line talks about the theft of people’s property: “He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country”. The King has cut off “our Trade with all Parts of the World” and imposed “Taxes on us without our Consent”. He has “sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance”.
Powerful stuff. No wonder, one of the oldest Revolutionary flags, known as the Gadsden Flag, was a snake in scribed below with the words “Don’t Tread on Me!”.
Laws that protect property between individuals are well developed in the United States of America. However when the government itself wants to take a citizen’s property, the laws have been immorally “reinterpreted” over the years to allow the government to seize a person’s property. Connecticut and New York say it’s now constitutional for your local town to seize your house and turn it over to a rich out-of-town property developer, using the rubric of “collective good”.
It was not always so. To the Founders it was obvious that property was the basis of all freedoms. In fact, the Declaration of Colonial Rights drawn up by the First Continental Congress on October 14, 1774 to list grievances against the King, identified the people’s inalienable rights as “life, liberty and property”.
By the Second Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson had rewritten and expanded these grievances into an impassioned plea for freedom and the right “to the pursuit of happiness”. These revolutionary words were finally adapted and approved in a closed session on Tuesday, July 2nd, and released to the people on Thursday, July 4, 1776.
Key Concepts:
Primordial Property (your life) Primary Property (your ideas from your mind) Secondary Property (your physical possessions) Tertiary Property (your stocks & bonds)
Because new property is continually being invented, wealth is continually being expanded.
Famous Quotes:
“Private property was the original source of freedom. Is still is its main bulwark.”
-Walter Lippman
“The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.”
-John Locke
Slogans & Bumper Sticker Idea:
"You Can Have My Property When You Take It From My Cold, Dead Fingers!"
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