PRIVATE PROPERTY

Links of Resources and Information on Private Property:

Natural Justice and Private Property -- Rev. Daniel Marino Benitez
Property: Its Duties and Rights -- McMillan and Company
The Economics and Ethics of Private Property -- Hans Hermann Hoppe
The Economics and Ethics of Private Property 2nd Edition -- Hans Hermann Hoppe
An Account of the Relatons between Private Property and Public Welfare -- Arthur Twining Hadley
Private Property  -Mises Institute
Ken Dost - Facebook


The history of America in recent decades is in large measure the history of a people who, unwilling to bear the responsibility that freedom and choice require, have ceded larger and larger portions of their liberty and property to a national government that promises to provide materially. The recent round of cries for socialized medicine in this country signifies an abdication by many Americans of responsibility for their own lives and welfare. The figure of the Grand Inquisitor shows us the manipulative and dehumanizing face lurking behind the mask of statist humanitarian compassion.


Do you own it? 

"By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another by force or fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice." --Thomas Jefferson: Batture at New Orleans, 1812. ME 18:104


"Nothing is ours, which another may deprive us of." --Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786. ME 5:440

        -  So, do you own your property today if it can be taken from you ?

"[If government have] a right of demanding ad libitum and of taxing us themselves to the full amount of their demand if we do not comply with it, [this would leave] us without anything we can call property." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Lord North, 1775. Papers 1:233

"The first foundations of the social compact would be broken up were we definitely to refuse to its members the protection of their persons and property while in their lawful pursuits." --Thomas Jefferson to James Maury, 1812. ME 13:145

       - What was a lawful pusuit in the days of our founding has become grossly distorted today.

The institution of private property cultivates and protects the moral freedom of the individual person by recognizing his essential dependence on the material world. The limits imposed by this material environment comprise to a large extent the conditions under which human beings make choices, and, thus, the conditions under which human beings exercise moral agency. The sphere of sovereignty that property provides is a sphere necessary to the moral autonomy of the person. Property forms a cushion of independence for each person from the moral intrusiveness of other individuals and the state. It is the fulcrum by which the lone individual makes his moral significance known to the forces that would strip him of his freedom.

"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'"

--Thomas Jefferson: Note in Destutt de Tracy's "Political Economy," 1816. ME 14:46


"But the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, considered as individual possessions are secured by those maxims of constitutional law which are the monuments showing the victorious progress of the race in securing to men the blessings of civilization under the reign of just and equal laws, so that, in the famous language of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, the government of the commonwealth 'may be a government of laws and not of men.' For, the very idea that one man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living, or any material right essential to the enjoyment of life, at the mere will of another, seems to be intolerable in any country where freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself."
[Yik Wo v. Hopkins (U.S. Supreme Court, 1885)]

"The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny."
[Gerry Spence - "With Justice For None" p.95]

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the rights of the people by the gradual & silent encroachments of those in power than by violent & sudden usurpations."
[Madison, Virginia Conv. 1788]

"And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God."
[Jonn F. Kennedy]

"For the principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature; but which could not be preserved in peace without the mutual assistance and intercourse, which is gained by the institution of friendly and social communities. Hence it follows, thay the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals."
[William Blackstone, Commentaries (1765)]

"By the absolute rights of individuals we mean those which are so in their primary and strictest sense; such as would belong to their persons merely in a state of nature, and which every man is entitled to enjoy whether out of society or in it."
[William Blackstone, Commentaries (1765)]

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
Alexander Hamilton, 23 Feb. 1775

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