PROPERTY AND LIBERTY or FIVE OUTRAGEOUS PROPOSITIONS ABOUT PROPERTY

1. PROPERTY AND LIBERTYorFIVE OUTRAGEOUS PROPOSITIONS ABOUT PROPERTY

2. FIVE OUTRAGEOUS PROPOSITIONS ABOUT PROPERTY I have as much property as Bill Gates! The former Soviet Union respected private property! Property protects the poor more than the rich! The American Revolution was fought for only three reasons: Property, property, property! Property and liberty mean the same thing!

3. 1. I have as much property as Bill Gates! Property is a right not a synonym for �things.� Property is the right of ownership. Property/Ownership is the legal right to exclude others � including the state in most instances � from resources acquired without coercion, theft, or fraud. Property is limited by the equal exclusionary right of others.

4. 2. The former Soviet Union respected private property! �The theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.� �The Communist Manifesto �The personal property right of citizens. . . is protected by law.� �Soviet Constitution of 1936, Art. 10 All societies recognize some applications of private property Reed�s World of Property

5. 3. Property protects the poor more than the rich! The rich can protect their own resources. In national terms: There is little poverty in property�strong nations There is little wealth in property�weak nations How the free market can cause poverty China�s secret The Mystery of Capital

6. How the institution of property facilitates wealth: Provides maximum incentive for new resource production Allows landholders to work outside their homes Facilitates capital formation Makes resources easily divisible

7. 4. The American Revolution was fought for three reasons: property, property, property! �No taxation without representation� was a property issue �At every stage in the controversy to 1776 and beyond, Americans claimed to be defending property rights.� �P.J. Marshall �Liberty, property, and no stamps.� �If we can tax the Americans without their consent, they have no property, nothing they can call their own.� �John Wilkes, Lord Mayor of London

8. Protection of property was the primary legitimate purpose for government. For example: �The protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property�[is] the first object of government.� �James Madison �The great end of men�s entering into society [is] the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety.� �John Locke �Civil government. . . .is instituted for the security of property.� �Adam Smith �The first and principal cause of making kings was to maintain property and contracts.� �John Davies

9. 5. Property and liberty mean the same thing! Importance of property and liberty: two views Liberty depends on people having enough of their own resources to be free from depending on the state. Property and liberty are semantically identical, the two sides of the same definitional coin. To say that one has a liberty to take certain action or that one has a property in taking certain action are equivalent. Under property/liberty, one may legally exclude others from interference.

10. William Blackstone and property as �natural liberty.� James Madison and liberty as property. �Property�in its particular application means that �dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.� In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to everyone else a like advantage. In the former sense, a man�s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.� �James Madison, �Property,� National Gazette, Mar. 29, 1792.

11. The �state of perfect freedom� is the ability of people �to order their actions, and to dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bound of nature, without asking leave, or depending on the will of any other man.� �John Locke �Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.� �John Adams �The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.� �Arthur Lee �Liberty and Property are not only joined in common discourse, but are in their own natures so nearly ally�d that one cannot be said to possess the one without the enjoyment of the other.� �National Gazette, Feb. 22, 1768 �A fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the right to property. Neither could have meaning without the other.� �Lynch v. Household Finance Corp., 405 U.S. 538, 552 (1972). �Property is the liberty to do with the substances and uses of a thing according to one�s wants and desires and to exclude every other person therefrom.� �Austrian Civil Code