The Primacy of Property Rights

When most Americans speak of personal liberties, they tend to think only in terms of First Amendment rights.  However, it is important that Americans recognize that property rights are just as essential and, in many ways, foundational to all other rights.  The right to earn and buy and own and use and dispose of private property as one sees fit is presently being gutted by this regime.  We see government telling companies what they can and cannot do, what they can and cannot pay, and what products they may and may not produce.  Hard working citizens are seeing more of their wealth being confiscated by a repressive and irresponsible government to benefit wasteful pet causes or redistributed to increasingly dependent citizens.  Dear Leader believes he, and only he, knows best — that as a supremely enlightened being, he and his cronies can best pick the winners and losers in society and can best allocate its limited resources.  The market and individual investors and consumers cannot be trusted they say – only elite government bureaucrats know best. History is not on their side.  Here are some quotes to help remind us of the importance of our right to private property.  As the 5th Amendment of the Constitution says,  “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Government has no other end than the preservation of property. –John Locke

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property. –John Locke

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing. –Calvin Coolidge

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

The Right of property is the guardian of every other Right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their Liberty. –Arthur Lee

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. –Samuel Adams

Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. –John Adams

Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property. –Ayn Rand

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race. –William Howard Taft

No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent. –John Jay

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. –John Adams.

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. –Samuel Adams

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. –James Madison

… whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience … [Power then] devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and, by the Establishment of a new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society. –John Locke

All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety. –George Mason

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending. –Andrew Jackson

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. —Fredrich Hayek

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark. –Lippmann Walter

A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom. –Lord Acton

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

 [A] private property regime makes people responsible for their own actions in the realm of material goods. Such a system therefore ensures that people experience the consequences of their own acts. Property sets up fences, but it also surrounds us with mirrors, reflecting back upon us the consequences of our own behavior. –Tom Bethell

That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression. –Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35

No man’s life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session. –Author Unknown

Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society. –David Friedman

Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family. –Herbert Hoover

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights… –Ayn Rand

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. –Ludwig von Mises

The best way to put more money in people’s wallets is to leave it there in the first place. –Edwin Feulner

Tags: Constitution, founding fathers, property rights, Quotes