by Tom DeWeese, American Policy Center, ©2024
(Dec. 4, 2024) — Most Americans tend to think of private property simply as a home – the place where the family resides, stores their belongings, and finds shelter and safety from the elements. It’s where you live. It’s yours because you pay the mortgage and the taxes. Most people don’t give property ownership much more thought than that.
There was a time when property ownership was considered to be much more. Property, and the ability to own and control it, was life itself.
John Adams said, “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.”
The great economist John Locke, whose writings and ideas had a major influence on the nation’s founders, believed that “life and liberty are secure only so long as the right of property is secure.”
Locke warned that human civilization would be reduced to the level of a pack of wolves and cease to exist because lack of control over your own actions caused fear and insecurity. Private property ownership, Locke argued, brought stability and wealth to individuals, leading to a prosperous society of man. That’s because legal ownership of property is the key to productive development.
Private property ownership is the reason the United States became the wealthiest nation on earth almost overnight. Free individuals, using their own land to create commerce and build personal wealth through the equity of their property, are the root of American success. Sixty percent of early American businesses were financed through the equity of property ownership. And sixty percent of American jobs were created through those successful businesses. That’s how a free-market economy is built. Private property ownership is the source of personal individual wealth for the average American.
John Locke advocated that if property rights did not exist, then the incentive for an industrious person to develop and improve property would be destroyed; that the industrious person would be deprived of the fruits of his labor; that marauding bands would confiscate, by force, the goods produced by others; and that mankind would be compelled to remain on a bare-subsistence level of hand-to-mouth survival because the accumulation of anything of value would invite attack.
One must only look to the example of the former Soviet Union to see clearly what happens to society when an outlaw government exercises brute force to take control of private property. Under that tyrannical government, each of Locke’s predictions came true. Throughout its history, the Soviet government excused its every action under the banner of equality for all. There were no property rights, no freedom of enterprise, and no protections for individual actions. Instead, the Soviet government enforced redistribution of wealth schemes, confiscating homes from the rich and middle class. Shelves were bare, freedom of choice was non-existent, and personal misery ruled the day.
The same basic redistribution schemes of the Soviets were later used by Zimbabwe’s former dictator, Robert Mugabe, to destroy that agriculturally rich African nation. Mugabe confiscated farmland owned by white farmers and gave it to friends of his corrupt government – most of whom had never even seen a farm. The result was economic disaster, widespread poverty, and hunger in a land that had once fed the continent. The nation of South Africa is now following in the murderous footsteps of Robert Mugabe as it attacks white farmers, taking their property and again putting it in the hands of those who know nothing about running a farm.
Clearly, John Locke’s warnings have been vindicated. Private property ownership is much more than a house. It is the root of a prosperous, healthy, human society based on the individual’s freedom to live a life of his own, gaining from the fruits of his own labor. Take that option away, and people will always react the same way. They stop producing.
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this subject is positively evident in the welfare rolls. fees, taxes, bonds and bureaucrats have become the weapons to transfer private wealth to the state. nearly all privately held large corporations, institutions (i.e. healthcare, utilities, insurance…) have followed suite with the steal to further monetize government. covid is a good example of how government uses infrastructure to transfer wealth. it all works like giant money/wealth sucking vacuum leaving nothing behind. the fix. thinking time to take action locally is when you see dissolution at the top. the incoming administration can start the dissolution at the top, but we will have to work it at the local level. anything short of complete elimination is failure.
Opinion:
At a 35,000-foot level, all tiers of government – local (township), county/parish, state, and federal are guilty of diminishing property rights of USA citizens every time each form of governmental authority imposes a tax or fee on anything you do, buy, sell, say, eat at restaurants, or earn at any type of job or investment.
In the overall picture, most of these taxes and fees are cumulative and non tax deductible. You end up literally being taxed to death or your quality of life is significantly reduced. They do this to make you less able to keep what is yours and your property is sometimes confiscated whereby you lose your hard-earned property through a complex web of bureaucracy.
Make America Bureaucratic-free Again.
The above is no laughing matter. What is a laughing matter is that there are ignorant people who brag about getting a tax refund thinking that they just got free money from their state or the federal government, except in the case of poverty citizens.