Private Property

At its core, free enterprise and a market economy can be reduced in many 
ways to an economic ideology centered around private property.  It gives 
me extraordinary joy to see how our founders, in writing the Declaration 
of Independence, declared that all men were "endowed by their Creator 
with certain unalienable rights, among them are life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness."

Here, the founders took the natural rights John Locke wrote about in his 
Second Treatise of Government in 1690 – "lives, liberties, and estates, 
which I call by the general name, property," and broadened it.  They 
presupposed that property was necessary for liberty and that the greater 
aspiration behind private property was "pursuit of happiness" (what we 
call "human flourishing" in my tradition).

Just weeks before the Declaration of Independence was written, George 
Mason had codified in the Virginia Declaration of Rights that "the 
enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and 
possessing property" were predicates to "pursuing and obtaining 
happiness and safety."  The founding fathers were not waxing and waning 
philosophically – well, they were not /only/ doing that – they were 
expressing the lived experience of the settlers in the new world.

The lived experience that served as the bedrock of our nation was one of 
private ownership driving incentives, of communal ownership discouraging 
productive work, and one where resentment was inevitable when rewards 
were equal, but effort was not.  Communal ownership of property had 
failed in practice because it was first a failed theory.

Private property is a natural right that flows from our ability to earn, 
hold, possess, retain, and manage the fruits of our own labor.  It 
produces responsibility, stewardship, and abundance that align with 
human nature.

David L. Bahnsen