Re: Private Property

On 8/9/2026 8:45 AM, Wilson wrote:
> 
> 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
>
We studied this in school: The French Revolution

The revolution ended noble land monopolies and peasant dues in 1789.. 
Established private property as a basic human right. How?

By abolishing feudal land rights and establishing legal protections for 
individual ownership in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.