Re: Private Property

On Sun, 9 Aug 2026 09:03:41 -0700, Dude <[email protected]> wrote:

>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.

It can be defined that way...or not.  There is nothing a priori about
it.
 
>> 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.
-- 
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