Re: Private Property

On 8/9/2026 1:34 PM, dart200 wrote:
> On 8/9/26 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
>>
> 
> i love how capitalists love to jerk themselves off about freedom and 
> flourishing endlessly while ignoring the fact 7/8 are enslaved to a 
> nation-state system that coercively interferes with basic freedom of 
> movement
> 
> this world is a travesty of authoritarian control all you can do is keep 
> crying endlessly about private property, as violently owning stuff is 
> the _only_ principle you actually care about

Self-defense is not the initiation of violence, and as it is oriented 
towards the protection of life and the thriving of the human person, it 
is a natural human right.

Property as gained by the effort and work of a human being is inherently 
a part of that person's life. As such, defense of that property is also 
a human right.

Anyone who attempts to take away one's property or other natural rights 
is an enabler of tyranny, and therefore an enemy of life and of humanity.