Re: Private Property

On 8/9/2026 10:49 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Aug 2026 09:32:33 -0700, Dude <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On 8/9/2026 9:18 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
>>> 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.
>>>
>> Did you complete 5th grade history class?
>>>
>> There is nothing a priori about it.
>>>
>> You're cutting out again. A natural human right is a priori, that's why
>> it is called a natural right, meaning from birth.
> 
> You can define it that way if you insist.  I insist otherwise.
> 
The United Nations explicitly states that humans have rights from birth 
in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which 
proclaims that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and 
rights".>

>> 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.