Re: Private Property

On 8/9/2026 11:28 AM, Wilson wrote:
> 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.
> 
Notice: Property Protected 24 hrs by Smith & Wesson.