The Connection | crowfor23

A common misconception held by many is the notion that private property originated

with capitalism. In truth, the idea of private property long predates capitalism and is intrinsic to

the human species. Lacking fur and innate defenses, the natural instinct of humans is to secure a

space to which they may safely live, cultivate and store the necessities required for their and their

offspring’s survival. Similarly, private property is essential to securing one’s liberty. At its basic

level, freedom depends on enjoying some kind of independence from material necessity and the

whims of one’s fellow men. Is there truly any other way for one to ensure basic self-sufficiency

and independence than to posses a place of one’s own where he or she is master and can safely

hold on to whatever is required for survival? Hence, the idea that a man’s house is his castle; that

is, one has a right to protect his house – his property – if another threatens to seize or destroy it.

For an attack on one’s property, in this sense, is an attack on one’s freedom. And one who is not

able or permitted to defend his property is, in fact, no better off than a slave.

Our Founding Fathers understood this truth concerning the connection between

individual liberty and personal property and enshrined this principle in our country’s Declaration

of Independence: “We hold these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are

endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and

the pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of our Declaration of

Independence, of course borrowed and adapted this idea from the great English defender of

liberty, John Locke who used the phrase, “life, liberty and property.” But make no mistake,

Jefferson’s adaptation was no slight of hand magician’s trick, but was in keeping with Locke’s

own understanding of the connection between liberty and property. The same could be said

concerning understandings of liberty extending back to the earliest republics in recorded history.

The ancient Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia and is linked to the idea of virtue or

excellence. For example, in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claimed that the happy man “lives

well and does well.” Drawing on this understanding of happiness, in his essay Concerning

Human Understanding, John Locke wrote,“The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the

foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and

constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves…is the necessary foundation

of our liberty.”

Thus, for most of the great political philosophers of classical antiquity, Locke, and our

country’s Founding Fathers, private property is not the goal of liberty – for, private property is

only considered an end in itself by pathological misers – but a necessary foundation for it; a

means to care for ourselves. And our own Bill of Rights enshrines the protection of rights to life,

liberty, and property in the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution which stipulates that no person

shall “be deprived of [that means have taken away] life, liberty, or property without due process

of law [i.e. legal procedures (such as a trial by jury) carried out according to the established law

of the land]; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation [fair

payment].

Those who would seek to take away from others their God-given rights (i.e. those with

which we have been endowed by our Creator), would do well to remember the words of our own

Declaration of Independence, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among

Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of

Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."

Kevin Crow

Published in The Beacon, April 2016