Property: The First Line of Defense
by Susan Snelling
What is Property?
Property rights are covered in the Constitution in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Property is more than your physical and material possessions, it is everything that pertains to you, including intellectual property. James Madison explained it in the National Gazette Essay, March 27, 1792 when he wrote: “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.”
In Federalist 10, Madison states: “The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.” What Madison is saying is that the government’s job under the Constitution is to protect not just our physical property but the right to obtain the property in the first place, which involves our faculties. Faculties are everything related to our person; our body, our mind, our gifts, our talents, our thoughts, and so forth. Everything that pertains to us as individuals.
The Constitution protects our essence as human beings. No person, government or entity can own us or control us. Anything other than protection of who we are as a person down to our thoughts and the gifts and abilities that God has given us, is a violation of our natural rights. Without protection of our most fundamental natural rights in our person there is no protection of any other right. It is the job of government to protect our property of every kind, without respect to position or title or station in life. James Madison wrote: “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.”
The Fifth Amendment is about the federal government and the individuals’ protection from its encroachments. It says that “no person shall be”: “…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. The Fourteenth Amendment is regarding the state governments and their encroachments: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law;”
It is important for citizens to pay attention to the different governmental agencies, both federal and state, to determine if they encroach on his person and property, whether it be his opinions or possessions. The American people have a right to the protection of property including our thoughts and opinions! James Madison said in his Address at the Virginia Convention: “It is sufficiently obvious that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act, and that the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.These rights cannot well be separated. The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right.”
Property rights are considered vulnerable and some historians call them “the first line of defense” for all other rights. Property rights and personal rights were just as important to the Founders. Some, including James W. Ely, Jr. in “The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights,” makes the case that property rights guarantee all other rights and that it was a primacy with the Founding Fathers. In the Declaration of Independence is the important phrase: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Happiness was interchangeable with the word “property.” Hopefully, that is understandable after Madison’s explanation of what constitutes “property.”
It is important that the American people make certain their legislators and other elected officials defend the Constitution in the area of property rights as a line of defense for the protection of other rights. When personal and property rights are infringed upon, other rights will be infringed upon as well. Property rights are tied into economic freedom, of which the Founding Fathers were also concerned. Where a people are not economically free, they have no freedom.
Today some legislatures pass laws that censure and punish speech or basically a person’s thoughts. The government has no say in our thoughts or opinions. Some district attorneys and attorney generals prosecute people for their opinions, if they disagree with the ruling class ideology. The only speech protected is that which the ruling class approves of. This creates a dual system of justice where the laws are applied depending on your worldview and political beliefs. The violation of property rights is to remove the blinder off from Lady Justice and shift the balance. If you are of the wrong ideology, beliefs, political party affiliation or question the ruling class then you will be censured, indicted, prosecuted, and perhaps imprisoned or worse.
This trend leads into an abyss of absolute tyranny. That is a path America cannot afford and one that would be the biggest failure of this “shining city on a hill” that the Founders established. It is a path we do not want to take and must resist. Do it for ourselves, for our posterity, and for those who have given their “last full measure” for our freedoms, and for the Founders who with faith in God and a dream that shone brightly in the darkness of oppression embarked upon. A nation established on Biblical principles that requires a moral and righteous people for its survival, shifts on the brink of wholesale moral, economic, political, and social bankruptcy. We must be able to speak our thoughts and exercise all our other natural rights to secure and maintain liberty. God save America.