As I look at the various discussions occurring in the 21st century, I again see that the overshadowing argument is over Property and Property Rights. I see and hear a distracting argument that was rattled in my day regarding the economy. There is a distinction yet a connection.
The economy is directly connected to Property! The ability to transact (buy & sell), trade, produce and build wealth (the accumulation of necessities that promotes ones well being over time). We studied the root of what is now economics from a completed historical view beginning with the differing thoughts of Plato and Aristotle; then the ideas of Mun, von Hornigk, Colbert and our contemporaries as Locke. You must understand that not until the early 1800’s did economics divest itself as a pseudo-science from the art of philosophy. This means that when we Founders established the founding documents from the time of settling America through the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and Bill of Rights – Property is the heart of Liberty!
In many of my writings and those of my fellow founders, we make it very clear that Property is more than the physical land that an individual acquires. Property as Locke, Madison and others note is: the labor of ones hands (work), thoughts, and acquisitions (money and physical property). Madison states this very clearly in 1792, “This term in its particular application means “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”
“In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.
“In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.
“In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.
“He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.
“He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, 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.
“Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.
“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.”
Yet, in your present time, Government has violated every protection that we Founders instituted Constitutionally and in the Bill of Rights by using legislation and the Supreme Court to take the property of the individual just like what we experienced in the 1700’s – excessive taxation, heavy regulations on commerce, courts and local governments taking land for the benefit of a few, government taking land and personal property without just compensation or having property taken without criminal intent – This is against all that Mr. Madison, my cousin John Adams and many Founders defined as Individual Property.
What I observe is that you are instituting Utopianism at every level of government. I, in particular, state that “Untopianism is UnConstitutional!” The modern terms for Utopianism are socialism and communism.
To even think of or allow these isms to become imbued, permeated, in any form in our government is against all that was intended for these United States or the Individual Citizen. To accept these isms or the influence of foreign governments is contrary to the spirit of the American Revolution and the original intent of Liberty.
It is your duty as it was in my day to reject Utopianism which is slavery and Stand, NO! To Fight for Liberty !