Here’s a pop music quiz: Name the band whose song, “Signs,” reached #1 on the charts in 1971? The answer: the Five Man Electrical Band. The song contains this memorable passage:
The sign says
anyone caught trespassing
will be shot on sight.
So I climbed on the fence
and I yelled to the house,
“Hey! What gives you the right?
To put up a fence to keep me out
and to keep Mother Nature in.
If God were here he’d tell you to your face,
‘Man, you must be some kind of sinner.’”
Thirty years later, environmental groups, politicians, “intellectuals,” and journalists are still singing that song. The notion that property rights are incompatible with protecting the environment, justice, and morality lies behind Bill Clinton’s designation of National Monuments in the final months of his administration; Clinton’s executive order closing roads on some 58 million acres of public lands; the extraordinary abuses of private property owners under the Endangered Species Act; and most recently the radical and dangerous proposal in the Bush energy plan authorizing the federal government’s use of eminent domain to take private property to clear the way for new power lines and pipelines.
Why We Will Lose
If we react to each of these assaults on private land owners singularly, we will lose. Our opponents claim they have the higher moral ground in all these cases; anyone who disagrees is “pro-business,” “anti-environment,” or “selfish.” Because people are too busy or too complacent to study issues that don’t directly or immediately affect them, they rely on moral judgements to choose sides. Right now, we’re the black hats.
To persuade our friends and neighbors, and eventually our elected officials, to oppose these assaults on individual freedom and private property, we need to answer the question, “What gives you the right?” That requires understanding and communicating the moral, historical, cultural, and legal foundations of our right to own property.
Five Reasons to Respect Property Rights
What gives us private property rights to land, possessions, and our own bodies? A lot of ink has been spilled arguing which reason is the most important or logically rigorous. Historically, private property rights have been respected for five reasons:
1. Property rights are the key to building a pluralistic society. Freedom of religion is impossible without property rights, because churches, synagogues, and temples all must be owned by someone or some group. Ask the Chinese if you disagree. The same is true of newspapers, television and radio stations, and book publishers. Ask the Russians if you disagree.
You can’t have unions without private property: Ask the Poles if you doubt that. You can’t have hospitals that pursue different philosophies of health care, or any of the millions of other private institutions that make up civil society, without private property rights.
The alternative to a pluralistic society is totalitarianism: a society where the individual is powerless against the state, and where the decisions and values of the few are imposed on the many. Is that the kind of society you would want to live in?
2. Private property rights flow logically and legally from self-ownership. If you don’t own yourself–your own body and mind–then who does? The alternative to self-ownership is slavery. Many of us have so internalized the ideal of self-ownership that we think it is a natural instinct, but it is not.
In many parts of the world to this very day, self-ownership is a strange concept embraced only by social outcasts denied membership in their tribes or clans. Self-ownership as a positive value didn’t appear in recorded history until 453 B.C., in Pericles’ funeral oration as reported by Homer.
The concept of self-ownership first appeared in modern legal theory in On the Law of War and Peace, written in 1625 by Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist. Grotius concluded that the right to private property extended to and protected the individual’s right to life and happiness. John Locke incorporated the idea in his Treatises, published in 1690, and they became the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution a century later.
3. Our property rights were purchased with the blood of millions of martyrs. We don’t know how many people were put to death by primitive tribal societies for asserting independence from the rules or beliefs of their tribe or clan. We do know tens of million of slaves died fighting for their liberty during the Roman Empire. Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence lost everything they owned fighting for these rights.
In the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of civilians were murdered by their own governments in China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and other socialist countries because they refused to surrender their right to private property. Millions of Americans fought and died in the Civil War and in two World Wars, not in the name of imperialism, national defense, or personal glory, but for individual freedom and the Rule of Law.
4. Private property works. It was only after individual property rights were secured that humankind left behind eons of starvation and savagery. Graphs showing life expectancy, population, and wealth during the past 2,000 years resemble hockey sticks: a long and flat line representing 1,700 years of economic stagnation, tyranny, and repression, followed by a sharp and steep rise that coincides precisely with the discovery and protection of private property rights.
In a recent comparison of the economic growth and civil liberties records of the world’s nations, The Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal found that those countries that protect private property rights are invariably the most free and prosperous.
What more proof is needed?
5. Property rights must be respected if individual freedom is to last. It required the better part of the twentieth century to prove what the best political philosophers always knew: You cannot have freedom without property rights. Countries that have tried have invariably failed.
Private property rights act as a check on the power of government and elites. They create opposition to centralized power by creating exit and choice options. They deny resources to tyrants and erect protective walls around law abiders. As Richard Pipes writes of the consequences of socialism in the twentieth century:
The simultaneous violation of property rights and destruction of human lives was not mere coincidence, for, what a man is, what he does, and what he owns are of a piece, so that the assault on his belongings is an assault also on his individuality and his right to life.
The Never-Ending Battle
It is easy to persuade people to give up a little freedom for more security. It is much more difficult to convince them that the little freedom they are tempted to surrender now might be of vital importance to someone else, or useful to them sometime down the road.
The next time you meet with family, friends, or coworkers, look closely at the people around the table. They are a microcosm of an entire nation. Do they understand that without property rights there would be no churches and only one television station? Have they ever even heard the phrase “self-ownership”? Do they know that socialist governments have murdered more of their own citizens than have died in all the wars of the past century?
If you don’t tell them, who will? And if you don’t tell them, why would they rally to defend somebody else’s property rights when they are under attack? Why would they come to your defense?
A 2,500-year legacy is literally in your hands. Please don’t drop it.
