Private Property is Private
The right to private property was one of the central issues involved in the American Revolution. The colonists’ cries of “taxation without representation” were but protests of what they saw as an unjust taking of private property.
The founders, of course, did not understand property simply to mean one’s possessions. Property was understood to include the fruit of one’s labor; it included a man’s conscience—the things he believed and thought, and the ideals he held dear.
James Madison wrote that individuals have a property, “In their opinions and the free exercise of them.” As well as “a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions and in the profession and practice dictated by them.” In short, “as man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”
Some Americans continue to share the belief that the right to private property is sacrosanct–other Americans, not so much.
In a 2001 radio interview, a young Barack Obama lamented that the Warren Court had not been more radical and had not addressed the redistribution of wealth, which is to say the redistribution of private property.
Obama continued to opine that the Constitution was a charter of “negative liberties,” which failed to declare, “What the federal or state government must do on your behalf.”
The truth is that when read through the lens of the Declaration, the Constitution lays out how the government will carry out its mission — protecting each citizen’s private property!
– read full article by Joseph C Phillips at Townhall
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Tags: Constitution
