I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the duties imposed upon us by the law of social union, as, upon any pretest of public service, to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen. Who but a tyrant (a name expressive of everything which can vitiate and degrade human nature) could think of seizing on the property of men, unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and thousands together?
—Edmund Burke, Reflections On The Revolution In France
We all like to pretend that one of the support pillars of a Society of Freedom and Ordered Liberty, Private Property, is still standing, holding-up the vulnerable structure that was The United States Of America [I continue, often, to be guilty of this refusal to accept Reality].
But it can be argued very successfully that Private Property was abolished in America with the passage of the first ‘Public Accommodation’ law.
From that point forward, Owners of property no longer were allowed to exercise their God-given right to use and dispose of their property. Control of it was transferred from the Owner who bought and maintained it to the State, subject, from thereon, to the whims of Politicians and Bureaucrats — people without any interest in seeing that said property flourish.
Kevin Williamson captures exactly what the result of the suppression of this Fundamental Right has meant and has led us to [tip of the fedora to Darleen Click]:
…When there is no private property — the great legal fiction of “public accommodation” saw to its effective abolition — then everything is subject to brute-force politics, and there can be no live-and-let-live ethic, which is why a nation facing financial ruination and the emergence of a bloodthirsty Islamic caliphate is suffering paroxysms over the question of whether we can clap confectioners into prison for declining to bake a cake for a wedding in which there is no bride. [He’s referring, as probably have guessed, to the controversy over the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act in Indiana and, now, Arkansas.]
Without Property Rights, without being able to be freely exercise control over possessions, all other Rights — which, once again can only be granted by The Creator — are vulnerable to the Tyrannical impulses of those in Power And Control of the governments of this country and their allies in the Business and Dependent Class communities.
We are reaping our own self-inflicted Harvest Of Character Weakness. In our desire to not be seen as ‘bigots’, we caved-in to the forces of Despotism and allowed our Basic Rights to be sacrificed on an Altar Of Unreasonable Guilt.
Welcome to the Brute-Force Age.
Prepare to Welcome the Jungle.
I repeat it, “If we can find no relief from this infamous situation”, let the ministry who have stripped us of our property and liberty, deprive us of our understanding too; that unconscious of what we have been or are, and ungoaded by tormenting reflections, we may tamely bow down our necks, with all the stupid serenity of servitude, to any drudgery which our lords & masters may please to command” — I appeal to the common sense of mankind. To what a state of misery and infamy must a people be reduced!
—Samuel Adams, writing as ‘CANDIDUS’, 07 October 1771
