Our “First Principles Series” is an ongoing awareness effort by Beacon to restore our nation’s commitment to those principles of free markets, individual liberty, and limited government that have made America the best nation in the history of the world. Often, politicians eager to appease constituents can stray from these principles. And voters can be misled into believing that policies violating these principles are in their best interest when they’re not. This series is designed to set the record straight and make the case for standing up for our most important principles, even when it might be politically expedient to ignore them. Read our entire “First Principles Series” here.
Private property rights lie at the very heart of civilization. Indeed, private property is a necessary condition for freedom and economic prosperity. While the Founders and early Americans saw property rights as essential for human flourishing and the preservation of liberty, modern academia and government institutions generally treat them as “second-class” rights.
When people think of their most important rights, they generally will point to rights like freedom of speech, the freedom to worship, or the right to privacy. Rarely are property rights considered as critical as our other individual rights. Yet without private property, other rights we hold dear are in jeopardy. If the government owned the printing press, would individuals be able to freely publish what they want or criticize the government? If places of worship were owned by the government, would people be able to freely practice their religion? If we did not have ownership in our homes and possessions, would we truly have privacy? As experiences like communism have demonstrated, without property rights, all of our rights would have very little meaning.
This is because private property creates spheres where individuals exert dominion and control independent of the government. Property rights thus create autonomy from government authority. In a society without private property rights, even rights written in a constitution offer little protection against government abuse. For example, although the Soviet Union’s various constitutions declared that the people had certain rights, such as freedom of speech or freedom of religion, once the government seized large swaths of private property, censorship and religious persecution soon followed. In the end, there was no private property to act as a shield against the heavy hand of the government.
As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek remarked, “The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom.” This is why societies with little to no property rights lack individual freedom. Unfortunately, federal, state, and local governments routinely violate the property rights of Americans. From laws and regulations restricting how property owners may use their property, to the government taking private property by eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture, or to the government making it difficult to retain property via property taxes, private property is under constant assault.
Luckily, the Constitution protects property rights through the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ Due Process Clauses and through the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. The Founders understood that protections for private property must exist if the nation was to remain free. Celebrating rights like freedom of speech while at the same time disregarding property rights is a grave error. If we care about individual liberty and limited government, we must remember to defend private property rights as fervently as we do our other rights. As John Adams rightly noted, “Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.”