The View From 1776

England’s history of private property rights was unique in world history, particularly as the rights of private property were the driving force that shaped representative government and gave us the conception of a Bill of Rights.  It began with Magna Carta in 1215, when the barons and earls, backed by the yeomanry and peasants, confronted King John and demanded a fundamental right: only Parliament, representing the whole of society, could levy taxes and fees.  All of the civil and criminal rights we take for granted flow from that document, culminating in the 1689 English Bill of Rights.

Underneath it all, as Melanie Wooten notes, are the rights of private property.  There is a reason why the colonists went to war with England, decrying taxation without colonial representation in Parliament.  As Samuel Adams wrote, no person may sustain any of his political liberties under a government that exercises arbitrary claims to seize even a tiny part of the individual’s private property without his consent.

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Yours, Mine and The Gubmint’s - Part I
By Melanie K. Wooten, Iowa

“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.” --- (Source: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), Vol. VI, p. 9.)

“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.” — James Madison on Property, (1792).

From the beginnings of our Country, the foundation of our Liberty is the right to private property.  We were unique in the world in putting this statement into the Bill of Rights and in the Constitution.  All jokes aside about giving our Constitution to Iraq since we are not using it, the new interim Iraqi constitution does not provide for the ownership of private property.  Article 16, Section A, states:  “Public property is sacrosanct and its protection is the duty of every citizen.” (Emphasis added.)

Our government is proud of this and then Secretary of State Colin Powell called the day the Iraqi people adopted this document “a day reflecting a bright future for the Iraqi people.” This is why we have sacrificed blood and treasury on foreign soil?  Or does this most recent attempt at nation building state the real intentions of our government that knows full well that without private property, no other rights can exist?  If so, Socialism is upon us.  And if we admit that our government has strayed that far from the constitutional republic envisioned by our Founding Fathers, the next question becomes, “What do we intend to do about it?”

I am writing this article on a computer system I own.  I am sitting in an apartment that my landlord has no right to enter without my permission except under specific circumstances.  I am surrounded by items I selected, purchased and own.  So far, so good.  But there are those who wish to deprive me of the right to keep and bear arms --- with the emphasis on KEEP --- and somehow the Second Amendment is not being equated with my right to private property.  I have news for you, every other right flows from my right to private property.

For almost two hundred years, our representatives have been selected for us and we dutifully vote for the limited choices we are offered.  Occasionally, we become alarmed by reported attacks on our rights under the Constitution, so we dash off to defend the Second Amendment when someone wants our guns; others stand tall for the Fourth Amendment, particularly now under the eminent domain fights being waged across our Nation.  (There is a much more important issue in the Fourth Amendment which I will address in a later article.) We know all about the Fifth Amendment (so we think) because that’s the one that doesn’t require me to “rat myself out”, as Judy Holliday so delightfully stated in “Born Yesterday”.

The First Amendment has its defenders every time someone opens their mouth in an unapproved (harrumph!) manner and we have even taken umbrage at a violation of our freedom of religion under the guise of “separation of church and state”, although I have yet to find that statement anywhere in the First Amendment or anywhere in the Constitution.  (Wouldn’t that be freedom from religion, which is definitely not mentioned?)

The Third Amendment does not appear to be an issue (quartering soldiers in our homes) nor do most of us worry about the provisions of the Sixth Amendment (right to a speedy trial) although lawyers appear to not want to try a case until either they are paid or everyone forgets why the trial is going forward anyway so we are asked to waive that right should the occasion arise.  As well, the Seventh Amendment (trial by jury) doesn’t appear to present problems for most of us.  The Eighth Amendment presents a problem for me because I have yet to understand why someone who killed someone else in a horribly prolonged manner finds the death penalty “cruel and unusual punishment”, but that is my personal preference, to which I am entitled under the Constitution!

As for the Ninth and Tenth Amendments --- those not limiting my rights to those stated and reserving to Me The People any rights not covered by the other rights enumerated --- we haven’t seen those in so long even I have forgotten --- and I am long in the tooth, children.

The point of laying out all those items covered by the Bill of Rights is to bring us to one of my pet questions:  Why do we support only that which attracts us at the moment?  It is as if we are magpies or squirrels, attracted by something shiny, and so off we go, in all directions, after the shiny things for other things that attract us at the moment.  And we do this, endlessly.  We appear to always be distracted by something new and shiny, dropping what we already have, losing all in the process.

We do not seem to understand that the ONLY protections that will shelter us in times of trouble, no matter what kind and how dire, are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; the whole wondrous documents, not just a particular amendment at a particular time.  And because of our penchant to be magpies and squirrels, we keep letting members of our gubmint carry off pieces of our freedom by making new laws and creating new problems.  We just keep dropping baubles along the way because we saw something else that caught our interest.  Soon, there will be no Constitution left to protect us --- and we will say that we were supporting our Constitution, never realizing we left it by the wayside long ago!

The Constitution is what defines us a Nation, not just the particular amendment we are supporting at a particular time.  It binds us to each other, for each other.  Our Founding Fathers’ vision gave us the entire document at the same time.  Each state voted on September 17, 1787 to accept the entire document or reject it.  Thank God, these brilliant, clear-thinking men made the sacrifices they did to give us ALL of it, ALL at once.  If they had not, do you seriously think these men would have been able to get together again and again to cover what they forgot or couldn’t agree on?  Not hardly!

So, why are we so blinded by the shiny things that we cannot see --- we MUST support the entire Constitution --- or none of it?  We cannot just pick and choose what is important to us at a given time; we must ALL stand firm in defense of the Constitution, as it was given to us by our Founding Fathers.  We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by those who would have us lose the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Especially if they are our gubmint.

And, yes, I am saying that the amendments cribbed together after the original documents and tacked on over the past two hundred years have proven disastrous to our Country, but that is the subject of another article, isn’t it?

Catch ya’ later!

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