Property Rights In America
In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
3-26-2024
In rural America we’ve been fighting the governmental offices of bureaucracy for a long time; the USDA, (Uncle Sam Destroying Agriculture), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA). “Government” using the fake threat of climate change and in the pretense of saving the land, have hit rural Americans with all kinds of restrictions, mandates, permits, licenses and forced inspections; making it difficult to farm, ranch, harvest lumber, coal, oil (the energy industry), or any business, which cares for or raises animals; including zoos, circuses, the horse and carriage industry, horse racing, from quarter horses to the Kentucky Derby and beyond, even those wild and exotic animal enthusiasts. If we aren’t fighting the government bureaucrats we’re being harassed by radical environmental groups and radical animal rights groups, such as the ASPCA and HSUS.
The infringement upon Property Rights has been a huge problem in America for many decades. Rural America has been feeling the sting of this tyranny for a long time.
I cut my teeth in the radio business working for a man named Derry Brownfield; the founder of the Brownfield Network. When I worked for Derry, however, he had a conservative talk show, “with a country flavor,” as he would say. He was a genius when it came to understanding just how the D.C. decisions, legislation, bureaucrat regulations and Executive Orders would affect production in rural America.
Rural America is the foundation of all America! Rural America produces America’s food, meat, produce, lumber, raw materials and energy. Rural Americans get the dirt under their fingernails so that Americans everywhere can have a better life! Production is work and it takes land! It is more than just an occupation, it is a way of life, it is their life! Many family farms and businesses have been worked down through generation after generation; it truly is a beautiful life. All any American really wants is to go about their business and life without government intrusion.
It was just this weekend, when for the first time, I heard a “talking head” (as Derry used to call the talk-show-news hosts) mention and focus on property rights in America. Mark Levin, whom I respect, shared on his show Sunday evening, James Madison’s words regarding property.
Mark Levin hailed James Madison regarding his definition of Property!
Neither socialism, communism, or Marxism believe in or uphold personal property. These ideologies and forms of governing believe in government owning everything (everything) and governing and controlling all individuals. No self-thought or disagreement with their governing decisions is allowed. You must adhere to their ways and their rules. In this form of governing there are the elites in charge and then there are the rest of us; surfs and slaves.
Property: Private Property is what makes America unique. There were to be no noblemen or noblewomen dictating down to the people. In our Constitutional Republic, We the people are the ones in charge; “Consent of the governed.” Somehow, someway, America was turned upside down and we are now underneath a gargantuan government system, foreign to the original intent of our Founding Fathers and our founding documents. Our founding documents make it very clear, and it’s simple to understand; our rights, those inalienable rights, come from God, not government. Those founding documents also make it clear that government is restricted by “consent of the governed” and not the other way around.
Our Founding Fathers considered private property extremely important. “So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community.” Sir Wiliam Blackstone 1783
When I read the following quote by Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, I couldn’t help but think about and wonder, “Why does America have so many homeless, jobless and hungry citizens?” “Whenever there is, in any country, uncultivated land and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far expended as to violate natural right.”
Today, our government rewards farmers to not cultivate land, our government has seized land to save some “endangered species,” or to “preserve” the land; national forests, wetlands, public lands (with no trespassing signs), and there are many wildlife preserves, and the list goes on. There are also conservation easements which infringe upon private property rights. All these government lands are to be managed by government bureaucrats, but mostly they are there to guard and keep citizens off the land. The government refuses to manage the forests and that is the real reason for the large fires experienced, not climate change.
Could these lands, which the government is supposed to manage, be used for production and saving lives?
While Mark Levin concentrated on our property rights as more than our land, I thought it necessary for America to understand that our government has been abusing its authority and bullying land owners, farmers and ranchers for many years.
JAMES MADISON –– PRIVATE PROPERTY
The Papers of James Madison
Volume 1, chapter 16, Document 23
March 29, 1792
This term in its particular application means "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual."
In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.
Property is also your morals, beliefs, your person as well as your material property; clothes, car, home, land, your livestock, your pets, all your inalienable rights, which come from God not government.
James Madison continues:
In the former sense, a man's land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.
In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.
He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.
He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.
In a word, as 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.
Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho' from an opposite cause.
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.
According to this standard of merit, the praise of affording a just securing to property, should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property.
More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a government, where a man's religious rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.
That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest. A magistrate issuing his warrants to a press gang, would be in his proper functions in Turkey or Indostan, under appellations proverbial of the most compleat despotism.
That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called. What must be the spirit of legislation where a manufacturer of linen cloth is forbidden to bury his own child in a linen shroud, in order to favour his neighbour who manufactures woolen cloth; where the manufacturer and wearer of woolen cloth are again forbidden the oeconomical use of buttons of that material, in favor of the manufacturer of buttons of other materials!
A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.
The democrat Party and their cohorts in charge hate Private Property Rights and they hate our Bill of Rights. Recently, the newest member of the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, made the following statement regarding free speech and the First Amendment: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods…”
Justice Brown couldn’t define a woman (although she apparently is one, as they brag about her being a black woman) and she cannot truly define, nor does she understand our Bill of Rights or our Constitution. If she did, she’d know that the very purpose of the Bill of Rights is to “hamstring the government.”
Madison Finished with:
If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence [inference?] will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.
If the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights: they will rival the government that most sacredly guards the former; and by repelling its example in violating the latter, will make themselves a pattern to that and all other governments.
Our Property Rights, in every sense of the word, are under attack! We in rural America have known this and have been fighting for it all for a long time. I hope all America will now join us in the fight, because it’s going to take all of us… to unite and Bring America Home. ©
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