Property and Freedom

Harvard professor Richard Pipes explores the history of property rights and their relationship to freedom. His thesis is that freedom is essentially defined as the ability to exercise property rights “What a man is, what he does, and what he owns are of a piece, so that the assault on his belongings is an assault also on his individuality and his right to life.” (p 210)

"Aristotle argues possessions enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the opportunity to be generous: 'liberality consists in the use which is made of property' " (p 8)

“[Communism] was born halfway through the mid eighteenth century…It was a pure intellectual construct, conceived in the imagination of thinkers who looked backward to a Golden Age. It held an irresistible attraction for those intellectuals who liked to blame their personal problems on the society in which they happened to live.” (p 43)

“Suffice it to say that in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels asserted that ‘the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.’” (p 51)

“While acquisitiveness is natural, respect for the property – and the liberty – of others is not. It has to be inculcated until it sinks such deep roots in the people’s consciousness that it is able to withstand all efforts to crush it.” (p 208)

“Thus the modern government not only ‘redistributes’ the possessions of its citizens, it also regulates their use. It invokes environmental laws to limit the use of land and housing. It interferes with the freedom of contract by legislating minimum wages and enforcing ‘affirmative action’ hiring practices. It imposes rent controls. It interferes with virtually every aspect of business, punishing any action that looks like price fixing, setting rates for public utilities, preventing the formation of trusts, regulating communications and transport, pressuring banks to lend to designated neighborhoods, and so on. The Task Force on Reinventing Government appointed by President Clinton and chaired by Vice President Gore estimated in 1993 that the ‘cost to the private sector of complying with [external] regulations is at least $430 billion annually – 9 percent of our gross national product!’” (p 231)

“The American revolution was carried out for the protection of property, the bastion of liberty, because it was believed that by taxing the colonists without giving them the opportunity to assent to taxation amounted to confiscation. At every stage in the controversy to 1776 and beyond, Americans claimed to be defending property rights.” (p 240)

“In 1923 the Supreme Court nullified these state laws when it upheld the decision of a District of Columbia court in the case of Children’s Hospital v. Adkins that minimum wage laws represented ‘an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract included within the guarantees of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.” (In 1937 during the Depression the Court declared minimum wages to be constitutional) (p 262)

“The close relationship between property and prosperity is demonstrated by the course of history, which shows that one of the main reasons for the rise of the West to the position of global economic preeminence lies in the institution of property, which originated there and found there its fullest development. … countries that provide the firmest guarantees of economic independence, including private property rights, are virtually without exception the richest. They also enjoy the best civil services and judiciary institutions.” (p 286)

"Within a month of taking control of the German government, the Nazis suspended constitutional guarantees of the inviolability of private property." (p 221)