The Road to Hell is Paved with Stolen Brickstones

Timothy Birdnow

This courtesy of the Federalist Patriot:

"Greater freedom for tax payers would be seized from tax consumers, in an act of terrorism against the sacred machinery of redistribution. This mindset flows from the fundamental leftist misunderstanding of freedom. They view the essence of freedom as action. ... In reality, freedom is property. Every form of collectivism, from fascism to socialism, is an offense against property rights. The early philosophers of socialism railed bitterly against the private ownership of property. They hated the notion of a middle class with independence secured through ownership. The perilous financial situation of the United States government illustrates how closely private property rights are connected to all other forms of liberty. The less absolute your rights of ownership over your land, labor, and fortune become, the more easily the other rights can be dismissed at the convenience of the State. ... Now we are told that we have no choice but to allow the State to become larger, spending and borrowing more as it extends its control over our lives. Those who disagree are denounced as 'terrorists.' ... In a nation where the government fully respected private ownership, the notion of citizens becoming 'hostages' to federal budget cuts would be laughable, rather than insulting. Freedom is not something to be granted, rationed, allocated, or redistributed. It is not won or lost in an election. Freedom is something you own."

columnist John HaywARD

He's right; a man who owns something has the final say, or is supposed to, at any rate. Leftists want the State to own everything, including your body and even your mind and soul. It fits with modernity; Man is but a series of conditioned responses, in modern liberal thinking, and as such he is clay to be molded as those elites who are better fitted to the task so please. They are better fitted to the task because THEY have somehow broken out of the cycle of stimulus and response to find real enlightenment, and it is their duty to rule over those whose behavior is rooted in mindlessness. Just as a farmer rules over his livestock, so too does the enlightened Leftist rule over his kingdom of ignoramouses. The ignoramouses are chattel as surely as the hens in the farmer's chicken coop.

And the ultimate means to establishing that end is the abolition of property rights. They have systematically removed them, with "public accomodation" laws (designed ostensibly to grant equal status to minorities but in reality to restrict the rights of property owners), by environmental regulations, by safety regulations (home inspections were originally intended to see that the structures were safe from fires and whatnot, but now they include whether the interior has been painted, etc.), with taxation of virtually every human activity or possession, with all the lying concepts of "social justice" which are not intended to make man freer but to restrain him.

I once wrote a piece that appeared at American Thinker about the fundamental importance of property rights. Read it here http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/06/the_first_right.html

Rights, like land or other possessions, are a form of property; you hold title to them, but they can be taken away if they are not valued by society as a whole. My great grandmother lost her farm to taxes; she had a few bad years and so the IRS man came with the Sheriff, and her property was sold at auction. Why should she pay taxes on property? It was HERS, paid for and worked with her own labor. Yet the Founders made the mistake of not including real property in the Bill of Rights, and soaking landowners seemed like a good idea to the unpropertied voters, so it was done. My family lost it's birthright that way.

That loss may just be a matter of "tough beans, old sod!" but, having accepted that the State had a right to tax property that the citizenry had acquired through the legal trade of accumulated wealth and had built up through sweat-equity, we accepted the power of the state to take that property away. It's a small step from there to saying the State has a right to force you to purchase health-care insurance from them because, well, you have some ownership rights over your own body but the state has likewise. In the end the State will have it all, and your body will be there for the pleasure of bureaucrats and Ivy League professors. Eugenics wasn't attempted on the landed classes in America, or in Germany, but on those who were largely unpropertied - or who were made unpropertied by the State confiscating it.

As was stated by the Enlish philosopher (and model of the American order) John Locke;

"Government has no other end than the preservation of property."

This would later be echoed by Samuel Adams;

"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can."

I would argue that these three rights are the cornerstone of each-other as well; you cannot have one without the other. They are the trinity of Natural Law.

Americans have come to devalue property rights to the point where they see no reason why they should not simply take property from those who have it, and the result is that liberty is in the process of dying, and even the right to life has become an open question. Having degraded our sacred view of property that of mere stewardship, we have pulled one leg from a three-legged chair, and the result is the catastrophe we are now witnessing; we would have no financial disaster had we kept the traditional view that people have a fundamental right to property. Deficit spending stems from a disregard for the right of people to keep the money they have earned, from the notion that the State has a right to that money and not the taxpayer. When we decided that compassion was more important than Natural Law we sliced our own jugular.

They came for my great grandmother's farm, and that seemed reasonable to a society that no longer hated thievery. How long before they come for my body, my mind, my soul?

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.