A contract is an agreement. Most Americans are agreeable with the legal concept of property rights.
Its never been posed as a qeustion, or ever been able to be disputed, just like during monarchies when there was no mechanism to challenge them, everyone went along with it.
And the extreme Left is generally collectivism, which is relevant to property rights just as much as the extreme Rights view of property.
The "extreme left" are mostly anarchists ... not really collectivists, but this whole collectivism vrs individualism is a false dictomy, its really democracy vrs plutocracy, since economics is an inherently social activity.
No, I am pointing out that in our culture we do not accept that by owning a piece of land that we are harming the rights of others, which is our collective ethical opinion. We would need to make a huge cultural change to think otherwise as a nation.
Right now, but that doesn't make it inherently right.
Also its fallacious to say its our collective ethical opnion, because we've never had another option.
No property rights = no freedom.
This paper is simply an assertion not an argument, but anyway
madison said:
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.
The former definition is the real definition, and the main part is the exclusion part.
The latter definition is arbitrary and can mean anything, and its a idealistic concept without any reality in concrete isntitutional reality.
madison said:
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.
None of those things are property, you dont' need any exclusive right of property, infact the opposite, those values are meaningless IF YOU HAVE exlusive rights to it, such as liberty, its meaningless unless its universal, religion, is almost always a communal concept, the same with free choice. The only time they become property is with intellectual property, which is forced exclusion, not of thought, but of implimentation of thought.
madison said:
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.
Except that most of the time property IS power.
madison said:
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.
An assersion posing as an axiom, also what ever "is his own" is arbitrary.
madison said:
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.
Since when has merit determined who gets property.
I could continue, but my point is that article doesn't show anything really.
When it comes to Liberty I'll quote Bakunin
Bakunin said:
I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each — an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being — they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.
Not being allowed to pick an apple from a tree does not harm the freedom of the person wanting to pick the apple either. They can simply find another tree or plant one themselves. All apples and apple trees are not under the possession of the single estate, only the trees on the single estate. But we do have regulatory laws that govern such monopolies. Recently locally a outside investor in New Mexico wanted to purchase water rights with no good reason. Their application was denied since they did not provide and establish a reason that would benefit the local population or the regional population or the citizens of the state of New Mexico.
http://www.ose.state.nm.us/PDF/Publi...annual-rpt.pdf
No you can't, you need to have land first, and have seeds,.
BTW, I agree we DO have laws, but I'm talkinga bout the philosophy of property here.
a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
I explained why that is bull****, opinions do NOT need exclusionary laws for their value, infact the very opposite is true.
Interesting. Kind of a trap that you are trying lay here. The US Government is in existence to serve the people as an extension of the peoples will. Tax's are necessary to ensure the will of of the people. Of course tax's can be unjust. Take that so called Obamacare tax that has everyone up in arms for example. What makes that tax unjust is not just because it could be considered an living tax, but because the tax is not the will of the people.
Its not a trap, what I'm saying is that people consider taxation to be a form of theft because tehy consider property fundemenatal and the state not.
Anyway property rights are one of the fundamental principles of this country.
I don't consider that to be an authority on morality ... Laws don't make right.
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. Property: James Madison, Property
That was one founding fathers opinion, other had other opinions ... Also since when does their opinion count more than anyone elses?