The Robin Hood Heresy
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The founding fathers saw
the right to own and use property as an inalienable right. The Leviathan
state attacks and in many ways, destroys this right. While property rights
still exist, the right is qualified, highly regulated and always subject to
alienation for a higher government purpose. And governments tax property
when it is used, sold, and purchased. Even if it sits idle, the owner still
gets an annual tax bill. Compare Locke’s assertion that government exists to
protect property with Leviathan’s actions that deem property as something to
be exploited to provide for those who do not own property.
The right to own and possess property is an
element of the Declaration’s assertion of the inalienability of the right to
pursue happiness. For a time, property rights were protected as a
substantive due process right under the Fourteenth Amendment. But the
“blessings of liberty” have been separated from liberty itself and redefined
as a requirement imposed on some individuals to provide and transfer the
blessings to others. The result has been the creation of a dependent class,
the recipient of the transferred “blessing of liberty,” and the loss of
liberty for the providers.
As a matter of law, property rights were
established by Chapter 39 of Magna Charta: “No freeman shall be arrested, or
detained in prison, or deprived of his freehold, or in any way molested, and
we will not set forth against him, nor send against him, unless by the
lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.”
The rights to own and use property, free from
expropriation and divestiture, were first set forth in the Coronation
Charter of Henry I, also known as the Charter of Liberties (1100). The
Charter included provisions for unjustly acquired property, stating it must
be returned to its legitimate owner.
Further developments in property law date to the
reign of Edward III (1352). Using Magna Charta as authority, private
individuals could not oust another person “on petition or suggestion to the
king or his counsel by powerful individuals,” ending a common practice from
that time.
Colonial America rejected feudalism, the European
system of property ownership. Feudalism, as a real property system, is
analogous to franchising as a marketing distribution system. The state owned
the patent to land. Territories were granted to noblemen in exchange for
loyalty in time of war, and royalties to maintain the central government.
The nobility, in turn, would grant sub-territories to another class that
worked the land, in exchange for loyalty to the noblemen.
The feudal system met much opposition. The rise
of mercantilism and tradesmen was antithetical to feudalism. The Puritan
middle class that settled New England was fiercely democratic and
anti-feudalistic. The Puritans who stayed in England had reduced the
importance of the royalty and nobility by the mid-1600s.