Causing and Condoning Sinful Behavior: Part III
The disrespect for a citizen’s property rights.
The Word of God is quite clear in the respect of one’s property. Two of the Ten Commandments state “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15, ESV) and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17 ESV).
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” —Thomas Jefferson, 1816, letter to Joseph Milligan
“Our properties within our own territories (should not) be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.” —Thomas Jefferson, 1774, Rights of British America
“A just security of property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species.” —James Madison, 1792, Essay on Property
Among the 45 goals of the Communist Party USA published in 1963:
14.) Continue giving Russia access to the US Patent Office.
Among the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto, authored by Karl Marx in 1848:
1.) Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purchase.
2.) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3.) Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Above you see quotes from the Holy Bible, two of founding fathers who were principle authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, respectively, the head of Communist Party USA in the early 1960s and Karl Marx, the founder of modern communism. Under which philosophy do you believe the United States government is operating in the year 2015?
Property rights have greatly eroded in this nation in the 50+ years I have been paying attention to government. As I have written in the first point, one of the biggest expenses of government today at both the state and federal levels involve the taxing of those who work to give unearned benefits to those who will not. Despite the 13th amendment’s abolition of slavery and the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the fruits of labor of those who work are unjustly and immorally taken, under threat of hostile government power, to be given to a class of people who do not exercise an adequate amount of labor to live on their own means. The political left of this nation fights for this right fiercely while the GOP quietly submits to the practice with no real effort to change it.
But the violation of our property rights do not end there.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) routinely keeps property owners from exercising their rights to their property. The agency has kept owners from planting, using water, clearing and other productive uses of the land. There has even been reported cases of property owners being prevented from using rain water that has fallen on their own property.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has practiced material confiscation from citizens suspected of drug activity denying their 5th amendment protection to not “be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” If there is an innocent victim of this type of confiscation, they have to go to the expense of suing the agency to prove their innocence in order to retrieve their property without interest or reimbursement of legal expenses. Once their property is confiscated the citizen is guilty until proven innocent contrary to the spirit of our Constitution. This practice has also spread to some state and local law enforcement agencies.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) routinely confiscates property at check points at our nation’s airports from people who have no criminal record or were not engaged in a criminal activity. All these violations were enacted by Democrats and I have not read of any efforts by the GOP to repeal these practices.
The worse example comes when the raising or cutting of taxes is being debated. The political left will argue that it’s our patriotic duty to pay more of our money to the government or that our income is really the government’s to begin with.
One other aspect of the political left’s disregard for personal property is how property damage is acceptable in the practice of political protest. The recent rebellions, in Baltimore this year and Ferguson the year before, reveal that the political left approves of senseless destruction of property when engaged in political protest. But to show that this phenomenon is not limited to any single race or income level, consider the Kent State episode of 1970. For anyone who has only read the left wing slant on this story, you may have heard about the burning of the ROTC building on the campus. One event that is rarely mentioned is how the protestors went off campus and completely destroyed the central business district of small town Kent, Ohio. All of this occurred before the national guard shootings that today is the only historical point about the event discussed when the topic is discussed and written about. Also, rarely pointed out is the KSU faculty member, who was also an activist member of Communist Party USA, who brought in the outside agitators, who fired up the problem into the explosive situation it became.
The political left has clearly adopted the Marxist concept that property is better owned by the government. rather than the people, is proper to destroy. in the act of making a political statement, and have knowledge their political opposition will not stand in their way.