By Douglas Daugherty

The contemporary civil war of words and ideas about equity is in large part an unspoken argument about who does and doesn’t have the financial resources to live the life THEY deem their right. It is a class war. It is fueled by years of presidential policy, including Johnson’s Great Society and Richard Nixon and the contemporary progressive’s call for a guaranteed minimum income.

The resistance to this idea is wise. It has never worked. The history of efforts to “eliminate poverty” by the government can be traced back to Greek times and in more modern ages to the creation of England’s poor laws passed in 1834.

It seems every few generations want to eliminate poverty. It always ends the same way. It expands rapidly beyond any projections; it greatly raises taxes and wages; it creates inflation and it nearly bankrupts the country. This cycle has happened so often that it easily falls into the bucket of “an unlearned lesson of history that repeats itself.”

I have come on a peculiar road with my thoughts on this subject.

Years ago, I read the Magna Carta of 1215, a bedrock of modern liberty, and it was largely filled with concerns by the nobles that their property would not pass to their children. This seemed odd to me. How did property find its way into the macro-discussion of liberty?

In the times of rule by King, and this is still true with Marxism, communism, some socialism, and anarchism, there was no private property. The ruler or ruling political party owned it all. The king or the government owns and/or controls everything, including you.

Most recent Western nation states eschewed this idea. “No,” they said. The king doesn’t own everything. We the people have certain unalienable rights, including, as Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

But where did Jefferson get this idea? A little study will show that he and many of the political philosophy minds of the time had studied John Locke, the Father of Classical Liberalism, who talked of “Life, Liberty and Estate (property).” But for some reason, Jefferson chose to use the phrase “Pursuit of Happiness” instead of “Property.”

Why? Two reasons. First, in Jefferson’s thinking, the pursuit of happiness included the concept of personal property. Secondly, he was a student of the Pre-Socratic Epicurean school of thought, and one Lucretius (99-55 BC). Jefferson strongly agreed with him in the world of moral philosophy. In a letter of 1819 to one William Short about Epicurean thought, Jefferson noted, “Happiness was the aim of Life.”

This may be one reason that Americans are generally ignorant of the importance of economic theory to our personal happiness.

The labor theory of property is a theory of natural law that holds that property originally comes about by the exertion of labor upon natural resources. The theory has been used to justify the homestead principle, which holds that one may gain whole permanent ownership of an unowned natural resource by performing an act of original appropriation. When a person works, that labor enters the object. Thus, the object becomes the property of that person.

Is property important to our general happiness? Unless you live as an ascetic monastic or choose to be homeless, the answer is a strong “YES!”

Without property, all you have is potential. With property you have the resources to act in your best interest, including safety, a measure of security, and further development for the future. Your choices grow/multiply.

In a peculiar way your property is an extension of yourself. It is more than image. It is a measure of YOUR PRESENCE on the earth. (This is not an idea of mere materialism, but the notion that your influence as a singular identity expands as you have more property.) This is especially true of intellectual property, great compositions in music or the arts, large life- altering technologies, or significant human-created institutions.

According to Locke and his followers, the most basic property is yourself and your labor. Wise choices transform simple self to a more substantial individual/family/business/career/inheritance for the next generation (your progeny or dream).

Locke developed a labor theory of property, whereby ownership of property is created by the application of labor. In addition, he believed that property precedes government and government cannot “dispose of the estates of the subjects arbitrarily.” Locke said that the individual “has a right to decide what would become of himself and what he would do, and as having a right to reap the benefits of what he did.” Karl Marx later critiqued Locke’s theory of property in his own social theory. Watch is here.

In Human Action, Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises argues that labor markets are the rational conclusion of self-ownership.

Isn’t it peculiar that the eighth commandment of Moses, given by God, is “You shall not steal”? This presupposes the entire concept of ownership, barter and transactions, and inheritance, and even speaks to the dangers of taxation by other coercive powers of, you guessed it, property.

What does property mean to your personhood? How does it speak to your sense of personal values? What does it say about your personal influence? How are we invested in our personal property?

Most conservatives are, in fact, classical liberals. This notion of private property stands in opposition to the whole mindset around distributive justice and entitlement theory, a view that confuses and marries the idea of legal justice with the craving for more property defined by some arbitrary bureaucrat or social scientist or with a person’s own personal idea of a “good life.”

Another thing that has caught my eye is all the poverty in Africa (except for South Africa). Why in a continent, filled with natural resources, is the average per capita income less than $400.00 per year? Surprise — there’s no right to property because of the widespread corruption in the governments. If you can’t own anything, you can’t acquire wealth or engage in barter or transactions to make more. African corruption means you can’t securely own and manage/control/steward anything!

In America, the right to property is protected by law. That’s why the rule of law is essential to economic prosperity. We have the free will to choose wisely or to choose foolishly. God wants us to choose wisely. There are all sorts of bad consequences for choosing foolishly. (Think entanglements in a bad marriage/ relationship, the criminal justice system, addictions leading to a walking death.)

The homestead principle, one that settled millions of acres in the American frontier, is an affirmation of the importance of private property to a growing nation of healthy, civic-minded citizens. In all, more than 160 million acres (250,000 square miles) of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River. This is the principle by which one gains ownership of an unowned natural resource by performing an act of original appropriation. Appropriation could be enacted by putting an unowned resource to active use.

Proponents of intellectual property hold that ideas can also be homesteaded by originally creating a virtual or tangible representation of them.

As we conclude, we would say that without earned property, your total presence in the world is less significant, and your true potential is never realized. Bad laws, overtaxation, and corruption, whether corporate or governmental, can interfere with the liberty that can only come from property. Mr. Jefferson may have had it right in 18th-century language with his attendant ideas, but every citizen of this county and advocate for the poor here and abroad MUST be able to articulate the value of property and resist the repeated failures to provide guaranteed property (money or benefits) without labor, unless we are talking about the truly aged or disabled. (And that is the subject of another time.)

“The heavens are the heavens of the Lord, But the earth He has given to the sons of men.” —Psalm 115:16