Property Rights Vs. Human Rights

Property rights is in the news lately, due in part to Kentucky's Republican-tea party senate candidate Rand Paul's breathtaking assertion that the 1964 Civil Rights Act had no business demanding owners of public facilities open their establishments to all comers.

Another instructive comment comes from Ron Johnson, the tea party Republican running for Senate from Wisconsin. "The most basic right," says Johnson, and given imprimatur by conservative columnist George Will, "is the right to keep your property." Will claims "government's limited purpose is to protect the exercise of natural (i.e. property) rights that preexist government, (unchanging) rights human reason can ascertain -- " But whose human reason?

Ayn Rand libertarians would have you believe there's no such thing as human rights without property rights. No right to basic sustenance or shelter, to education, to health care, to a living wage. These are simply statist larceny; stealing from one person's productivity to reward those who are unwilling or incapable of producing for themselves.

That may be the case -- in the natural state, but then who knows what the natural state looks like? For instance, there were and are cultures for which the concept of personal ownership is unknown. Maybe that's the natural state.

Cons are so fixated on property rights they don't see its ultimate paradox. If property rights is "the most basic right" how is it the colonists birthed a nation by confiscating the land from the legitimate owner, the Crown? This is the kind of nuttiness that results when ideologues are given crayons.

What conservatives and libertarians refuse to acknowledge is the founding documents also embody 17th and 18th century concepts like social contract and popular sovereignty. Jefferson borrowed freely from John Locke's "Second Treatise of Government" (1689) in writing the Declaration, but rejected Locke's use of the phrase "life, liberty and estate (property)" in favor of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Now neither "property" nor "happiness" mean the same as they did then. In addition to land or possessions, property incorporated the sense of wholeness, a person's self worth, and pursuit of happiness allowed for the ability to obtain that wholeness. Jefferson expanded upon Locke's narrower notion to give expression to the uniquely American idea of opportunity.

The amended Constitution guarantees all manner of rights and powers, often in conflict with common law property rights -- due process, eminent domain, trial by jury, regulation of commerce, progressive taxation, universal suffrage, to name a few. The Preamble also sets about to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare.

So then -- the two originating documents emphasize life, liberty, opportunity, equality, rule of law, justice, tranquility and the general welfare. Nowhere do they guarantee any right to accumulate obscene amounts of "estate" at the expense of the common good.