Posted on 12/08/2025 10:57:48 AM PST by BHI2025
The only word that fits when describing the Framers’ attitude toward protecting your property is “obsession.” Therefore, the first thing we must do, right now, is define exactly what the Framers meant by the word “property.” It absolutely and positively does not merely mean land, as many believe.
Let us check with James Madison in a vitally important quotation that we will examine in full a bit later.
A man’s land, or merchandise, or money, is called his property.
Money is property…If you want some modern confirmations of that formulation, a Google search will reveal the truth of this in seconds. Mine turned up Paul Larkin writing for the Heritage Foundation.
Accordingly, the Founders’ generation understood that property included the right to possess, use, enjoy, and dispose of land, commodities, currency, or their equivalents.
Also, the American Policy Center recently ran an article correcting the mistaken notion that property refers to landed estates. The author also states that in 1700s America, property was better understood. He writes, “Property, and the ability to own and control it, was life itself.”
So, no; neither the Framers nor the philosophy behind property rights itself discriminate in their views on what property means. The landed estate of the great man in the great house is no more sacred, no more deserving of government protection than are his shoelaces or his coffee cups, and certainly no more sacred than the coins the poor laborer receives for plowing the great man’s fields.
It really must be this way, of course. After all, can you think of a more morally bankrupt philosophy than one that would proclaim that if you are wealthy enough or lucky enough to own land, then you are entitled to some government protection that a mere laborer is not entitled to?
Now that we know the definition of property (your paycheck), let us see what value the Framers placed on it. You might want to read the last quotation twice just to let it sink in.
The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If “THOU SHALT NOT COVET,” and “THOU SHALT NOT STEAL,” were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.
— John Adams
Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.
— John Adams
Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.
— John Adams
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.
— James Madison
The primary objects of civil society are the security of property and public safety.
— James Madison
Lastly, Forrest McDonald tells us that the Framers believed that the object of government was the protection of life, liberty, and property. All but four of the Framers, that is—but three of those four disagreed with that formulation because they actually “put the protection of property ahead of liberty as the main object of society.”
No, this does not mean that taxation is criminal. More on this later, but taxes are absolutely legitimate and entirely necessary. And while my right to my money is just as unalienable as my right to worship and should be treated with at least as much reverence, it is, like all rights in civil society, necessarily and justifiably compromised. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater, and you must pay taxes.
However, while the government should never oppress my speech rights just because some may find my speech offensive, the government also should never oppress my property rights for breathtakingly nonsensical reasons—like the trash that the DOGE has been uncovering, or a Woodstock concert museum.
When New York senators tried to take my money for a museum dedicated to the cultural glories of the Woodstock concert, it was not merely annoying or stupid, it was a crime. Even attempting to oppress my property rights for their little museum was every bit as much a crime as if they had attempted to oppress my speech rights by preventing me from protesting their ridiculous and corrupt scheme.
After all, how can it possibly be legitimate for clients in New York to tap the shoulders of their senators and ask those senators to seize your money and give it to them? Why should your paycheck be the plaything of politicians who live in states thousands of miles from you? Why and how is such a thing even legal? Actually, when the Constitution was understood and respected, this kind of thing was not legal, and that’s why federal spending as a percentage of GDP averaged less than 4% for the nation’s first 130 years. More on that later.
From the moment I’d become even a bit politically aware, I knew all about some of the insanely ridiculous things (again, hat tip to DOGE here) that the federal government spent my money on. You’ve heard of them; we’ve all heard of them. Some of these things are so flat-out bizarre, they might actually be hilarious if they weren’t so expensive.
After reading the Framers’ words, though, I suddenly realized that these things were not just infuriating in their stupidity, they were irredeemably corrupt—corrupt to their core. These expenditures were blatant theft, immoral and tyrannical at the same time.
We’ve come now to the point of this chapter. It may be an impossible uphill struggle, but my goal here is to make you feel deep in your bones that the government expenditures you’ve spent a lifetime laughing at are not merely ridiculous, or even outrageous. They are every bit as immoral and corrupt and wrong as the oppression of free speech.
An uphill struggle indeed…Can you imagine a politician campaigning on a promise to suppress your free speech? And yet, so thoroughly trained are we in surrendering our cash that in every election cycle there are dozens of candidates who openly, brazenly, and proudly swear to the high heavens that they have great plans to seize even more of your money. And they win just as many elections as they lose.
I can think of two things that keep people from recognizing the sacred nature of their earnings—both powerful in their ability to deceive, but neither in any way legitimate.
First, for all our lives, the supremely bankrupt notion that there is something somehow grubby and tainted about money and mere commerce has been pounded into our skulls with sledgehammers. This despite the incomparable Samuel Johnson instructing us that “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” Also, isn’t it strange how politicians are always so eager to get their mitts on our grubby cash in order to give it to somebody else in exchange for votes? Does your property stop being grubby when given to others?
And one more thing. The only reason that I’ve not lived a short, ugly life of unendurable toil, hardship, and soul-crushing menial labor is because a lot of people before me (investors, inventors, industrialists, capitalists) have wanted to—and have succeeded in—making a lot of grubby cash. Do people not see? You can make grubby money or you can live in a cave and fight off feral beasts for the privilege of eating bugs. It’s that simple.
Second, there is one very significant difference between our money and our other sacred rights. As noted earlier, in order for government to exist, it must seize somebody’s cash. Taxation is entirely legitimate. There is no other way. The same, however, is not true about most of our other rights. Governments can exist, thrive, and function smoothly even if they have nearly limitless respect for gun rights, free speech, or freedom of worship. Money’s different, though. If you want the blessings of government, if you want to rise above the dreaded state of nature where life is—I’m sure you’ve heard—“nasty, brutish, and short,” then you must have government, and you must pay for it.
In order to exist, government must, frequently and regularly, seize your cash. It’s easy to see how this leads to the crazy notion that there’s really nothing at all special about your property. When the federal government takes your money and gives it to mohair producers, or multinational firms for their overseas advertising, or farmers in the form of price supports, or any one of hundreds of other special interest groups in whatever inventive fashion, then this is somehow seen as legitimate. Stupid and wasteful at times, certainly, but never immoral, never a violation of our sacred, natural rights. It just does not occur to people that their money should be treated precisely like all their sacred rights—infringed on, taken, or seized minimally, and only when necessary.
So many people, when looking at the type of spending mentioned above, will chime in here that government spending like this is just the inevitable and legitimate cost of doing business, the price we pay for living in a civil society that protects our lives and cleans the streets. After all, we can never—and will never—all agree on every government expense.
Nonsense! And the Framers knew better. They thought enough of your paycheck to make sure the kind of federal government spending noted above was unconstitutional (much more on the constitutional versus the unconstitutional in chapter 8). It was not some mistake, oversight, or forgetfulness that kept those kinds of powers from being assigned to the federal government, from being listed in the Enumeration.
And, until the Supreme Court lost its nerve in the 1930s, that kind of federal spending hardly existed.
As noted earlier, in the 130 years before World War II, federal spending as a percentage of GDP averaged less than 4%. Now it’s well over 20%. In 2021, it was 35%.
As you will see when you read all the others that are to come, the quotations that begin this chapter are neither cherry-picked nor aberrations.
The Framers believed more passionately in your right to keep your money than they did in anything mentioned in the First Amendment, and references to money, property, taxes, etc., appear in The Federalist Papers more than 17 times as often as the First Amendment rights combined.
Especially in today’s environment, when people consider those sweat-stained dollars in their pockets as the fruits of mere commerce, dirty and grubby in nature, it is simply not possible to overstate the point that the Framers believed that your money was among the most precious of your rights.
The idea that our paychecks are on an equal footing with such things as the right to choose our own lifestyles is unknown to almost all Americans. It is, further, nothing short of incomprehensible to us. Most of us, upon hearing that our paychecks, those ugly little dollar bills of ours, represent rights as sacred and unalienable as our speech rights will react with ridicule, shock, or disdain, for nothing could be so totally alien, so utterly foreign, and so simply outrageous as that claim. This notion is simply beyond the pale.
I believe, however, that just a bit more reflection on the subject can convince most people of the truth of the proposition. The notion that property is and should be as sacred as everything else that makes up freedom and self-determination becomes obvious with some thoughtful consideration.
First, most Americans are already deeply committed to and passionate believers in property rights—they just don’t know it. I’ve said a few times that you’ve never heard of property rights, but that’s not entirely true. You’ve actually heard of them frequently and for your entire life—but you know property rights by different names. Let’s go back to that James Madison quotation with which we began this chapter. This time, we’ll quote him in full.
This term [property], 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 everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to everyone else the like advantage [emphasis in original].
In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandise, or money, is called his property.
In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
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.
The above is pretty clear. Your free speech rights, and your right to worship as you choose, and your right to self-defense, and your freedom of thought and of opinion and of conscience, every single thing, without exception, that makes up today’s pantheon of precious and sacred rights, is encompassed, and always has been, by the term “property rights.” And the truth of that goes back to at least the 17th century and John Locke, the single most significant influence on the Framers and their thoughts on property.
In other words, this country has, for at least the entirety of my life, been in thrall to property rights. It’s just that someone has done a wonderful job of deleting the “property” part.
And the fact that they are called property rights and not “conscience rights” is no accident. Property rights may not be any more sacred than our other rights, but, in a political context at least, they are certainly the most important of our rights.
We noted earlier that a philosophy of property rights that includes land but not dollar bills is clearly illegitimate and illogical. So too is a philosophy that says, in the American tradition, “I have a right to do or to say anything that does no harm to others,” but somehow excludes from that statement the keeping of one’s own money.
A man proclaims that he has every right to act and speak in bizarre, offensive, and revolting ways. He stands in the public square and spits on your nation, heritage, culture, and religion, and he proudly worships Satan or a tree stump. Or thousands of Obama’s fellow travelers can throw a party in a church to celebrate the slaughter of 3,000 Americans a mere five days after 9-11…
Almost all Americans would say, “Those are his rights! Nothing that he has said or done harms me or harms others.”
Another man stands up and says “I want merely to keep my paycheck in my pocket and out of the hands of Senators Clinton and Schumer and their friends who want my cash for a Woodstock museum. This is my sacred right and harms no others.”
How many Americans agree with the second man? Virtually zero. Sure, we understand his desire, but that part about keeping his money being a sacred right? We scoff. Keeping his money is certainly not, and never will be, and cannot ever be, a sacred right.
That is wrong. It is illegitimate and illogical. Who was this god who stood before the world and declared that our sacred rights of conscience did not include keeping our money? You believe in tree stump worship. I believe in keeping my money. How is one a right and not the other? Who gets to decide that I’m being common and grubby, while tree stump guy is nurturing his soul? Who separated conscience from cash, marking cash as an unholy desire? Who said that only the individual can declare his own conscience, and that it can be anything in heaven or earth that harms no others, except keeping what he has earned? Where is the logic in that? Who declared that money is off-limits? Not John Locke or the Framers, the most brilliant men ever assembled in one place at one time. No, that idea is a modern invention, one pushed by politicians who do not care about any of your aberrant thoughts or actions just so long as the cash keeps flowing, so long as your money can be seized by them and handed to others in exchange for votes.
So, what is at first alien or ludicrous is really nothing more than post–World War II American liberal thought, instantly recognized and accepted by almost all. What is at first shocking, is, on second evaluation, plainly obvious.
The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule.
— John Locke
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
— Thomas Jefferson
This, after all, is the very heart and soul of modern liberal thought. Therefore, those whose speech is as close to pure evil as speech can become, such as the Nazis demonstrating in front of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, are every bit as protected by law as those who would write politically motivated letters to their local newspapers. Can it really be that taunting Holocaust survivors is okay, but merely keeping your money is outrageous?
If we are really entitled to engage in activities that do not harm others, why do we so easily accept that this philosophy, which covers our social, political, religious, and moral existence, does not include our economic activity, which most people engage in more than all others? If we really believe that we are in any significant way free, why are we so willing to exclude the one activity that virtually the whole of humanity spends most of its waking time engaged in—the pursuit of property?
How is it that zealously protecting weird and outlandish behavior, engaged in by various and sundry freaks, is government’s sacred charge, to be regulated only under certain very extreme circumstances, but when a ditch is dug, a window is washed, or an automobile is repaired, the government can insert itself into the equation for virtually any reason on Earth, cutting itself in for a limitless supply of the pie to finance bizarre “studies,” a bike path, a student loan, or a highway to be named for a congressman and placed in his district three thousand miles from the taxpayers who financed it?
There is just no intellectually good reason why repugnant actions that harm no others should receive constitutional protection while the working actions of a ditchdigger, window washer, or mechanic that harm no others—and indeed are a valuable resource—receive no protection whatsoever.
And again, we do willingly and rightfully compromise our rights, including property rights, when living in civil society. It is an absolute requirement. As noted earlier, there can be no other way. But why, upon entering civil society, do we surrender as little as is humanly possible of our speech and other rights, while simultaneously surrendering 100% of our property rights? And, yes, 100% is the correct number, for there is no limiting principle in today’s government that would prohibit a seizure of all my property for virtually any reason imaginable.
Let us forget Locke for a moment. Forget our Constitution, the Framers, and the Founding Fathers, too. For you need not have heard of any of them to be familiar with today’s American credo, which goes something like this: “No man or institution may tell me how to live my life. I am free to be my own person, and self-determination is my right.”
Or, to quote the famously liberal Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in one of his well-known dissents,
“The most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men” [is] “the right to be let alone”…“[T]he concept of privacy embodies the ‘moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.’”
If you accept this credo, then you must accept that a laborer should not have to surrender his wages to support another human being. For it is a simple and undeniable fact that what freedom is, what was sacred in the Framers’ and Locke’s worldview was self-determination and all the many things that that means. And when somebody is coerced to reject his true beliefs or maintain silence about his ideas or is made to labor for the benefit of another, then he has lost liberty, lost self-determination. He is not free.
One more philosophical note on your right to your money. File this under the “strange bedfellows” category, but “my body, my right” people (anti-vaxxers, pro-choicers, etc.) should appreciate this.
Locke instructs that it is the labor necessary to acquire property that imbues it with its special nature. When a man works to acquire or create property, the very nature of the property changes—its existence becomes intertwined with the labor of its creator. The thing created is a part of the creator. Simply put, a man owns his own labor and his own person. Indeed, a man’s labor is an extension of his very self. When they take your money, they are taking a part of you!
People realize this easily enough, I believe, when they see a homesteader building a cabin and growing crops. If a man chooses, however, to not take his property in the form of an acre of corn and a bunch of chickens, but instead turns his labor (his very self) into a paycheck after analyzing spreadsheets for 40 hours a week, people lose sight of the principle. That’s a mistake—the two situations are logically identical.
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common State Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
— John Locke
Why Are Property Rights the Most Important of All Rights?
Property rights are more important than free speech? (Gasp!) Yes, and as soon as we all stop entertaining the patently ridiculous, virtue signaling, self-congratulatory little fantasy that goes, “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” then the world will be a much better place.
To see why property rights are the most important, we will first consult James Madison writing in Federalist 10, widely regarded as the best and most famous of those essays. What does Madison have to say about property in this brilliant piece?
Madison begins by saying that one of the best aspects of the proposed Union is “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.” A “faction” is what today we call a special interest group.
He refers to the “instability, injustice, and confusion” that factions bring about. Many things give rise to society’s factions, Madison notes, “But the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”
Property is unequally distributed because of “The diversity in the faculties of men.”
And, more importantly, “The protection of these faculties, is the first object of government.”
Can it get simpler than this? The chief cause of civil strife is the fact that men cannot stop coveting the property of other men, and the “first object” of government is to protect said property.
Madison goes on to say that “justice” ought to decide legislative questions, not the will of the majority acting through a legislature, for this sets up the majority as judges in their own cause. And what are the legislative topics that most concern Madison? No cookie for guessing something other than free speech or a free press. Nor is he most concerned with the right to protest or worship or own guns. No, the most pressing questions involve creditors versus debtors, tariffs as they relate to domestic manufacturers versus foreign manufacturers, and the landed class versus the manufacturing class. So…money, money, and money again. And let’s not forget questions of taxation in which,
Every shilling with which they [the majority] over-burden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.
Money again. Madison closes by noting that a large and extended republic, such as proposed for the nation, provides the remedy to control factions. This is because factions would have a difficult time spreading their mischief and coordinating their efforts over distances and populations large enough to affect the national legislature.
What poison, exactly, is it that these factions will be unable to spread through the nation? Hint—it’s not their desire to crush free speech. Yet again, we see that his concern is for money and property.
A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the union, than a particular member of it.
In summation, property is the foremost catalyst of the conflicts (both political and armed) that make government necessary in the first place, and government’s role is not to redistribute this property, but to secure it with its rightful possessor.
When speaking of the importance of property, we might also note here that the immediate and most important causes of our revolution were the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Sugar Act, and the Tea Act. In other words, money, money, money, and money again.
Also, more importantly, we will see in the next chapter that it was repeated assaults on property—in this case pure cash (paper money and gold/silver coin)—that led not only to the Revolution, but to the creation of the Constitution itself.
Let us be clear—the most immediate and pressing cause for the calling of the Constitutional Convention and the creation of the U.S. Constitution was to stop one group of Americans from continuing to steal money from another group of Americans. The Convention was called to protect money—not free speech, or freedom of religion, or the right to keep and bear arms. It was called to protect money.
And all this obsession with property should come as no surprise. It is a plain and simple fact that property/money is at the center of your universe, and this has nothing to do with governments, philosophers, political thinkers, or anything else outside of and separate from you. If you’re anything approaching normal, you’ve spent your entire life pursuing property, and no matter how much you have, you want more. And you will probably carry that desire for more literally until the day you die. For better or worse, that’s just how almost all of us operate. Lots of people claim to have no interest in the Powerball; maybe one in 1,000 of them means it.
Property/money is also the lifeblood of politics and government, and any government charter that does not take these facts into account will almost certainly not protect the property of anybody but the ruling class.
And while Americans now have vastly more property than did our forefathers, that in no way changes the sanctity of its nature, as some would argue. Truly, nothing has changed where property is concerned. Even today, even here in the United States, a nation awash in prosperity, we spend roughly half our waking lives, for 50 years or more, in the pursuit of property. Yes, even today, property still equals health, peace, security, and, sometimes, happiness.
When the day comes that property is so plentiful that our government ceases taking it from us to give to others, one might then argue that things have changed, but until then, property remains what it has always been: a vital, sacred right.
It may seem grubby, it may seem common, it is not the stuff of epic poems and majestic rhetoric, but property keeps us alive, and for the few of us fortunate enough to live under governments that allow even a moderately unrestricted pursuit of it, property has raised us from shortened lives of ugly, backbreaking toil and made us healthy, wealthy, secure, and comfortable. How many greater gifts are to be found on this Earth?
These are the reasons property rights are so vital, and these are the reasons the Framers wrote so much about them.
In The Federalist Papers, for example, forms of the four words below, dealing with only one unalienable right, appear 316 times.
• Money: 47 • • Tax: 133 • • Revenue: 75 • • Property: 61 • This is more than 17 times as often as the words below, which deal with your “big three” First Amendment rights.
• Religion: 7 • • Speech : 0 • • Press: 8 • • Newspaper: 3 • “Money” appears more than twice as often as all the words in the second set combined.
“Tax” appears more than seven times as often as all the words in the second set combined.
“Revenue” appears more than four times as often as all the words in the second set combined.
“Property” appears more than three times as often as all the words in the second set combined.
Similar numbers occur within the Constitution itself, even after the Bill of Rights is included. The four “money” words appear more than four times as often as the words in the second group. Indeed, none of the words from the second group appears in the original, unamended Constitution.
In the next chapter, we will see how assaults on property rights led to the creation of the Constitution.
The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right.
— James Madison
One great [object] of [Government] is personal protection and the security of Property.
— Alexander Hamilton
Government has no other end but the preservation of Property.
— John Locke
The absolute rights of Englishmen…are the rights of personal security, personal liberty, and of private property.
— James Otis
Men cannot be happy, without Freedom; nor free, without Security of Property; nor so secure, unless the sole Power to dispose of it be lodged in themselves.
— John Dickinson
That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
— George Mason
But who would trust his life, liberty, and property to a madman, or an assembly of them? It would be safer to confide in knaves. Five hundred or five thousand together, in an assembly, are not less liable to this extravagance than one.
— John Adams
Check it out...
This sentence
“Accordingly, the Founders’ generation understood that property included the right to possess, use, enjoy, and dispose of land, commodities, currency, or their equivalents.”
Should have been in quotation marks. It’s from Larkin.
Well said!
Thank you!
bkmk
NICELY DONE!
SCOTUS didn't "lose its nerve," FDR (the first all-socialist, all-the-time POTUS) stacked the court with fellow Progressivists.
Wrong. He THREATENED to stack the court, and then, with no change in the court, the decisions started going his way. Look up “the change in time that saved nine.”
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