“No other rights are safe where property is not safe.”
— Daniel Webster
“The great chief end therefore, of Mens’ uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.” “Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience,...”
— John Locke, 2nd Treatise of Government, 1690
“[T]he moment that 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. Property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist.”
— John Adams
“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. . . 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 central argument is that private or several property serves as a guarantor of liberty, quite independently of how political or collective decisions are made. The direct implication is, of course, that effective constitutional limits must be present, limits that will effectively constrain overt political intrusions into rights of property, as legally defined, and into voluntary contractual arrangements involving transfer of property. If individual liberty is to be protected, such constitutional limits must be in place prior to and separately from any exercise of democratic governance.”
— James M. Buchanan, Property as a Guarantor of Liberty
I don’t take issue with any of that. But I don’t see that any of it means there is a right to property anymore than there is a right to happiness.