Contrary to popular belief, it is impossible to put ‘property’ above or before ‘people’ because only people have property. A property-centric legal order is not at all materialistic but, indeed, recognizes the humanity vitalizing objects with meaning and legacy.
This is why people have preferences for what is theirs over the priorities of strangers or antagonists and to argue against this is also, along with egalitarianism, a revolt against nature. Respecting other people’s preferences, so long as they are not creating a negative externality, is the true essence of liberalism and not the coercive redistribution of property or imposed social engineering it has perversely morphed into ever since the so-called Progressive Era.
Clarifying the lines of proper human conduct, by respecting property boundaries, allows for greater social harmony while opening the frontier of creativity and innovation. When people are secure in their property, they are free to direct their energies toward greater self-expression and, ultimately, service to humanity.
It is violations of property that make people more materialistic, less secure, and more inwardly focused. Political interventions upon the ownership or trade of property titles creates unnatural conflict and social anxiety, leading to less cohesive communities. Moreover, property violations not only feed the political caste with tax revenues but also prevent the victims of taxation and regulation from cooperating to overthrow the abusive system that facilitates the violence.
People need sufficient wealth in order to have the time necessary to organize and train with their arms so as to execute the law that protects their property, prevents invasions of their individual and commonwealth properties, and suppress insurrections against constitutional order by rogue officials or other aggressors.
Without a minimum respect for private property, to produce beyond a subsistence level, people will lack the means as well as the time sufficient to secure a free state by participating in self-government.
This is also why the political caste actively erodes property rights, confiscates other peoples’ wealth, and set up popular narratives that distract the citizenry. Such perverse conditions prevent the social cohesion necessary to sustain a functioning polity based on people sharing sufficient mutual affinity to protect the commonwealth. Securing a republic requires people that are both steeped in virtuous principles and knowledgeable of civics.
Yet the current arrangement encourages, against the advice of Samuel Adams, people to be ignorant of consequential political matters and debauched in their manners.
The problem is most especially acute in the incitements toward envy and jealously toward other people’s wealth and property. Now, there is plenty to be filled with righteous rage about when the unfair privileges afforded to politically connected cronies and the massive fraud that is fiat money, central banking, and fractional reserve banking are exposed.
However, this is different because, again, those perverse results exist due to unlawful property violations in the first place and cannot abide in a private property legal order. Who in their right mind would tolerate them, particularly when they had the legitimate right and means to rebuke, with force as necessary, every instance of fraud, theft, and extortion?
On this matter, it is a question of both legitimacy and relative power. The political caste has legislated into existence a system that perpetuates widespread harms in the form of currency debasement, impoverishment, and unlawful interventions that prevent people from creating and protecting their wealth.
Provocations against private property, leading to mass ignorance of common law legal principles, are at the heart of what keeps the corrupt system in place. Because people have been conditioned, largely through politically controlled and bureaucratically managed education and mass media, to despise their neighbors’ things and choices; envy, resentment, and malice abound.
Keeping people jealous of the success of others discourages social cohesion and plays into the hands of the political caste as they maintain a divide and rule tension strategy. A general feeling of distrust and insecurity leads the fearful to call for greater intervention from public office holders. And the political caste will take that popular support and run with it, paying lip service to public sentiment while enriching and aggrandizing themselves.
Returning to Samuel Adams, virtue is the best security. To remain free, morality, manners, and education in the necessities of (authentic) public service are essential attributes for the population. Learning to respect the space and property of others, so long as they are not violating the rights of anyone else, requires discipline. It takes work to prevent the
green monster of envy from rearing its ugly head.
This too, is why activating the principles of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 16 is so crucial to upholding law and instilling a relatively harmonious social order. The whole body of the people must be not only organized and armed but, most importantly, disciplined. The discipline of martial training, the kind that inculcates the skills involved in executing the law, repelling invasions, and suppressing insurrections builds confidence while dispelling fear.