Missed over the weekend was an excellent column by Walter E. Williams on the distinction that is continuously, and erroneously, made between property rights and human rights.
Here’s the money quote:
That it’s bogus to make a distinction between human, civil and property rights can be seen in another way. In a free society, each person is his own private property; I own myself and you own yourself. That’s why it’s immoral to rape or murder. It violates a person’s property rights.
The fact of self-ownership also helps explain why theft is immoral. For self-ownership to be meaningful, a person must have ownership rights to what he produces or earns. A good working description of slavery is that it is a condition where a person does not own what he produces. What he produces belongs to someone else. Therefore, if someone steals my computer, he has violated my ownership rights to my computer, which I earned through my labor, and therefore my human or civil rights to keep what I produce.
More broadly, if a society does not protect property rights and property becomes something we hold only at the whim of the state, then it is inevitable that other freedoms will eventually suffer the same fate.
As President John Adams (1797-1801) put it, “Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.” Adding, “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.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
