Obama - property rights?
Yeah, I haven't been posting much lately - when one combines the time "suck" of a biz trip, doing some behind the scenes work for the Tea Party Coalition here in NH, and starting the prep work on a technical revamp of GraniteGrok, there's been little time for posting. And blogging will remain "light" over the next few weeks.
That said, Scott over at Powerline has a good post concerning a topic that I have been following here at the 'Grok - the Obama Administration takeover of the auto car companies and what seems to be a slow slide away from two of the bulwarks of our Republic - the Rule of Law.
And the Right to Private Properties. For this, I blame two institutions - our educational system as it now exists for NOT teaching these tenents, and the Press for not keeping to their watchdog status.
Side note: watchdogs? Nay, consider them poodles. After all, Obama joked at the recent White House Corresspondents dinner when speaking about the media: "Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me".
I expected to hear silence from the Press at this revelation that attended - at least groans as they should have realized what Obama had just said. Instead, they gave him thunderous applause as if to say "hey dude, we all did it for you - we got you elected!". Any pretense of objectivity by the media was laid to rest that night.
So, why is this important? More and more I keep reading posts by people far smarter than I concerning "soft despotism" by Big Government - adults allowing themselves to become children as they allow government to do more and more for them, trading self-responsibility for security and ease-of-life. "Why worry about the massive taxes to do so, when I don't have to worry about the 'bad' things in life like unemployment, health care, education, being offended by what somebody says?"
The American Revolution is of course the appropriate place to begin to understand the role of property rights in the American legal order. The American Revolution was in part a rebellion against the feudal order, remnants of which still prevailed in Great Britain. In the feudal order all property belonged to the King; the King retained ownership but conditionally granted the use of property to his subjects.
By contrast, the idea that men possessed the right to acquire and enjoy property separate and apart from the prerogative of sovereign government was one of the "unalienable rights" grounded in "the laws of Nature and Nature's God" at the heart of the American Revolution. In the founders' view, property rights did not emanate from government. Rather, they emanated from the nature of man, and it was the function of government to protect the rights conferred on man by nature.
Indeed, Jefferson characterized property rights as "the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone [of] the free exercise of industry and the fruits acquired by it." As Jefferson's comment suggests, the right to acquire property was the critical right for the founders; it made property rights the friend of the poor by allowing them to earn and safeguard wealth ("the fruits acquired by" work).
Accordingly, when the founders crafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, ...
...they provided numerous protections of property rights. Congress was authorized to protect the intellectual property of writers and inventors through the issuance of patents and copyrights. The states were prohibited from impairing private contractual obligations.
Further, putting property on a par with life and liberty, the Constitution prohibited the government from taking property in any criminal case without due process. And in the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, the government was prohibited from taking private property for public use without just compensation; the government was not even afforded the power to take private property for anything but public use.
The founders extended these and other specific protections to the property of Americans in the fundamental law of the United States for the sake of freedom. The freedom to exercise and profit from one's abilities without regard to caste or class was in the view of the founders the essence of freedom.
As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, "the first object of government" is the "protection of the diversity in the faculties [abilities] of men, from which the rights of property originate.
The above is NOT Obama's model - his is where Big Government makes the decisions and not its citizens. It shackles its own citizens "for their own good" - the lure of "the good life" by trading responsibilities away via the sweet Siren call of "no worries". And it has started with the loss of property rights (the bondholders), the abrogation of contracts (the rule of law), and crony capitalism (putting the politically favored, the UAW, first in line for the spoils).
And the lack of a watchdog media. And a clueless educational system that either doesn't understand the true responsibilities of citizenship, or is clueless itself (after all, it ain't diversity and ain't a "self-esteem" worship system).
Comments
Posted by: srdha | May 30, 2009 2:20 AM