Property Rights

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.

Friedrich August von Hayek

 

 

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

Milton Friedman

When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.

Grover Cleveland
 

Whenever 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

 

Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.

John Adams

 

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.

John Locke

 

Freedom and Property Rights are inseparable. You can't have one without the other.

George Washington
 

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

Ayn Rand
 

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.

Ayn Rand
 
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
Samuel Adams
 

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.

James Madison
 
 

Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.

John Adams
 
 

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.

William Howard Taft
 
 

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.

John Locke
 
 
Whenever 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
 

My position as regards the monied interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run, identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand; for property belongs to man and not man to property.

Theodore Roosevelt
 

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

Alan Greenspan
 
 

When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he does't care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you.

Milton Friedman

Emmons Creek off Deans Lake Road and Stratton Lake Road at Old fisheryEmmons Creek off Deans Lake Road and Stratton Lake Road at Old fishery