Property

The courts The protection of property rights requires: a system of contract law and tort law that upholds real, personal and intellectual property rights; a rigorously enforced criminal code that outlaws theft, fraud, trespass, vandalism, and other deliberate...

Intellectual property is as much property in the eyes of the natural law as tangible property. Consider this passage from a BBC report: Thailand’s health ministry says it has approved the production of cheaper versions of patented anti-AIDS and heart disease drugs....

The problem which ultimately tore apart the Roman Republic was the accumulation of the lands of Italy in the hands of a few aristocrats. This proved politically destabilizing and led to tyranny, because land was needed, just as air is needed, to survive and prosper....

Rent control, quite apart from its disastrous practical effects, is primarily objectionable for the moral reason that it infringes property rights. If a landlord is denied the right to contract on any terms he sees fit, he does not really own the property—it has been...

The natural law recognizes that parents have a duty to support their children until they are old enough to fend for themselves, and it recognizes that spouses cannot leave one another destitute. However, to the extent that laws otherwise interfere with testamentary...

Freedom is … a liberty to dispose, and order, as he likes, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property. —John Locke. Two Treatises of Government, 1689. When the government prohibits the demolition of a building on the grounds that it is ‘heritage listed’...

“Thou shalt not steal,” carries with it a complete charter of the rights of property. —Herbert Spencer. The Law, 1850. When you accept a government subsidy, when you accept welfare, when you send your children to a public school, when you ride a subsidized government...

The reason why men enter into society, is the preserva­tion of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society. —John...

Nor could any man in the state of nature, have a right to violate the property of another; that is, what another had acquired by his act or labor; or to interrupt him in his industry and enjoyments, as long as he himself was not injured by that industry and those...

It is competition made possible by the dispersion of property that deprives the individual owners of particular things of all coercive powers. —Friedrich Hayek. The Constitution of Liberty, 1960. The unnatural growth of big business and the inhibition of small...

Freedom is … a liberty to dispose, and order, as he likes, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property … not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own. —John Locke. Two Treatises of Government, 1689. Governments should...

Hence are apparent the cause of the decay of arts amongst the Turks; and of the neglect and want of care in manuring and cultivating their lands; why their houses and private buildings are made slight, and not durable for more than ten or twenty years; why you find...

To live securely, happily, and independently is the end and effect of liberty; and it is the ambition of all men to live agreeably to their own humours and discretion … therefore all men are animated by the passion of acquiring and defending property, because property...

A man has but poor encouragement to bestow labor and expense upon a piece of ground, in which he has no secure property; and when neither himself, nor his posterity, will, probably, ever derive any permanent advantage from it. —Joseph Priestley. An Essay on the First...

The right to property is not a construct of civilization, but rather an indisputable, indefeasible, divine right born of the natural law. It is based on the ownership by every person of his own body. This was explained by John Locke: Every man has a property in his...