The Founders on property and liberty
Commenter “Montage” wrote on the recent de Blasio thread:
I read the [de Blasio] interview for a more complete picture and context is important. The key is when he says: “hundreds of years of history that have ELEVATED property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.”
I capitalized the word elevated because he is not saying he dislikes the idea of property rights. He is saying that it has become elevated to the point that is ”˜calls the tune on a lot of development.’
But property rights have not been elevated. They are basic and always have been. Take a look at this to see what’s going on here:
Only one who ignores the history of the founding period could deny that the men of that era held the right to private property in high esteem. Indeed, it could be said that the central question of principle that animated the movements that led to independence and the framing of the Constitution concerned property rights; for it was a threat to property rights, in the form of taxation without representation, that initiated the crisis that led eventually to independence. Moreover, it was largely the undermining of property rights by state legislatures under the Articles of Confederation that prompted the framing of a new national constitution that would protect the individual right to property against infringement by national and state government power. (The state abuses of power during the 1780s included the cancellation of private debts either directly or indirectly, especially through deliberately inflationary policies and the emission of worthless paper money as legal tender.)
So insofar as the Founders made any distinction between property rights and other individual rights, they insisted that property rights were at least as important as personal rights. In Federalist 54, James Madison stated tersely: “Government is instituted no less for the protection of the property than of the persons of individuals.”
As Madison later elaborated, property rights are as important as personal rights because the two are intimately connected. The right to labor and acquire property is itself an important personal right and entitled to government protection; and the property acquired through the exercise of this personal right is entitled, by derivation, to an equal protection.
Also see these quotes offered by commenter Geoffrey Britain:
“Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.” John Adams
“Now what liberty can there be where property is taken without consent?” Samuel Adams
“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” ”“ Daniel Webster
“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” Alexis de Tocqueville
I don’t think there’s any question about the primacy and extreme importance of property rights to our entire system of government and of human rights. And I think that Daniel Webster quote is especially apropos when applied to the de Blasios of the world.
Great quotes. I have borrowed Webster and de Tocqueville to use as signatures on my emails.
One could almost think of de Blasio as a caricature; except that, unfortunately, the type is becoming all too common in American politics.
I’m not sure anymore where I saw the argument made that Jefferson, in the Declaration, substituted “pursuit of happiness” for “property” in the more usual formulation of the Triad.
A lot of mischief would have been avoided if he had kept the original.
When Jefferson changed Locke’s Life, Liberty, and Property to Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness in The Declaration of Independence, I wonder what he had in mind?
Here is one take on it, with the comments following supporting Locke’s original tripartite take on freedom:
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/46460
AesopFan:
Like minds and all that…
Slavery forced many of the Founding Father’s hands, because they relied on Divine Providence to end slavery, not human politics.
As Jehovah told the Israelis, don’t use slavery 1.0 on the 12 tribes of Israel, but they were allowed to use as slave labor the giant tribes they conquers but did not exterminate. These nephiliim giant kin were used by Solomon to build the temple.
Slavery 2.0 had not been authorized by Jehovah, and many of the Founding Fathers of a religious or deistic bent, didn’t think it held true to divine principles. Some of them even may have thought it diabolical and Luciferian, but trying to do something about it without the support of Jehovah would mean little in the end.
It took awhile for Divine Judgment to land on the US, but just as in the days of Noah’s, humans were given plenty of time to repent and fix their behaviors.
Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto raised quite a stir twenty years ago with his best-selling book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. De Soto argues that capitalism’s success in the West depends largely on a formal system of documented property – the key to unlocking capital.
“Just as a river needs a hydroelectric plant to produce useable energy,” says deSoto, “assets need a formal property system to generate significant surplus value. Without formal property to extract their economic potential and convert it into a form that can be easily transported and controlled, assets of developing world are like water in a lake, high in the Andes – an untapped stock of potential energy.”
All I know is my property was gained within the rule of law. Change the law and it remains my property. Not afraid to defend it. All they can do is kill me and mine. High cost, but the cost is higher if you think otherwise.
Locke did put two limits on the right to property, though — from his “Of Property” in his Second Treatise on Civil Government:
Ann,
Locke was either being disingenuous or was “in his cups” when he wrote that.
There’s only so much ocean front property. I.E. only so much desirable property. Everyone cannot have their own mansion with an ocean view.
I don’t begrudge those that do, in fact I’m happy for them. Perhaps in my next lifetime, I’ll have one too. Or, I can occasionally camp at the beach. The point being that one of the secrets to life is to be more happy with what you have than unhappy with what you don’t have…
“as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils” Locke
Exactly how does unused property ‘spoil’? Locke is also stating that land must be used, hardly in keeping with today’s environmental correctness.
What the hell Ann? I inherited 52.3 acres. This consists of pasture that I may or not choose to graze, a creek I may or may not choose to drink from, a wood lot I may or may not choose to harvest and fertile land that I may choose or not choose to cultivate. The property has out buildings that I may choose to maintain or not maintain. I will pass it on to the child or children of my choosing. And they will decide what they want to do with it.
Most importantly, it is not your or Locke’s bizwax what I choose to do with my property as long as I come to own it within the rule of law. We also own rental property purchased within the rule of law, it is our property and what we do with it is not your bizwax or Locke’s. Or may I demand your property become mine because you cannot make use of it?
Ok, to each because of their need. I need everything you have down to the clothes in the closet. I will let you keep the clothes you are wearing because I am kind.
Slavery was up close and unlike today, was the magnifying glass that put focus on property rights being where freedom rests…
without property one is a slave to man or a slave to nature, but ones life is not ones own because it takes accumulation to make enough of anything to have force.
as man moves from primitive animal he acquires property which is what frees him from the slavery and tyranny of nature (for the most part compared to previously), and with that time invented society and all around us. Without that property, there would be no time, and without the time, nothing that needs it can follow.
how does one become a slave? one has no property, so one is not free to make exchange and so, move and do as they please within the framework of the freedom they have acquired.
what goes on in the heads of these idjits is not they dislike money, they dislike others being more free than they are!!!!!!!!! and how are they free? they have more property. they can make the choices that the jealous person wants to make (but often they dont), and the jealous person cant, and thats that.
all the things we like to do, practice and spend our property on, go away in a communist state because there is nothing extra to exchange, and so, no way to choose what to do other than what is provided (with a state that sees every non essential act as a negative revenue and so even sees essential acts that way too often enough)
But how could one live in this propose world that has no property, and yet live high on top? what is the key then if one does not own? Ford declared it. he said i want to own nothing and control everything.
and that is the rub, property is a cure against control. if you have yours and i have mine, we have no way to easily compel each other but through words and arguments and entreatments (and sometimes war or fighting).
however if one of us has no property, the other can control them by apportioning just enough, reward good behavior, punish bad… and good and bad is what the other desires, for slaves have no morals, for in morals there is conflict with the controller
so those who control, control the flow of property, which gives them control of all people. which is what marx was all about… how does the top control the bottom, not for the sake of the bottom either.
he described a slaves life in wonderful terms focusing on all the positivist ideas he could and the movement could so that the people would beg to be slaves, not only beg, but even fight for it – and put up their own masters who positioned themselves to be such.
if i have no property, i cant travel
i cant dress accordingly or change dress
and the list goes on.. .
property is freedom
persuit of happyness is how you create property
you persue someone elses happyness and provide it
miserable selfish people cant figure out how to make others happy and so they refuse to understand it, instead coming up with other measures that they claim is the true right measure. teachers should make a million not actors… but teachers make 30 kids miserable for 9 months of the year or so, while an actor can make 20 million people happy in one afternoon for a few bucks in exchange.
even the state and marxists are bribing their people, but more like the jihadis, with a promise of what will come.. not with a concrete piece of property now..
or as a russian once told me, promise them something they will never get for work they will give today..
oh well..
Oldflyer Says:
September 12th, 2017 at 5:16 pm
Great quotes. I have borrowed Webster and de Tocqueville to use as signatures on my emails.
if you want a GREAT Third, try Balthazar Gracien
a stupendous mind mostly forgotten and author of The Art of Worldly Wisdom..
Don’t take the wrong side of an argument just because your opponent has taken the right side
and
Even knowledge has to be in the fashion, and where it is not, it is wise to affect ignorance
enjoy!
To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else
Balthazar Gracien
You can spend all your time making money
you can spend all your money making time
[he sings love not money]
but the point is this, property is just money which is just stored up time in trade with nothing having any fixed value over time.
I’ve been reading some of the amicus briefs in Oil States. Neo is spot on. The Founders were extremely keen on property rights and the connection to a jury trial conducted by an Article 3 judge. Learned today that King George used admiralty courts (political hacks) to enforce the Stamp Act and otherwise deprive colonists of their property.
In the “there’s nothing new under the sun” department, King Barack created his PTAB at the behest of his paymasters at Google and Apple in order to beat people out of their property. Too crazy to explain here.
Oil States will be the con law and property rights case of the century. Billions on the line and I’m not joking. To be argued in November or December.
Ann; Geoffrey Britain; parker:
Locke on property:
By the way, Locke was an Englishman who influenced the founding fathers, but he was not himself a founding father.
King Obama in the 18th century: At some point, you’ve accumulated enough property. And you didn’t build that.
Parker, re: Locke, in this instance property is not just land, but also what a person could grow, their livestock, and their rewards for honest labor. A person may have little land, but still have a fair bit of property to worry about the government taking unjustly, or spoiling before it could be used. With the wide use of money, property has become way more than land, and the issue of spoilage is largely moot.. And I agree it is none of any government’s business how I acquired it, as long as I did it lawfully.
I personally care not about inequality of results as long what is gained (by anyone) has been gained legally. I have what I have because I inherited 52.3 acres, invested wisely, lived a frugal life. All that I have belong to me. Period. What I do with what belong to me is up to me, along with Mrs parker. What we pass to our children is also not the business of anyone else. Period.
Otherwise, it is a slippery slope to all belongs to the State.
Not only intellectually do we understand the necessity of private ownership of property as essential to the preservation of our other freedoms, but history and human nature confirm that those countries which do not protect that basic right (North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.) are lacking in the other rights and are fact hellholes.
Great discussion. Thanks everyone. Happiness in the 18th century meaning makes the phrase ‘in order to form a more perfect union’ in the Preamble to the Constitution take on a broader meaning. TJ and his ilk believed in the perfectibility of man in the continuing improvement sense.
Women didn’t have property either, but most of the public focuses on what they call slavery, which was merely Slavery 2.0, not the slavery of social welfare or the indentured servitude temporary state of the Israelis.
To have property, one would need absolute cognatic or agnatic-cognatic succession laws.
Of course, many white men didn’t have property either and couldn’t vote before Andrew Jackson. That’s why “white” clans, created by the Confed slave lords to usher in the union of whites vs black slaves, liked Jackson so much, even though they didn’t have his virtues yet obtained his vices.
So property in the US became not only political capital, it was economic, social, and religious capital. Those who had capital were the Righteous, and everybody else were their slaves and serfs. But that’s not how people see it now, because their traditions were warped and they grew up based upon these deceptive warped traditions.
The more property a slave lord had, the more white serfs he had, the more women in bondage he had, the more votes he had, the more wealth he had, the more political leverage he had, the more economic social and religious leverage he had. It is little wonder what the slave lords were willing to use the threat of secession to force the Union to enforce Federal laws over state rights.
By adopting the Leftist alliance’s tactics and ideology because of the doctrine of winning a war against the Left, the anti Left has begun to become the enemy and lose to the hatred of the human heart.
Before, they didn’t see evil and thus refused to hate it. Now they are subsumed by their hatred and have begun to adopt the tactics of the enemy, all the while claiming that they won’t become the enemy.
Lincoln did not choose to adopt slavery in order to counter the evil of the slave lords. The Union ended up choosing diametrically opposite methods based on divine ethics, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and Divine Providence.
That is why the US was allowed to prosper and “win”. Will the divine counsel allow the future US to win once again, when the people are corrupt, and are weaklings in the face of the hatred in the human heart towards the Leftist alliance?
In the beginning, we wandered… We came to Eden (the real one they just located), and started to settle and change our lives from hunters, to hunter gatherers, and then farmers and so on.
EACH stage of that journey required the ownership of something. From the weapons the man made, to the clothing the woman constructed. Without it, we are animals not man.
The founders grasped the essential difference between man and animals (not all), and that was man was a property owning creature whose belongings enabled him freedom from the most basic existence in nature. Halleluiah many might say.
EVERYTHING ELSE stems from the above realization, and is just what ifs as to the conditions one can create with, without, or upon others. But at its crux is one must be free to own things to not be an animal. Owning things given for use only which really belongs to others, is akin to a horse owning a saddle.
If you take 100% of what someone owns, and provide them with shelter and medicine, etc. Are they slaves? Prisoners? What are they? Socialists? well, Jefferson kept slaves, and his slaves and many others (but not all), were often paid. Ergo the term “slave wages”. They sometimes bought their own freedom and then sometimes bought to own their wives and children. (the total evil opposite of this would be a black slave owner in the south by the name of Nat — he would convince slaves to escape to his home, then turn them in for reward and if the reward was not large enough, sell them to someone else).
So near 100% at some point, you have a slave… what about prisoners? Prisoners make less than slaves, but even prisoners earn. No? so again, some point near 100% the condition of slavery exists, because the person is so poor as to be (as the left argues) at the whim of those who are wealthier than they (and the left feels absolves them from responsibility — more would require too much space to explain)
So, from 0% to 100% at what point does one go from being free to being a slave?
Property rights is the staple of man because property rights is what is required not to be an animal
To continue from this line, you would then argue that once man had property. Magical objects that made him better than others without them. He had to defend his property. Ergo, the importance of words, and the importance of weapons to back them. Words we forget are used to defend us first, and so, when words are under attack as with the lefts games (like using gender in place of sex for years then using genders OTHER definitions suddenly cause that’s how careless we were with synonyms).
So, property, words, weapons are the basis of man as non animal , non slave.
Take away ANY of the three and the stool falls over and you are no longer free. Shave one down, and remove the balance, and the stool falls over and you are no longer free.
what is the last part of this equation?
posterity
Take away that, and you have no continuance of the state of man as free yet modern, you have the modern administrative slave state. (Where equal makes you a leggo)
by the way, read the newsweek article on fertilility of men plummeting. they dont know why, but it coincides with the rise of feminisms dominance (and its pretending it isnt), and its trying to find any and all reasons why we are so below replacement we are dying out and they are worried. I said a long time ago this was happening, but we dont care about men, and we have no money for means health and reproduction. the article DOES point out that we have been importing peoeple, but even the imports after a short while decline in fertility.
but dears.. turn men as a class into 100% betas, and you get low fertility. no need for plastics, no need for anything else (just as the same is true for early menses on blood father absence!). you can read thousands of studies that show losing makes men infertile over alphas, you just cant connect the dots as facts have to hang apart
gonna get real interesting if the population of women ever figure out that they been had and been used to exterminate their priveleged white selves VOLUNTARILY FOR AN IDEA so strong their families and husbands and such could not stop them from selling out (and thats exactly what they did).
yeah. give me the litany of i hate women…
I dont, and my wife will attest to that as would others that actually know me… in fact, as far as i see, women do not want to be barren and end up alone in old age under state care, but thats me maybe.
but bottom line, kill the messenger all you want…
the message will remain and either be heard or ignored
NOT MY CIRCUS NOT MY MONKEYS
(Meaning i am just watching the show and then i die out)
bdh Says:
September 13th, 2017 at 12:41 am
… A person may have little land, but still have a fair bit of property to worry about the government taking unjustly, or spoiling before it could be used. …And I agree it is none of any government’s business how I acquired it, as long as I did it lawfully.
* **
On the bolded points: (1) Kelo; (2) a Colorado case where a couple who had purchased a rural mountain lot to build on for retirement discovered that their neighbors had been using it, and a judge awarded the property to the neighbors for that reason (probably more complex than that, but the news reports were some years ago); (3) hence the need to redefine “lawful” to exclude commonly understood terms (see Ymar above on words) and the Left’s insistence that unlawful simply means “having more than someone else” (a very fluid definition).
Money is fossilized laziness.
–Stephen Gaskin
In the sixties Gaskin taught composition, creative writing and general semantics at San Francisco State. Then he went hippie, dropped out and emerged as a Haight Street spiritual teacher.
Which might not sound promising to most readers here, but at that time for that gig Gaskin was a fairly sensible, non-abusive fellow in the tradition of American Freethinkers. An important teaching he gave was how not to have one’s head copped by the legions of mini-Mansons roaming the Haight-Ashbury then.
His followers swelled. In 1970 hundreds of them followed Gaskin in a great bus caravan which toured the US as Gaskin spoke everywhere he could. Their journey ended in Tennessee when they settled on large parcel of donated land out in the boonies.
Gaskin and his people established a hippie commune — about the only one which lasted more than fifteen minutes — and they called it the Farm. However, by the 80s the Farm was so overrun with freeloaders, its economy collapsed.
They didn’t give up their experiment entirely, but they stopped being a full commune. Members had to make it financially in private households, otherwise living in agreement with a community covenant. The new Farm still exists, in some cases with three generations of family.
Abolishing private property is an abiding dream of humanity, but it never seems to work out except in strict religious orders.
Stephen Gaskin died three years ago. His death received more notice than I expected, and quite favorable at that, in major media.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10946714/Stephen-Gaskin-obituary.html
He was one of my teachers.
I took it as a given tht de Blasio’s “hundreds of years of history” were intended to include and indict the American founding.
Property rights are civil rights, perhaps the most ignored in our society.
Slavery is wrong because the fundamental property right is owning yourself.
AesopFan: the Boulder, Colorado case you’re referring to is from 2007 and the claim was based on a long-standing tenet of English common law, and written into statutory law, known as “adverse possession.” The existing Colorado law got a few “tweaks” after that case due to the public response to the ruling. Some info:
https://coloradorealestateblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/new-adverse-possession-law-in-colorado/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
Huxley:
Was Gaskin echoing and expanding on the use constitutes ownership theory? It’s a common law ingredient of property right issues like adverse possession, agreed boundaries, and right of ways. It’s a main part of western state’s water right laws – if you don’t use it, you lose it – and a recurring excuse for property taxes, the theory being that by taxing property it will usually be put to a productive use. It’s also the theory behind negative interest rates.
If you add up zoning laws, environmental restrictions, building codes, permit fees, property taxes, and the various personal property taxes and fees, you can see that there is no absolute individual right to property. To a great extent we already have collective ownership. Why not go all the way as Gaskin proposed?
Jefferson’s substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for Locke’s “property” may have been a matter of reinforcing the glaring contradiction created by the existence of chattel slavery with regard to the unalienable rights of all men. It’s not as if the Founders were ignorant of the fact some men would be forced to give up property as a result of the abolition required to protect unalienable rights. The other fact they knew with certainty was they lacked the means to address the contradiction at the time.
“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” Alexis de Tocqueville
Its as if de Tocqueville had Hillary in mind when he wrote that, but I guess it would apply to Obama as well.
The Other Chuck: Gaskin and friends were attempting to build a new spiritual way of life in America based on their psychedelic visions. They wanted to become “voluntary peasants” so as to free themselves from materialism and to be less of a burden on the planet’s resources.
However, once you settle several hundred people onto a piece of land and start building roads, houses, schools, laundries etc., you’re in the soup with reality, laws and property. Plus, to his credit, Gaskin had already weaned his people off welfare. He considered it dishonest and immoral to take money like that.
I mention Gaskin and the Farm more as a modern cautionary tale about collective ownership.
Back when communes were the Next Big Thing, there was a guy who went around the country reviewing communes. He liked to take photos of commune member toothbrushes — not shared property! — hanging together.
***
BTW, for any Deadheads here (I’ll bet I’m not alone), Gaskin was “Saint Stephen” in the Grateful Dead song of that name:
Saint Stephen with a rose
In and out of the garden he goes
Country garden in the wind and the rain
Wherever he goes the people all complain
Stephen prospered in his time
Well, he may and he may decline
Did it matter, does it now?
Stephen would answer if he only knew how
The Southern slave lords, the Northern Democrats profiting off the slave trade and political alliances, and the pastors of various churches who supported slavery, knew very well that if they defined blacks as full humans, they would have internal problems.
Which is why they classified blacks as sub humans, basically animals. A house can love and feed a dog, but it isn’t going to elect the Dog as master or politician. A difference.
That is why blacks were forbidden from being taught how to read, because it prevented them from reading the Bible and declaring themselves a “Christian”.
Many Christians supported this interpretation of “property”. And other Christians disagreed. So they had a war about this, but it got blamed on Lincoln a a “tyrant”.
The traditions of man are as manifold as the stars and as corrupt as DC’s Kennedies.
Thanks for the shout out to Montage. Hey, that’s me! LOL
Anyway, I really do think De Blasio was simply paying rhetorical games. It’s election season and he knows a lot of NY voters don’t like high rent and new unaffordable developments. So he was using a populist tactic, which is to speak right to the heart of the matter without actually addressing the fix. Politicians do this all the time.
De Blasio has been accused by opponents [on the left] of being cozy with developers. So he is trying to make it clear he is not that cozy with them.
Here is from an article I read on this.
“Another real estate executive said that the mayor’s statements shouldn’t be taken too seriously. He said the comments were just the mayor’s best Bernie Sanders impression, a way to up his liberal cred leading up to the election. He noted that the city has turned to private developers to address the city’s affordable housing crisis. The mayor’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program, the linchpin of his affordable housing agenda, for example, relies HEAVILY on a buy-in from the city’s developers. “His administration has advocated using density to solve affordable housing woes and building our way out of the crisis,” he said. “That’s a market-based solution.”
Link:
https://therealdeal.com/2017/09/11/he-went-straight-to-chairman-mao-real-estate-execs-sound-off-on-de-blasios-views-on-property-rights/
So, Montage, you feel De Blasio’s ability to dismiss property rights with such absoluteness and apparent conviction to be a strength?
Harry the Extremist Says:
> “So, Montage, you feel De Blasio’s ability to dismiss property rights with such absoluteness and apparent conviction to be a strength?”
If he wins more votes than his opponent then it is a strength. Regardless of what I think. But what I do think is that De Blasio is not opposed to private property. He is using populist rhetoric that he will never actually enact. But that does bring up an interesting discussion topic about what voters believe. If they choose De Blasio on this type of rhetoric then perhaps the voters have an issue with some private property rights? That’s worth thinking about.
Bob Yates:
You’ve blown the main transaxle, Ripley … ease down, ease down.
–Aliens
Montage:
Actually, it’s possible to be a socialist and to also be cozy with developers. Hypocrisy is always an option.
Montage, if the voters have an issue with property rights, they can either vote for the actual socialist or the guy who merely sounds like one. Either way, rhetoric like this from an American politician is pretty disturbing whether he’s pandering or not.
ColoComment Says:
September 13th, 2017 at 11:55 am
AesopFan: the Boulder, Colorado case you’re referring to is from 2007 and the claim was based on a long-standing tenet of English common law, and written into statutory law, known as “adverse possession.”
* * *
I had forgotten it was so long ago.
Some friends of mine built a “retirement” house in Bozeman that they lived on only a few months of the year while still working in Kentucky; some sleazebag moved in, claimed it by “adverse possession”, and sold it — all perfectly legal. The laws may have had some merit originally, as a way to make productive use of abandoned claims/homesteads, but today they are a source of illicit revenue for flat-out criminals.
Ymar Sakar Says:
September 13th, 2017 at 4:46 pm
The Southern slave lords, the Northern Democrats profiting off the slave trade and political alliances, and the pastors of various churches who supported slavery, knew very well that if they defined blacks as full humans, they would have internal problems.
* * *
IMO, the millenia-old institution of the slavery of conquered peoples, even bought ones, doesn’t negate their intrinsic worth as humans: they caught a bad deal, but so do earthquake and famine victims. God lets us work out our salvation in that context, as St. Paul indicates.
The decision of the American South to deliberately make the transition from “enslaved humans” to “not humans” sealed their fate under Heaven’s longsuffering-but-not-infinite patience with fallen men.
huxley Says:
September 13th, 2017 at 3:16 pm
..toothbrushes…
***
All the attempts at communal life founder on the fact that people who can live by the ideal standards are outnumbered by those who can’t, or won’t.
The LDS “United Order” foundered after not very long, despite almost-ideal commitment; the Israeli kibbutzim are the longest-lasting but had to make concessions to less-than-wholly-communal living. The Hutterites were perhaps the most successful long-term, IIRC, but also had to institute some select private ownership principles.
“perhaps the voters have an issue with some private property rights?”
You mean the what was it, maybe 20% of NYC eligible voters who bothered to vote when Wilhelm (his real name) was elected mayor?
Montage: You do know de Blasio has a history with socialism and communism?
When younger he called himself a “Democratic socialist.” He worked with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He honeymooned in Cuba.
Only people from the hard left do those things and people from the hard left draw the line on private property quite differently from traditional Americans.
Sure, de Blasio is cool with private property.
You can keep your toothbrush.
I’m just killing some time here and missed these comments before, but quickly, it looks like an interesting link.
I’ve been through this kind of case before and the facts probably are as Aesopfan says, more complex than he could readily recall from memory alone.
Though states differ, in mine the adverse possession must be open, notorious, hostile, exclusive, unbroken and for 14 years before giving the intruder a right of ownership.
Those who tried to take part of our land failed on all counts though early on when I discovered the trespass, I was advised by a lawyer to take down their boundary wire and posting signs, which I did while armed, and put up my own real fence… something which caused a minor stir in the court case that followed.
The law is probably well meant as it is intended to quiet endless suits at law or worse based on shifting surveys, and such.
If you have a paved driveway encroaching six inches onto your neighbors property line, a drive which has been there since time out of mind, it doesn’t make sense for you to have to tear it out just because they get a survey before selling their house and discover that the long ago previous owners had allowed such a situation to develop.
Stealing my hunting land is another matter entirely of course.
States don’t generally allow adverse possession against them for obvious reasons. There go the parks into the hands of every small holder how buys property along the boundary and surreptitiously starts lawn mowing a couple extra acres …
Ha … good link. Because the formula is just about as I remember it, and even a drive way is mentioned in the article.
Which makes sense since the example of an old driveway on a property line is probably the easiest example to understand and come to grips with …