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QUOTATIONS ABOUT LIBERTY AND POWER #1: PROPERTY RIGHTS <oll.libertyfund.org/title/2503> “That great as is your material interest in safeguarding the rights of individual property, yet higher & greater are & ever will be the moral reasons that forbid our sanctioning any attack upon it, or our suffering state burdens & restrictions & impediments to grow round it. True liberty ... cannot exist apart from the full rights of property; for property is - so to speak - only the crystallized form of free faculties.” [Auberon Herbert (1897)] Quotations about Liberty and power <oll.libertyfund.org/title/2189> [July, 2013] 1 Editor’s Introduction 11. Thomas Hodgskin argues for a Lockean notion of the right to property (“natural”) and against the Benthamite notion that property rights are created Since the OLL went live to the public in March by the state (“artificial”) (1832) 2004 we have had a quote of the week to highlight 12. J.B. Say on the self-evident nature of property some of the interesting content we have in the library. rights which is nevertheless violated by the state in To date [March 31, 2013] there are 408 quotes in the taxation and slavery (1817) collection. The quotations are organized into the 13. J.S. Millʼs great principle was that “over himself, following themes: over his own body and mind, the individual is Colonies, Slavery & Abolition | Economics | sovereign” (1859) Education | Food & Drink | Free Trade | Freedom of 14. Wolowski and Levasseur argue that Property is Speech | Law | Liberty | Literature & Music | Money “the fruit of human liberty” and that Violence and & Banking | Natural Rights | Odds & Ends | Origin Conquest have done much to disturb this natural of Government | Parties & Elections | Philosophy | order (1884) Politics & Liberty | Presidents, Kings, Tyrants, & 15. John Taylor on how a “sound freedom of Despots | Property Rights | Religion & Toleration | property” can destroy the threat to Liberty posed Revolution | Science | Socialism & Interventionism | by “an adoration of military fame” and oppressive Sport and Liberty | Taxation | The State | War & governments (1820) Peace | Women's Rights Below we list all the quotations on the theme of "Property Rights" [The passages in bold are the parts “The science of mine and thine —- the of the quote which appeared on the front page of the science of justice —- is the science of website]: 1. Say on a person’s property right in their own all human rights; of all a man’s rights “industrious faculties” (1819) of person and property; of all his rights 2. Molinari defends the right to property against the socialists who want to overthrow it, and the to life, liberty, and the pursuit of conservatives who defend it poorly (1849) happiness. It is the science which alone 3. Auberon Herbert on the “magic of private property” (1897) can tell any man what he can, and 4. Auberon Herbert on compulsory taxation as the “citadel” of state power (1885) cannot, do; what he can, and cannot, 5. Gaius states that according to natural reason the have; what he can, and cannot, say, first occupier of any previously unowned property becomes the just owner (2nd Century) without infringing the rights of any 6. Wollaston on crimes against person or property as other person. It is the science of peace; contradictions of fundamental truths (1722) 7. James Mill on the natural disposition to and the only science of peace; since it is accumulate property (1808). 8. Lysander Spooner spells out his theory of “mine the science which alone can tell us on and thine”, or the science of natural law and what conditions mankind can live in justice, which alone can ensure that mankind lives in peace (1882) peace, or ought to live in peace, with 9. Sir William Blackstone argues that occupancy of each other.” previously unowned land creates a natural right to that property which excludes others from it (1753) [Lysander Spooner (1882)] 10. Lord Kames states that the “hoarding appetite” is part of human nature and that it is the foundation of our notion of property rights (1779) 2 1. Say on a person’s property right in interfere with the rights of third parties. A similar violation is committed when a man’s labour is their own “industrious put in requisition for one purpose, though designed by faculties” (1819) himself for another; as when an artisan or trader is forced into the military life, whether permanently or merely for the occasion. About this Quotation [Footnote 30.] The industrious faculties are, of all kinds of property, the least questionable; Say’s Treatise on Political Economy had a profound being derived directly either from nature, or impact in both France and America where it was used from personal assiduity. The property in them as a college text book throughout the 19th century is of higher pretensions than that of the land, (there were several editions after its first appearance in which may generally be traced up to an act of 1803). Unlike modern economics textbooks Say spoliation; for it is hardly possible to show an includes a chapter on the right to own property fairly early on in the treatise, in fact just before his famous instance, in which its ownership has been chapter “On Markets.” This passage includes a very legitimately transmitted from the first interesting footnote in which Say talks about property occupancy. It ranks higher than the right of in things other than material things, such as what he the capitalist also; for even taking it for terms “les talents industrielles” which the 19th century granted, that this latter has been acquired American translator calls “the industrious faculties.” By without any spoliation whatever, and by the this Say has in mind those aspects of an individual’s gradual accumulations of ages, yet the person and character which makes him or her a succession to it could not have been productive or “industrious” individual such as established without the aid of legislation, knowledge, skills, motivation, capacity to plan or which aid may have been granted on invent, and so on. A Lockean political philosopher might call this “self-ownership”. Say described this conditions. Yet, sacred as the property in the right to property in one’s own faculties and talents as faculties of industry is, it is constantly “sacred.” Also of interest is Say’s claim that the justice infringed upon, not only in the flagrant abuse of this form of property is more clear cut (or of personal slavery, but in many other points “supérieur”) than other, more commonly recognized of more frequent occurrence. forms of property such as land or capital. The former, A government is guilty of an invasion upon it, he thought, could often be traced back to an original when it appropriates to itself a particular branch of act of plunder (such as dispossession of an original industry, the business of exchange and brokerage for owner), or in the case of the latter, from some piece of example; or when it sells the exclusive privilege of favorable government legislation which allowed the conducting it. It is still a greater violation to authorize a accumulation of capital to take place. gendarme, commissary of police, or judge, to arrest and detain individuals at discretion, on the plea of Quotation public safety or security to the constituted authorities; thus depriving the individual of the fair and reasonable In the chapter “On the Right of Property” in his certainty of having his time and faculties at his own Treatise (1803, 1819) the French economist Jean- disposal, and of being able to complete what he may Baptiste Say (1767-1832) argues that property is not begin upon. What robber or despoiler could commit a more atrocious act of invasion upon the public security, limited to ownership of “things” but also includes an certain as he is of being speedily put down, and individual’s “talents and faculties”: counteracted by private as well as public opposition? [Text]: The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties and [30] talents, except insomuch as they would 3 Source 12 evenings Molinari gives us a detailed defense of both the “Justice” and the “Utility” of property rights, <oll.libertyfund.org/quote/425>. both of which he believed were crucial pillars in any Jean Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy; or theory of property. Liberty Fund is having this the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth, ed. important book by Molinari translated and is pleased Clement C. Biddle, trans. C. R. Prinsep from the 4th to give readers a foretaste here. ed. of the French, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1855. 4th-5th ed. ). Chapter: BOOK I, Quotation CHAPTER XIV: OF THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. <oll.libertyfund.org/title/274/37998/901727>. In the second year of the 1848 Revolution the More works by Jean Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French political economist Gustave de Molinari <oll.libertyfund.org/person/166>. (1819-1912) wrote a defence of the right to property in the form of conversations between an Economist (him), a Socialist, and a Conservative. He argues that the 2. Molinari defends the right to Socialists want to overthrow the right to property without understanding what this will do to both justice property against the socialists who and prosperity, and that Conservatives do not know want to overthrow it, and the how to defend property correctly: The quotation on the title page: It is necessary to conservatives who defend it poorly refrain from attributing to the physical laws the evils which are the just and inevitable punishment for the (1849) violation of this very order of laws, which have been instituted in order to produce good.