Opus 2024-129: Property Is Liberty

I am thinking about the communist manifesto and it’s emphasis on property.  It does not want you to have any.  The communists have that in common with autocrats,  monarchies,  kings and any other powerful political force.  All of these have made a monopoly of owning property.  We have a record of Pharaoh bring that about.

(Gen 47:20 KJV)  And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh's.

And much of the world in order to own property you need to be either royalty, nobility, or the church.

While this is the norm for pagan culture it is antithetical for Biblical societies.  In the Bible, we have a lot of evidence that personal property was real and good.  In proverbs 31 the wife buys a field and plants a vineyard.  We have the king who had a property owner executed so he could buy his property.  Abraham bought land to bury his wife.  And so forth.  

When Israel came to the promised land, it was divided up by clans and later on by family.  We know this because they were not supposed to move boundaries.  They were not supposed to take the land from widows and orphans.  And there was a provision for returning land to his original family in the Jubilee.

(Lev 25:23 KJV)  The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.

I don’t know that this law was followed but it was the way God intended it to be.

One of the salient motives for people coming to America was the knowledge that there was land to be had.  The government did not make it impossible to own your own farm or home.  In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson did not have “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, he had “life, liberty and property”.  At the end of the Civil War the Homestead Act was passed that made it possible to claim 160 acres of land if you improved it and lived there five years.  

Property was recognized as a part of liberty.

That is why out communist overlords are determined to do away with private property.  Notice how many laws make it hard to buy your own home.  Notice the economic policies that want to force us into 15 minute cities.  Think zoning laws, environmental impact statments, wetlands regulations, building permits and the list goes on.  What we see going on in Texas now and across the country as states and the federal government grab more land is a similar movement.  In a state like Nevada the government owns almost everything.  Every year they gobble up more land to preserve for future generations, or at least their future generations.  Us peasants will only have access to the great outdoors if it is allowed.

When you hear of anything that limits your right to buy and own land or anything else that would be considered property an alarm should go off in your head.  Big Brother wants you in a tenement, without a car and dependent on your government handouts.  As the memes keep reminding us, “You will own nothing and be happy.”

homo unius libri

Opus 2023-187: Another Slant on Liberty

You may have heard of the Liberty Bell.  You may be aware of the inscription, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land.”  I would hope you know where that phrase came from but if you went to public school all this would all bring from you is “Huh?”

The inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Bible.

(Lev 25:10 KJV)  And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

The bell makers took the part they wanted but there is more to the quotation than meets the editors eye.  A little background is in order.  I am not going to try to go through the entire chapter but I want to lift out some specifics of the verse.

There are several revolutionary concepts in this.  The first is the concept of “liberty.”  When the bell was ordered and the inscription agreed on the first thing that came to mind was the idea of political liberty.  Today we would think in terms of the Bill of Rights.  In the time Leviticus was written political freedom was a different concept than we have today.  Israel had no king or organized government.  The closest was in the person of Moses who had appointed tribal elders to assist him in running things.  It would have been closer to the original arrangement of the United States under the Articles of Confederation.  

The Hebrew word for “liberty” is consistently translated that way by the KJV.  The NASB more frequently uses the word “release”.  The underlying concept is flowing or free run.  From our Declaration of Independence you might get “the pusuit of happiness.”  That understanding relates to the other concepts in this verse and the rest of the chapter.

Involved in this statement is a concept that is anathema to the modern elites.  It is the concept of property.  Back when Israel moved into the Promised Land and divide it up there were assignments given.  That land was to stay in the family forever.  In most ancient and medieval cultures the land belonged to the elites.  In order to maintain this non-traditional arrangement, only under precise circumstances could it be sold and usually that sale was more of a lease.  It had to be returned to the original owner in the year of Jubilee.  A landless man was little more than a slave.  So every fifty years all land was to revert to the original owner.  That obviously meant the original Jewish owner, not the original pagan tribes that held the land, so don’t get excited about giving Manhattan back to the Indians, although I am not sure I would not vote for that.  

Also implicit in this regulation was that slaves were to be freed.  The seeds to destroy slavery were being laid by God all the way back in Leviticus.  It did not eliminate slavery, common to all cultures, it put a time limit on the servitude.  

Also notice the importance of the family.  When you are freed you are to go back home.  This is another foundation of Godly society that the Marxists and their followers are trying to destroy.

So happy 4th.  Celebrate with your family in your home.  Enjoy the liberty to travel and move around as much as you want.  The foundation for all that is in the Bible.

homo unius libri

Opus 2011-329, Plow and Crown: Liberty and Property

(Leviticus 25:10 KJV)  And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

Even in the days of Moses liberty was equated with property.  This was a deliberate step away from the Crown philosophy of Egypt.  My understanding is that in Ancient Egypt all land belonged to the Pharaoh or to the temples.  Private property was not part of the equation.  That is a pattern that we see down through history.  When people began immigrating to the New World they were coming from monarchies that kept strict control of land.  Primogeniture was the policy.  That meant that great estates were not to be broken down but were to be passed on to the heir intact.  We saw the nobility closing off the commons of villages and taking away what little land was available.  Land was liberty.

In Feudal Europe the land belonged to the king.  In granting a fief he was loaning the land to the Lord as long as he agreed to serve the king.  It is much more complicated than this and the battle between Plow and Crown was slowly breaking it down but one of the freedoms that pulled people to America was the freedom to own land.

In the writings of the Founders you find frequent reference to property.  Even in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence the original three rights were “Life, Liberty and Property.”  This is why we have the protections against search and seizure in the 4th Amendment to the Constitution,

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”

And we have the concept of “just compensation” in the 5th Amendment.

Real Estate is the foundation of political power.  In the Roman Republic you could only be elected to a political office if you had enough wealth to qualify.  Only the very rich could hold positions of power.  In the England our Founding Fathers knew, you needed to have a certain amount of wealth in order to vote.  Often that was stated in terms of owning property.  When they were writing our Constitution some wanted to insert that as a requirement to hold political office but they were voted down.

In modern times we are seeing the Crown gnawing away at the sanctity of property.  It starts with simple things like zoning laws.  Who could be against that?  At least that is usually done by local elected officials who can be dealt with.  But it has gotten much more serious in my life time.  We see the War on Drugs making it possible for law enforcement to confiscate property without due process.  In a recent Supreme Court case, Kelo v. City of New London, we see the right of imminent domain being extended to local governments who simply want to pass the land to their political supporters.  You have the laws about endangered species and wetlands making it impossible for people to build homes on land that belongs to them.  We see massive land grabs by the federal government as they declare new National Parks and National Monuments.  Just this week I was reading about the federal government trying to extend a ban on new mining around the Grand Canyon.  We see land being designated as U.N. Biozones.  The inroads into liberty are on the march. 

The Crown is on the move.  Will the Plow respond while it still has a chance?

homo unius libri