A necessary prerequisite for happiness

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 necessary prerequisite for prosperity

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...