Property

Legal framework to protect 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

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....

Land

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

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...

Testamentary freedom

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...

Heritage listing

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’...

Taking the unearned is immoral

“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...

Wide property ownership prevents serfdom

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...

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...