By Evelyn Pyburn

One really can’t look at the events of the world today without realizing that there are forces coming from every direction trying to destroy our country. As bit by bit government chips away at our lives, we must realize that the effort has actually been going on for a long time, but it has largely failed. The US is still the largest economy in the world and it is still growing daily.

A lot of people do not make the connection between our economy and our freedom but the power mongers do. That’s why so many of their attempted restraints focus on the activities of business and how people use their time and property. How we use those things determines our level of production, and that is the strength of the US far more so than armies. That’s what makes armies possible.

To cripple our ability to produce is what the savvy power mongers are trying to do with most every new law,  with every shut down, with every law suit, with every distortion of history, and twisting of common sense.

And it shouldn’t be surprising that  many of those efforts are focused as attacks on the availability of  cheap and abundant energy. There’s only one thing more important to the success of our economy than energy and that’s property rights – the right of every individual to own property, to own what they produce, to own their own life.

Americans go to work every day to acquire property just so they can be independent.

But, as vital as property rights are to our personal and national well being, there is astounding little public discourse about them.

Regulations that erode them are incorporated into local laws with hardly a comment – they are called regulations.

Judges who rule to destroy private property in favor of empowering government or the collective, are publically applauded, and few people are aware that they are cheering their own demise.

Individual property rights, as our forefathers provided for in the US Constitution, give each citizen great strength in how they function in society and in dealing with politics.

Our individual property rights are unique in human history and their creation unleashed a force in civilization never before seen, and never duplicated by any other country since, despite their proven effectiveness in achieving what every foreign despot – as well as many domestic ones – claim is their goal — a higher standard of living for the citizens.

That’s no accidental oversight on their part, they know full well what they need to do to retain power. The despots of the world who collaborate in the great effort to bring the US down, know full well that they could achieve the same level of economic success as the US, if they too granted the same level of private property rights for their citizens. That that has never happened says most clearly that their true interest is in gaining power over others.

It’s been claimed that ‘private property is standing room for the individual’ for very good reason.

So as individual citizens, if it is our freedom and our standard of living we want to preserve, we should be focused on preserving this most coveted of rights. We must fully understand the depth of its importance and defend it at every turn.

Property includes all that we value and that which has value. It includes ideas, the cash in our pocket or savings in the bank. Our means of protection, our homes and our businesses. When a thief takes any of those things, because of the degree that our individual wellbeing can depend upon them, it makes theft a most heinous crime. There was a good reason that they used to hang horse thieves.

We should understand that when we purchase a parcel of land we do not purchase a pile of dirt to put in our pocket but we purchase the RIGHT to determine how to use it. A property owner has the legal right to determine whether to grow wheat upon that land or build a building. It is the ability to make those choices that they purchased, not a pile of dirt. The owner of property has the legal stance to resell that right, lease all or part of it to others or improve its value in some manner they think fit, even if their neighbors or the government disagrees.

Any effort to minimize the property owner’s ability to make those decisions is a taking of the right he has acquired. Without that legal power a property is nothing. It has no value.

So when neighbors (and all too often government) gather together to try to stop a property owner from doing what he wants to do on a parcel of property — when they are imposing their choices upon how that property is used they are taking a value from the owner. In legal terminology that is exactly what it is called – “a takings”.

In most circumstances when someone takes the property of another it is called theft, but I guess for the sake of civil decorum judges and lawyers prefer calling it a takings – but a theft is exactly what is happening. And it is rampant. Every day we hear about one group or gang taking away all or some of this value from others. And the really amazing thing is they can stand up in righteous indignation to declare they should be allowed to conduct such a theft.

In the name of scenic views, preserving history, the environment, or to protect their own property values, they have no compunction about conducting such acts of theft. And quite often the legal system supports these acts of thefts even though there is a much easier way to resolve the issue. Buy the property. Purchase the right to determine how to use it, just as the existing owner had to do.

Oh that’s not so easy if you don’t have the money. When you don’t have the value needed to legally determine how to use the property. What makes you think it was any easier for the existing owner to acquire the right to determine how to use the property? That is the value you attempt to take at no cost to yourself!

If you want to have control about what happens on a piece of property next to your house, your farm, or your business there’s a very simple straightforward way to do it. Buy that control. Buy that right. There are very savvy business people who do that every day. They purchase a property just so they can assure some future use won’t have a detrimental effect on their business or their home.

If you want to preserve the view of the neighboring landscape owned by a farmer, property rights can allow that to happen probably cheaper than a court case. One can pay the property owner some lesser sum to guarantee he won’t build a granary there or some company can’t pay him to build a cell tower. There are numerous legal mechanisms that can be used to control such things – agreements, contracts, covenants etc. and the glorious thing is they recognize everyone’s property rights – but they don’t allow “takings.”

More importantly, the very nature of exercising legal property rights and the people involved are acting to preserve the integrity of private property rights which is by far the greatest value to be preserved for everyone’s sake.