| |
| Property Rights |
| |
|
The right to procure property and
to use it for one's own enjoyment is essential to the freedom of every person, and our
other rights would mean little without these rights of property ownership. It is also for
these reasons that the government's power to tax property is placed in those
representatives most frequently and directly responsible to the people, since it is the
people themselves who must pay those taxes out of their holdings of property.
|
| |
 |
| |
|
"The true foundation of
republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and
in their management." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:36
|
| |
|
"A right to property is
founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these
wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar
rights of other sensible beings." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de
Nemours, 1816. ME 14:490
|
| |
|
"[We in America entertain] a
due sense of our equal right to... the acquisitions of our own industry." --Thomas
Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:320
|
| |
|
"He who is permitted by law
to have no property of his own can with difficulty conceive that property is founded in
anything but force." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Bancroft, 1788. ME 19:41
|
| |
|
"That, on the principle of a
communion of property, small societies may exist in habits of virtue, order, industry, and
peace, and consequently in a state of as much happiness as Heaven has been pleased to deal
out to imperfect humanity, I can readily conceive, and indeed, have seen its proofs in
various small societies which have been constituted on that principle. But I do not feel
authorized to conclude from these that an extended society, like that of the United States
or of an individual State, could be governed happily on the same principle." --Thomas
Jefferson to Cornelius Camden Blatchly, 1822. ME 15:399
|
| |
|
|
"It is a moot question
whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed
by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural
right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed,
whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the
property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation,
the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late
in the progress of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333
|
| |
|
"A right of property in
moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in
lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all
the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in
lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has
gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it.
Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately
appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in
the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to
individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant." --Thomas Jefferson: Batture
at New Orleans, 1812. ME 18:45
|
| |
|
"The laws of civil society,
indeed, for the encouragement of industry, give the property of the parent to his family
on his death, and in most civilized countries permit him even to give it, by testament, to
whom he pleases." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Earle, 1823. ME 15:470
|
| |
Every Citizen is Entitled to
Own Property
|
|
"The political institutions
of America, its various soils and climates, opened a certain resource to the unfortunate
and to the enterprising of every country and insured to them the acquisition and free
possession of property." --Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms, 1775.
Papers 1:199
|
| |
|
"The earth is given as a
common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow
it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those
excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth
returns to the unemployed... It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as
few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the
most precious part of a state." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. ME 19:18,
Papers 8:682
|
| |
|
"No right [should] be
stipulated for aliens to hold real property within these States, this being utterly
inadmissible by their several laws and policy." --Thomas Jefferson: Commercial
Treaties Instructions, 1784.
|
| |
|
"Whenever there is in any
country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have
been so far extended as to violate natural right." --Thomas Jefferson to James
Madison, 1785. ME 19:18, Papers 8:682
|
| |
|
"[The] unequal division of
property... occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which... is to be observed
all over Europe." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. ME 19:17, Papers 8:681
|
| |
|
"I am conscious that an
equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous
inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too
many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand
in hand with the natural affections of the human mind." --Thomas Jefferson to James
Madison, 1785. ME 19:17, Papers 8:682
|
| |
The Protection of Property
Rights
|
|
"[The] rights [of the
people] to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against
the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods." --Thomas
Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1816.
|
| |
|
"I may err in my measures,
but never shall deflect from the intention to fortify the public liberty by every possible
means, and to put it out of the power of the few to riot on the labors of the many."
--Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1804. ME 11:33
|
| |
|
"Our wish... is that...
equality of rights [be] maintained, and that state of property, equal or unequal, which
results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers." --Thomas
Jefferson: 2nd Inaugural Address, 1805. ME 3:382
|
| |
|
"To take from one because it
is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order
to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is
to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--'the guarantee to every
one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'" --Thomas
Jefferson: Note in Destutt de Tracy's "Political Economy," 1816. ME 14:466
|
| |
|
"If the overgrown wealth of
an individual is deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal
inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature,
while extra-taxation violates it." --Thomas Jefferson: Note in Destutt de Tracy's
"Political Economy," 1816. ME 14:466
|
| |
Rights Associated With
Ownership
|
|
"It would be singular to
admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors... It would be curious... if an
idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be
claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less
susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power
called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one,
and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no
one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an
idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his
taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from
one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and
improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by
nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their
density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical
being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in
nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits
arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility,
but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society,
without claim or complaint from anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not
of natural right, but for the benefit of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac
McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333
|
| |
|
"By nature's law, every man
has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another by
force or fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of
regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a
part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and
regulated as to circumstances of practice." --Thomas Jefferson: Batture at New
Orleans, 1812. ME 18:104
|
| |
|
"Charged with the care of
the general interest of the nation, and among these with the preservation of their lands
from intrusion, I exercised, on their behalf, a right given by nature to all men,
individual or associated, that of rescuing their own property wrongfully taken."
--Thomas Jefferson to W. C. C. Claiborne, 1810. ME 12:383
|
| |
|
"Nothing is ours, which
another may deprive us of." --Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786. ME 5:440
|
| |
|
"[If government have] a
right of demanding ad libitum and of taxing us themselves to the full amount of
their demand if we do not comply with it, [this would leave] us without anything we can
call property." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Lord North, 1775. Papers 1:233
|
| |
|
"The first foundations of
the social compact would be broken up were we definitely to refuse to its members the
protection of their persons and property while in their lawful pursuits." --Thomas
Jefferson to James Maury, 1812. ME 13:145
|
| |
|
"Persons and property make
the sum of the objects of government." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME
7:459, Papers 15:396
|
| |
|
"The right to sell is one of
the rights of property." --Thomas Jefferson to Handsome Lake, 1802. ME 16:395
|
| |
|
"The power of repelling
invasions, and making laws necessary for carrying that power into execution seems to
include that of occupying those sites which are necessary to repel an enemy, observing
only the amendment to the Constitution which provides that private property shall not be
taken for public use without just compensation... Where the necessary sites cannot be
obtained by the joint and valid consent of parties,... provision should be made by a
process of ad quod damnum, or any other more eligible means for authorizing the
sites which are necessary for the public defense to be appropriated to that purpose."
--Thomas Jefferson: Message on Defence, 1808. ME 3:326
|
| |
ME, FE = Memorial Edition, Ford Edition. |
|
