PROPERTY
Liberal friendly quotes:
"Property is organized robbery."
-- George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara, preface.
"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought
of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe
him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars,
murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had
been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling
in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening
to this imposter; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the
earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'"
-- Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1755
"Most libertarians ignore the fact that all rights (including
property rights) are created, maintained, and constrained by force
or the credible threat of forceful retaliation. The few that
admit this propose to use the market to distribute rights; but
most people wouldn't like to see rights distributed as unevenly
as incomes."
-- Mike Huben
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security
of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich
against the poor, or of those who have some property against those
who have none at all."
-- Adam Smith
"Private property… is a Creature of Society, and is
subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities
shall require it, even to its last Farthing, its contributors
therefore to the public Exigencies are not to be considered a
Benefit on the Public, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions
of Honor and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously
received, or as payment for a just Debt."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"While it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind
of property is derived from Nature at all… it is considered
by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no one
has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land…
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late
in the progress of society."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"…legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing
property… Another means of silently lessening the inequality
of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point,
and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression
as they rise. Whenever there are 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 (in a letter to James Madison), 1785
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