This week we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, and it is an infancy in some ways—we are a nation certainly not yet nearing retirement, and in many respects we are still experiencing the growing pains of a relatively young democratic republic.
And yet our country has accomplished so much in that short span, with a bounty of possibilities still ahead of us. America has spent two-and-a-half centuries celebrating freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and self-government. We still hear, even in these polarizing times, the rallying cry of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the civil liberties they guarantee us.
For that we are grateful.
And yet, as we celebrate our extraordinary and exceptional nation, let us not forget one important fact that is all too often ignored or forgotten: Our freedoms did not emerge in isolation but rest upon an even more basic and fundamental foundation—the right of individuals to own property and exercise dominion over it free from arbitrary government control.
That understanding was so fundamental that the Constitution repeatedly assumes and protects it, even though it is discussed less explicitly today than speech or religion. These days, property rights are often treated as economic privileges rather than constitutional liberties, but the Founders argued the opposite case: that property rights were the practical foundation upon which the exercise of other liberties depended.
This week’s stories illustrate exactly why they believed that. We visit struggles in California and Kansas that seek to dismantle that very precious first right. In some ways, highlighting local stories and families seems far removed from the national story, but in truth they are the national story, for individual stories can accumulate into broad obliterations of liberty, or they can build into inspiring expressions of it.
Telling local stories shows that the true trespass that is government control of land, by regulatory fiat or brute edict, must never succeed. For if the right of private property collapses, then no other civil right is assured. It is a hard lesson to learn, and one that our most recent generations, except for a noticeable few individuals, have forgotten en masse. Such lapses are not new, though, as F.A Hayek knew:
“What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all the means of production were vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of ‘society’ as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.”
What Hayek understood is that a system of private property in which the power of property is distributed among the many—the population—instead of the one—the government—not only secures and sustains marketplace competition but is itself a system of checks and balances on government power. In fact, it is the ultimate check and balance, the foundation of all the amendments in the Bill of Rights.
Hayek wrote that in 1944, in The Road to Serfdom. Only in the aftermath of World War II, after our republic and allied nations defeated the forces of a brutal and totalitarian fascism, at very great cost, did we regain our footing, literally, with respect to the importance of the soil beneath us. Our new respect for property led to an unprecedented boom and the emergence of a historically vibrant middle class anchored in property ownership and in individual freedom, which enabled creative expression, artistic endeavor, and entrepreneurship.
Now, in the intervening years, for multiple reasons, much of our nation has once again forgotten what Hayek reminded us—that private property is the most important guarantor of freedom. And with that sociopolitical amnesia has come another great assault upon those rights. On the macro scale, globalists and bureaucrats in Washington have declared as a goal the effective taking of 30 percent of the world’s land and water by 2030, and 50 percent by 2050.
At the state level, local and state governments have formed unholy alliances with nonprofit land trusts to confiscate as much land as they can under the guise of conservation easements, if not outright purchase. American Stewards of Liberty, led by CEO Dan Byfield and executive director Margaret Byfield, have proudly been at the forefront in the fight against these easements.
“No one has the right to permanently impair the property rights of future generations, but that is exactly the role forever conservation easements play,” Margaret Byfield has said in supporting legislation to limit easements held by the Department of the Interior to 30 years. “This is a vital step in making the property rights whole again and reducing the stranglehold the federal government has over landowners. It is not our right to tell future generations what they can and cannot do with their land.”
It’s not just easements. Governments have gone rogue where no government once dared to trespass—the taking of private property through eminent domain, often enough for private purposes.
In his book The Dying Citizen, historian Victor Davis Hanson teaches us that property rights, as the First Right, have been bound up with the idea of democracy and citizenship since ancient Greece. In a 2022 interview with Albert Mohler on “Thinking in Public,” Hanson said: “The idea was, the very wealthy will always have greater means to change, warp, leverage government. And the poor will not be an independent voice because they will look to the state for sustenance. But the middle class, if they were property-owning … they were economically autonomous.”
They could voice their disagreement or their views with both the wealthy and the poor, Hanson explained: “Citizenship rises in Greece to protect the small land-owning hoplite soldier who wants to pass on his property. Property was very important in the creation of citizenship.”
Not just very important, but essential to bring down the age of kings and queens and other authoritarian rulers.
In the early days of the Republic, there was no lack of appreciation for the centrality of property rights in sustaining a society of free individuals. Thomas Jefferson, to cite a major example, believed in the yeoman farm, which personified liberty because it embodied democracy in the fundamental right to own and control property.
To own and control the farm was to own and control the family’s food and means of production. To own and control the farm freed the farmer and the farmer’s family to act as free individuals in the wider market of ideas, politics, commerce, and social relationships. In other words, to own and control the farm freed the farmer and the farmer’s family to seek their ambition.
And so it is with all property. To be able to own and control one’s property frees individuals to pursue their ambition or, as our Founders might say, their happiness. Indeed, as James Madison wrote in 1792, private property rights were the ultimate civil right: “In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”
That view of property is so essential, and yet these days it has become so diminished. Instead of one dramatic turning point, Americans gradually began viewing property as merely wealth rather than liberty. Beginning in the Progressive Era and accelerating during the New Deal and postwar administrative expansion, public policy increasingly treated property as something to regulate in pursuit of broader social goals rather than as a liberty that limited government itself.
That paradigm shift opened the door to conservation easements, expansive land-use regulation, eminent domain, bureaucratic planning, and increasingly intrusive administrative regulation. Both our stories this week demonstrate these trajectories.
In Marin County, the government is no longer regulating land, but the owner’s occupation. Instead of saying: “You may not build there,” government says, “You must become the kind of person we want you to be.”
That’s an extraordinary escalation.
The Kansas dispute illustrates another aspect of the same principle. While the government continues to demand ever more private property, it fails—time and again—to demonstrate responsible stewardship of what it already owns and controls. Instead, federal agencies seek ever more authority while neglecting and ignoring obvious management failures on lands it has already confiscated in the name of the public.
This week, there are two storylines, but only one reality: the government increasingly reaches people through their property.
As we celebrate our freedoms this year, let’s make a special toast to the freedom that makes them all possible—the right to own property and do with it as you reasonably choose. Private property is not protected merely because it creates wealth. It is protected because it also preserves freedom. The two go hand in hand. Speech, religion, enterprise, self-government—even dissent itself—depend upon citizens retaining meaningful control over their own lives and possessions.
As America begins its 250 years, perhaps no constitutional principle deserves renewed attention more than the one Madison described so broadly, Jefferson so admired in its rootedness, and Hayek defended so passionately: that a free people remain free only so long as government respects the boundary between public power and private ownership.
So happy birthday, America, the land that enshrined property rights and unleashed more wealth, prosperity, and freedom the world has ever known
Here’s to 250 more of the same.
