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Originally Posted by markolas
Speak for yourself. I'm a whole lot more than the things I own.
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You misunderstand, markolas. Of course you are more than the things you own. We are all of us more than the things we own.
When I say, "If you have no rights to your property, you have nothing," what I mean is that it's the
right itself -- not the actual property -- that allows you to live the kind of life you deem worthy.
Property rights are absolutely essential to any free society -- that is, a society in which individuals are free to pursue their happiness so long as they don't infringe on those very same rights belonging to their fellow citizens.
The principle of it is so important because it implies something essential: you have a right to property that cannot be abrogated by the state. It cannot be eliminated by a nasty president or a Congress of any political party. That right of yours -- like your rights to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness -- is YOURS; it does not & cannot belong, ever, to any government instituted on Earth. You, the individual, are the owner of your property; & you are therefore ipso facto not at the mercy of the whims of your fellow citizens to strip you of that property at their discretion or the discretion of your elected leaders.
If you have no right to property that supersedes the political body in which you live, then no power on Earth (or elsewhere) can assure you of your right to liberty or even life itself. If you are in every respect SECONDARY to the state, the state can annihilate you, can crush you under its massively impersonal boot. That is the importance of your right to property.
I hate to sound like a Libertarian -- I'm not one. But this principle of rights that you have -- rights that are not given to you by a government but rights that you are born possessing by virtue of the fact that you are a human being -- is essential to our constitutional republic, & was equally important to the Founding Fathers.