Property Rights Are Human Rights Because People Hold Property, Not Things

"Human rights over property rights." You have seen it on a placard, a mission statement or a speaker's slide, delivered with the calm of a man announcing that two plus two is four. It is a very good slogan. It has one small flaw. It makes no sense.

Try this. Ask the person holding the placard to tell you who, exactly, owns property. Not "things," not "the economy," not "capitalism." Who? The answer, of course, is people. A house belongs to a family. A workshop belongs to the woman who built it. A farm belongs to the family that has fed itself and its neighbors from it for three generations. Every property right is a right held by a human being. To set "property rights" against "human rights" is to set the carpenter against his own hammer, and then to wonder why the carpenter objects.

Let me make the case properly, in numbered premises, with the home, the shop and the farm in front of us. Then I'll give the strongest objection, that property entrenches inequality, a fair hearing, and answer it.

The definition that does the work

Start with the word, because the slogan lives or dies on it.

A property right is not a right of a thing. A house has no rights. It is a right of a person against everyone else, to use, enjoy, improve, give away or sell something he has acquired by lawful means, and to keep others from taking it without his consent. When a thief takes your wallet, the wrong is not done to the wallet. It is done to you.

James Madison saw this clearly. In an essay called "Property," published in the National Gazette on March 29, 1792, he wrote that the word has two senses. In the narrow sense it means "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual." But in its broader sense, he said, a man has a property in his opinions, his conscience, his safety and his faculties. And he coined the line that deserves to be learned by heart: 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 is the whole argument in a sentence. Rights and property are not opposed; they are the same family. For more of Madison's essay and its meaning, see Madison's 1792 Essay Says Your Conscience Is Your Property Too.

The argument in five premises

1. A person owns himself and his labor. Locke set this down in his Second Treatise (1689): every man has a property in his own person, and the work of his hands is his own. This is the starting point of the liberal tradition.
2. When a person mixes his labor with something, the product is his. The farmer who clears a field, the carpenter who builds a table, the programmer who writes software have each put a piece of themselves into the result. To take the product is to take part of the person's life. See Locke Said Property Begins the Moment Your Labor Mixes With the Earth.
3. A right that you cannot keep is not a right. If the government, a mob or a richer neighbor can take what your work produced whenever it likes, then you have no security in your labor, and you are living on sufferance. Security of ownership is what makes it rational to plant a crop that takes years to bear, to save for a child's education, or to build a home you plan to leave to your family.
4. Therefore property rights are the practical form of personal liberty. A man who owns his home can say what happens in it. A man who owns his business can decline to bow to a boss who disagrees with his politics. A man who owns nothing, and depends on one employer or one government office for every meal, can be told what to say. Property is the material base of independence.
5. So protecting property is protecting people. Every property law, from the law of theft to the law of contracts to the Fifth Amendment, protects a human being's claim to the results of his own effort. To weaken those protections is to weaken those persons.

The conclusion is not that property is more important than people. It is that, for the human being, the two cannot be separated.

The home, the workshop and the farm

Make it concrete.

The home. Picture a family in Ohio, hypothetically, that has paid its mortgage for twenty-five years. The house is the product of two lifetimes of work: the wages, the saved dollars, the Saturdays spent on the roof. It is where the children were raised. If a government could take it by decree, or if a developer with enough friends at city hall could have it condemned and transferred, the family's labor would be erased. That family is not defending a "thing." It is defending its own history.

The workshop. A woman who starts a small bakery puts in her savings and eighteen-hour days. The oven, the lease and the recipes are the embodiment of her skills. If a regulation or a larger competitor can seize or hobble them without compensation, she has no reason to try again, and neither does anyone watching.

The family farm. The farm is perhaps the clearest case. A farmer plants a crop that matures in months and an orchard that matures in years. He invests in fences, soil and equipment on the faith that the land will remain his to harvest. Take away that security and he farms for a season and stops. Property rights are what allow patience, and patience is what allows prosperity.

What the poor of the world prove

The strongest evidence that property rights serve the poor comes from the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, whose book The Mystery of Capital (2000) examined what happens where property is held informally.

De Soto and his team studied poor countries and found that most of the poor already own a great deal: homes, small shops and farms, built by their own labor. The trouble is that they hold these assets without legal title. Their ownership is real by custom, but it is invisible to the law. They cannot use their house as collateral for a loan to start a business, because no bank can verify the title. They cannot sell it to a stranger with confidence. They cannot easily pass it to their children without a dispute. De Soto called this "dead capital," value locked up in assets that cannot be turned into working money.

His team documented how difficult it was, in several countries, simply to register a small business or obtain legal title to a house: the procedures took many months of full-time effort and went through layers of officials, and so the poor stayed outside the legal system. The result is that the rich, whose property is secure, have credit and the poor, whose property is just as real, do not.

The lesson cuts directly against the slogan. The poor do not need less respect for property. They need more of it: clear, cheap, enforceable title. The campaign against property rights, in the name of the poor, would deepen the very problem de Soto identified. Property rights are the rich man's protection only where they are the poor man's luxury. Make them universal, and they become the poor man's ladder. Related reading on how ownership built American citizens is in Levittown Built a Nation of Homeowners, and Ownership Built Citizens.

What the Constitution says

The Founders did not treat property as a minor matter. The Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1791, says that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Notice three things.

First, life, liberty and property are in the same sentence. The Founders did not rank them against one another; they treated them as parts of the same security for the person.

Second, the government may take private property, but only "for public use" and only with "just compensation." The right is not absolute, but it is protected by a rule: if the public needs your land for a road, the public must pay what it is worth, and everyone, not just you, bears the cost.

Third, the clause applies to "private property," which means property held by a person, and the protection exists because a person is behind it.

The Court tested this clause in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), a 5-4 decision in which the majority allowed a Connecticut city to take homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood and transfer the land to a private developer for an economic development plan. Justice O'Connor, dissenting, warned that the result left every home at the mercy of anyone who could promise a more profitable use. The public reaction was so sharp that most states passed laws restricting such takings. The projected development did not materialize on the site. That history is a reminder that when property is treated as a "thing," a person's home can be traded for a promise. See The Takings Clause Explained, From Public Use to Just Compensation.

The strongest objection, stated fairly

Now the other side, and it is a serious one.

"You say property protects the poor. But in practice property is distributed very unequally. A few people own enormous amounts and many own almost nothing. A system that strongly protects whatever you have also protects whoever happens to be rich, and the poor have nothing to protect. Property rights entrench inequality and let accumulated advantage pass from parent to child. Proudhon said it bluntly in the nineteenth century: property is theft. We should put human need ahead of the claims of the owners."

That is the best form of the objection, and it has force. Inequality of ownership is real. Some of it comes from injustice, including the seizure of land and the exclusion of whole groups from ownership by law.

Why the objection fails

First, the cure for unequal ownership is more ownership, not less. Where people lack property, the usual cause is that the rules make it hard to get: titling is slow, licensing is costly, zoning blocks cheap housing, credit is scarce. De Soto's finding is that the poor are shut out of the system of property, not protected from it. The remedy is to open the system.

Second, the objection confuses protecting the principle with protecting any particular fortune. The law of property protects the rich man's house and the poor man's house by the same rule, and the poor man benefits most from a rule that cannot be bent by influence. The rich can protect themselves through lawyers and lobbyists. The poor cannot. A world without strong property rules is a world where whoever has the most power decides who owns what. See Why Washington Owns Most of Nevada and What the Property Clause Allows for a view of how this works when government itself is the owner.

Third, history shows what abolishing property does. Where regimes have abolished private property in the name of the people, such as in the Soviet collectivization of the early 1930s, the people lost their farms, their homes and their voices. The state became the sole owner, and the citizen became its tenant. The Pilgrims learned a milder version of the lesson at Plymouth, where common property in the early 1620s produced hunger until William Bradford assigned each family its own plot; see plymouth tried common property in 1621 and nearly starved before 1623.

Fourth, property does not stand against need; it is how need is met. The farmer who owns his land feeds the city. The builder who owns his tools builds the houses. The slogan sets "human need" against "owners" as if the two were different groups. They are the same people.

The Founders knew

The Declaration lists "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," and Locke's formula, the one it adapted, was "life, liberty and estate." Property was never an afterthought. The Founders had just fought a war that began over taxation and the seizure of what colonists had built. They knew that a man who cannot keep what he has earned is not free.

The case in brief

1. A property right is a person's right to keep what his work produced; a house or a farm has no rights of its own, only the owner does.
2. Madison argued in 1792 that a man has a property in his rights as much as in his possessions, so the two cannot be set against each other.
3. De Soto's work shows that the poor already hold great wealth informally and are shut out of credit and growth for lack of clear title, so what they need is more property rights, not fewer.
4. The Fifth Amendment protects life, liberty and property together and permits takings only for public use and with just compensation, a protection tested in Kelo (2005).
5. The cure for unequal ownership is wider ownership, and every regime that abolished private property made its citizens the tenants of the state.

What you can do: look up your state's eminent domain statute on its legislature's website, read what it says about takings for private development, and write your state legislator if it does not match the Fifth Amendment's standard.