“This term in its particular application means "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual. In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.
In the former sense, a man's land, or merchandize, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.
He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. 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.
Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.”
James Madison
The chief architect of the Constitution thought the primary function of a just government was to protect the rights and property of its citizens. As is evident above, he defined property in a very broad sense. A person’s property, according to this author of the Federalist, when setting about to explain the Constitution, included as property, more than just objects.
Our property encompasses our opinions, our speech, and, yes, our personal safety and our bodies. According to the Fifth Amendment, “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.”
Enter King Joe’s vaccine mandate stripping citizens of their right to be secure in the property of their own bodies—for the cause of public’s use in their insane quest for a sense of safety from a virus with a 99% plus survival rate.
Madison was not the Lone Ranger of property rights. Thomas Jefferson, the chief author of the Declaration of Independence, as Governor of Virginia, called this kind of public supplanting of personal rights and property to advantage the masses, the “tyranny of the majority”.
What we are witnessing in this country today is the first of many upcoming overt grabs for power by the government. Public fears generated by government agencies and their media stooges will not just bring to an end your liberty. They will have your family, friends, and neighbors crying for the government to step in and “doing something” about you and your right to be secure in your property.
If you do nothing--but roll the dice and let come what may, the future will come up boxcars.
Sic semper tyrannis.
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