Perhaps the best way to illumine the connection between the economics and philosophy of liberty is to uncover the relation between liberty and property.

There is no more authentically conservative idea than the rights of property. What is less understood is that there is no more authentically liberal idea either. The alliance between liberty and property is nowhere more celebrated than in John Locke’s second treatise of government, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government, and it is to the master that we turn for its exposition.

To Locke, property was a broad concept. Anything that one has a right to is his property, for rights are proprietary interests, no more, no less. Indeed Locke often interchanges “property” and “rights.” Everything we have is thus a property: life, limb, health, reputation, and possessions. Thus broadly must be understood Locke’s noble statement, oft cited but little understood, “Government has no other end but the preservation of property.”^[1] So he explains himself, to anyone who troubles to look.

It is “lives, liberties, and estates, which,” Locke informs his readers, “I call by the general name, property.”^[2] Earlier he had written, “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”^[3] Properly his—or proper to him—because man has “in himself the great foundation of property.”^[4] Again and again, this unifying idea—property, or rights—lends simplicity and beauty to this earliest exposition of limited government.

We have, for example, a proprietary interest in our children which though it gives us the exclusive right to rear them is neither unlimited nor permanent: we have created an equal with rights of his own. The moral basis of religion is much the same: “For men being all the work manship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker . . . they are his property, whose work manship they are. . . .”^[5] Whether the relation between God and man is master-slave or father-child is the subject of many a theological discourse and an endless dialogue between Creator and created. Marriage is also a proprietary interest as it “consist chiefly in such a communion and right in one another’s bodies. . . .”^[6] The commitments of contract, founded on mutual considerations, are also proprietary interests, rights to be secured by the law of the land. Richard Baxter, an English divine contemporary with Locke, summed it up this way: “Every man is born with a propriety in his own members, and nature giveth him a propriety in his children, and his food and other just acquisitions of his industry. . . . And men’s lives and liberties are the chief parts of their propriety.”^[7] Perhaps more than anything else, it is Locke’s broad, underlying conception of property that makes his magnum opus cohere so gracefully.

It also illuminates the connection between liberty and property. Liberty, after all, refers to something coercive that isn’t there. It is a condition of noninterference with one’s properties, one’s proprietary interests, one’s rights: noninterference with one’s person, family, worship, contracts, and possessions. That is liberty and it is of property. Jefferson’s statement that governments were instituted to secure the rights of man is Locke’s assertion that governments exist for the preservation of property recast in the language of a later time.

The Power to Tax

The preservation of attachments, of man to God, of family ties, of contractual commitments, of a man to his life, fortune, and honor is perhaps the essence of conservatism tightly understood. The closely allied classical liberal tradition is about freedom: the freedom to attach, the freedom not to attach, the freedom not to be interfered with in one’s attachments. Government is ever a threat to such freedom and attachment, to liberty and property, for it has within its means the dread taxing power. If we understand property broadly as did Locke, then the power to tax—to take property—is readily seen to encompass all the multifarious interventions of the state in our lives. The power to tax is indeed the power to destroy.

Such an understanding of property and taxation gives the lie to those who incessantly call for “national service” and their fond belief that this would lower taxes. Of course, it would simply make the state’s consumption of the energies of the citizenry more direct and more coercive, shifting the burden of taxation from “that property which men have in their . . . goods” to “that property which men have in their persons.”^[8] As George Gilder has written, the shift is regressive, “the Moloch of the closing circle”: “The rates of taxation climb and the levels of capital decline, until the only remaining wealth beyond the reach of the regime is the very protein of human flesh, and that too is finally taxed, bound, and gagged, and brought to the colossal temple of the state—a final sacrifice of carnal revenue to feed the declining elite. This is the destination of all dictatorship. . . ..”^[9]

But what of that property which men have in their goods and in their land? How do rights in places and things preserve liberty? The answer lies more in the nature of human action than in the nature of places and things. Human action not only engages our persons; most action is performed on, with, or by the agency of property. And all human action takes place on the Good Earth, where by the grace of God man has erected his civilization. Thus is liberty of property and thus does the preservation of property rights secure liberty. The founders did not have available the comprehensive and beautiful vision of human action and economic freedom that we do, but this simple insight, that liberty is largely of property, never left them for a moment. That is why the polity they constructed so protected property and why their hope for freedom was realized here for so long, so well.

To come to a full appreciation of the role of personal property in human action, consider the dearth of activities that would remain open to us were all private (non-state-sanctioned) uses of personal property suddenly banned. Trade and enterprise would vanish, just as Marx, who worked for the abolition of private property, wished. Universities, broadcasters, and printers would have to close up shop, and everything else would soon follow. Indeed only three activities seem to be left to us: disorderly fist fighting (neither gloves, a whistle, nor a ring is allowed), yelling at large crowds (yelling because microphones are property, the crowd is gathered because radio, television, and other means of telecommunication involve property), and making love in the grass (beds being property). There was a time when this was largely what was meant by freedom; the reader may recall this as the Freedom of the Sixties. It is what is left of freedom when we are free to use our persons as we wish, but not our property. It is without question a caricature of freedom.

But even such skeletal personal freedom assumes the right to use the land as one wishes. Without such property rights, even these meager liberties are preserved only as long as the state pretermits. Land use regulations become ever more proscriptive and ever more prescriptive until one finds oneself utterly without choice of how to live on the land: the condition is known as serfdom and it is the logical extension of land use regulations and the actual unfortunate lot of millions.

When the territory of the free society—the many arenas of private activity—is not respected, the liberties of its denizens are woefully insecure. That is why state control of land, its use, and its distribution is so prominent a feature of socialist programs and why such miserable and blatant failures as collectivist agriculture still generate enthusiasm among the ruling elite. These leaders understand full well—as did their predecessors in other closed societies, feudal societies, for instance—that the private domains of a free society powerfully circumscribe the long arm and reach of the state. Private property is thus for them a thing to be greatly feared.

Concern for the security of real property is not new to the tradition of liberty. Indeed it is one of the principal concerns of the Magna Carta and eventually made its way into our Bill of Rights as part of the third, fourth, and fifth amendments to the Federal constitution.

Let us move forward in time and examine the liberty-property connection as it is manifested today. Indeed today much abridgment of liberty comes under the guise of regulation of. property: real and personal. Whether the state draws the line around the object the man wishes to use or around the man who wishes to use the object is only a matter of perspective. What results is a contraction of choice, a limitation of the field of possibilities for human action, in short an abridgment of liberty.

Regulations of farms and farm products inflate the costs of production and abridge the farmer’s liberty to produce. Urban zoning ordinances abridge the associative freedoms and erect bar-tiers to commerce, enterprise, and peaceful residency. Airwaves, too, are real property. When their use is circumscribed by “fairness,” political access, public access, equal time, community service, and public interest requirements, it is the liberty of expression that is violated, in particular the liberty not to speak. When labeling requirements are placed on substances, it is the same freedom that is diminished along with the freedom of enterprise.

Productive human action is greatly encumbered by detailed regulations on capital goods and plant by the likes of OSHA and USDA, on transportation by the likes of DOT, the ICC, the FAA, and NHTSA, and on housing by 31) and countless state, county, and municipal agencies. The demands of these agencies are on people, not on machines, trucks, and houses. It is people who are directed to associate with such and such a person in the name of fairness, to transport only such and such an item in the name of fair competition, and to build machines in this or that way in the name of worker safety.

But it is precisely because control over people is being exerted through control of property that such measures can never meet their goals. Writes William E. Simon: