Our Current Chaos is not All About the Death of George Floyd
Article by William Sullivan in "The American Thinker":
Do
not, for one moment, make the mistake of believing that the violence
and vandalism we are seeing in recent riots area are about the horrific
death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. This
is not to say that there are not protestors among the groups that are
genuinely outraged, and who seek to peaceably assemble to petition the
government for a meaningful change to police policy and demand justice,
all of which is explicitly protected by the First Amendment to our
Constitution. But it is to say that any lawful means of protest ends
when it violates an innocent person’s private property rights.
First, the obvious. The vandals who pillaged
a Louis Vuitton store weren’t driven to do so because of their sense of
moral indignation about Floyd’s death. They were driven to do so
because they liked the idea of smashing a window to steal designer items
more than the idea of working and saving to earn those expensive
items.
But
let’s imagine for a moment that it actually was Floyd’s death that
drove them to the act. The owners of the business had precisely nothing
to do with Floyd’s death, so even then, in what meaningful sense would
this be considered “justice”?
Imagine
this moral question differently. Imagine that my friend has his car
stolen, and the thief is arrested, awaiting trial. A lot of people like
my friend have their cars stolen these days, I conclude, so I’m
understandably angry about it. Rather than await justice from the
courts, I instead find some other innocent person who has some expensive
wheels, and assault him and steal his car.
Now,
I would, and should, go to jail for that crime, and for good reason.
And that’s because the other person has innate rights to property, and
those rights are every bit as important as, say, my right to life and
liberty.
Many people would consider
John Locke the “intellectual father of our country,” and he held a
“central political principle: that rights in property are the basis of
human freedom and government exists to protect them and to preserve
public order.” At the time of the nation’s Founding, and throughout
most of our history, it was accepted that government exists primarily to
preserve life and property.
It
might be important to note, however, that the Founders often didn’t
believe it necessary to denote a distinction between the right to life
and the right to property, because they believed them both to be
elements of the same natural right. But “insofar as the Founders made
any distinction between property rights and other individual rights,” writes
David Upham at the Foundation for Economic Education, “they insisted
that property rights were at least as important as personal rights,”
citing Madison in Federalist 54, who states unequivocally that
“Government is instituted no less for the protection of property than of
the persons of individuals.”
Madison goes on to say at the Virginia Convention:
It
is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great
subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of
persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection
of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be
separated. The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural
right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a
social right.
It
is this American “social right” which the rioters are explicitly
challenging, and demanding be replaced by their brand of “social
justice” that is more akin to communism than anything American
governance has ever been.
For
most of the rioters, this isn’t about race. It’s about unmaking
America. And we’ve been cobbling the path to this moment for a long
time. What we do now will determine whether or not America’s future is
as a constitutional republic or a new socialist experiment that is based
upon countless failed ones.
John Adams predicted the path up to this moment, and its logical end, in his three-volume work, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.
Like Madison, he acknowledges the presupposition that “[p]roperty is
surely a right of mankind as really as liberty,” and he goes on to say
that the “moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not
as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and
public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
This would occur, he argues, as a sequence of falling dominoes:
Perhaps,
at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would
restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping
on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and
enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to
countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at
least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavily on the rich, and not at all on the others;
and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded, and
voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious,
the intemperate would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery,
sell and spend their share, and then demand a new division of those who
purchased from them.
All
of this has either happened already, or is being presented by
progressives today as a means to “transform the country,” as even the
supposedly moderate Joe Biden is openly offering as his goal.
To
save what’s left of the core essence of the American idea, President
Trump, the state governors, and local officials must commit to the
notion that property rights are every bit as worthy of protection as the
rights to life and liberty, and that there is a force of low and public
justice that is capable of protecting it. And if we fail to do that, I
fear that America may become what Cornell West suggests it already has become: a failed social experiment.
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