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Declaration of Independence

I blame Jefferson. Had the delegates to the Second Continental Congress chosen one of their lesser wordsmiths to draft their declaration, we might have been spared the confusion arising from the language of its second sentence. Such was Jefferson's learning and facility with the pen, however, that he chose to substitute the more felicitous "pursuit of happiness" for the sturdy Anglo-Saxon concept of "property."

The wording served its purpose in inspiring rebellion against King George. Still, in substituting a rhetorical abstraction for a practical safeguard, Jefferson inadvertently loosed upon America mischief that has plagued us ever since.

To modern ears, accustomed to regarding property only in its most literal sense -- as "things" that we buy and sell and own -- it may be near impossible to conceive of property in the spiritual sense of the Anglo-American Enlightenment: as the guarantor of all other rights.

The original expression of this idea dated to Locke's Second Treatise on Government, wherein "life, liberty and estate" were thought to be natural rights governments were constituted to protect. What they meant by property was not simply a man's accumulation of goods but his wherewithal, his security, his opportunity. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the Founding Fathers saw in property the basis of civilization. Men who did not believe their property secure, they reckoned, would have no incentive to improve upon it. (One reason we have patent laws.) And the more diffuse this property was, the less any one man had to fear from a concentration of power.

Today these understandings may sound distant and arcane. But they were the intellectual bricks and mortar with which the American republic was fashioned. The men who affixed their signatures to the Declaration, after all, held not only that these concepts were "truths" but that they were "self-evident." In their pursuit of these truths they saw themselves in the light of the English noblemen who forced their own property rights from the Crown in the Magna Carta. That they took them seriously we know, because they went to war, under the rallying cry "No taxation without representation."

When it came time to draft a constitution, the Founding Fathers were even more literal. Noah Webster wrote in 1787 that property, as the basis of power, "directs us to the means of preserving our freedoms." James Fenimore Cooper agreed. "Property," he wrote in The American Democrat, "is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage."

Over the years it was this sense in which people understood property, both pro and con. Macaulay noted that it was "the natural tendency of every society in which property enjoys tolerable security is to increase in wealth." In his encyclical on socialism, Quod aposolici muneris, Pope Leo XIII declared that the "right of property and its disposal, which are derived from nature, should in every case remain inviolate."

Even Marx and Engels did not dispute this relation of property to freedom and independence. Hence the Communist Manifesto's frank admission that "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property."

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Today we have largely lost this almost theological understanding of property, cut off as we have been from the natural law reasoning that informed our founding documents. To the extent that property does come up, it is typically to note that the Founding Fathers were all property-holding men, many of them, like Jefferson, slave-holders. The same goes for the popes, whose constant defense of property has been interpreted as a defense of the church's riches. Conscious or unconscious, this is a class reading of the constitution, the implication being that when people like Madison, Jefferson or Washington spoke of the importance of property it was only to protect their own (considerable) interests.

There was that, of course. In citing the merits of the new Constitution Hamilton listed "the good will of most men of property in several states who wish a government of the union able to protect them against domestic violence and the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property." There was too a nasty side debate about the status of slaves, whom Southerners claimed as property when the subject of rights came up but claimed as people when it came to determining the representation in the Congress but not when it came to taxation.

But to dismiss a key component of Anglo-American thinking as naked self-interest is to miss the larger story, which was that the view of property derived from the view of man, indeed the understanding of self-interest. Implicit in much writing today, especially Christian writing, is the identification of property with materialism and hence at best a necessary evil on the road to a more perfect society. But the men who fought and bled -- and risked their fortunes -- under the banner "No taxation without representation" rightly or wrongly believed that the unalienable rights they described meant nothing unless they could secure property.

We still have vestiges of that understanding with us. Today when we speak of a man of independent means, we mean someone who is free to do and speak as he pleases because his wealth gives him some independence. Likewise the idea that a man's home, however humble, is his castle. The premise here is that this security is essential to the liberty of those without property as those with, in terms of choice and opportunity. Absent property, other rights become as hollow as the Mexican Constitution.

For example, what is the right to a free press without the right to own a newspaper? This was Lenin's reasoning, when in a famous meeting he declared against returning the presses and newsprint to the newspaper owners. What can the right to freedom of worship mean if you don't also have the right to a church? Before he died a few years ago, Dominic Tang, Archbishop of Canton -- who spent more than two decades in a Chinese prison for refusing to renounce the pope -- told me that when the Communists attacked his church they didn't do it by proscribing worship but by presenting him with an assessment for back taxes that the church could not afford.

What would democracy itself mean, moreover, absent the property and wealth that creates choice? Had John F. Kennedy's father not been extraordinarily wealthy, we might never have had a Catholic president. Were Steve Forbes not wealthy, he would not even be a candidate. And what would it mean to vote for different candidates without institutions promoting different views -- not just a New York Times and Washington Post but a National Review and the Nation, the New Republic and The American Spectator, a Jewish Forward and a National Catholic Register, for that matter a Sierra Club and a Heritage Foundation. In this way even those of us who do not have the wealth to have publications ourselves may be thankful that there are people who do.

This article, for example, appears in the magazine of a university whose religious take a vow of poverty but who nonetheless preside over a $1.8 billion endowment, rightfully understood as the necessary means to both excellence and independence. The same thing goes for orders themselves. Nuns and brothers and priests may voluntarily agree to live in common and not own things individually. But they have found it necessary for their respective apostolates to hold much property as organizations, in the form of convents, hospitals, monasteries, friaries, churches and rectories. Most would understand that the property they own and administer serves not just themselves but society as a whole.

All this was implicit in the reasoning of the American founders. And it was not simply philosophy that moved them. If there was one thing Jefferson and his confreres loathed, it was the European system of entailment and primogeniture, whereby the large estates were given to one descendant rather than divided up among the many.

The widespread distribution of property in America was not only a safeguard against such concentrations of power but to provide incentives for everyone -- not just the very rich -- to husband their resources and improve upon their properties, leading to more wealth for all. In other words, it guaranteed security but promoted virtues like thrift and industry. And it prevented the kind of static societies they saw in the Old World, which limited the opportunities for a man to improve his lot by hard work and enterprise.

Perhaps it clears things up to note this was largely what Jefferson meant by happiness. In the copy of Lord Kames' Principles of Morality in National Religion that can still be found at Monticello, Jefferson underlined the following passage: "People have an innate sense of right and wrong. When they act virtuously, they increase the general happiness of mankind. Thus, the pursuit of virtue and morality is the pursuit of happiness."

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Our own century seems bent on rediscovering this the hard way. Anyone who visited Poland or the Soviet Union before the Berlin Wall came down would recognize the special stores for dollars where people might get Western goods, the disparity between the mass of citizens and the well-connected Party figures, the pillaging of once beautiful towns and countrysides by the inroads on property. Indeed, the famines created by Stalin's collectivization of agriculture ultimately forced the Soviet Union to permit individual households to cultivate small private plots averaging only 0.6 acres in size. As the Russian scholar Richard Pipes points out in his new book Property and Freedom, though these plots accounted for but 1.5 percent of the country's cultivated area, it provided about a third of the nation's foodstuffs.

China had a similar experience with starvation and, ultimately, a similar response. After Mao's collectivizations had reduced the country to chaos and catastrophe -- at one point people gave up their individual woks for communal dining rooms -- agriculture was liberalized, the first of a number of liberalizations that would follow. The more Deng Xiaoping moved away from Mao the better fed -- and freer -- its people became. The reason for this is, as China is finding out, that people do not as a rule develop what they don't own. How many renters plow money into their apartments, compared to homeowners?

Though China is certainly freer than it was in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the continuing lack of secure property rights (and a legal system to back it up) has meant in effect that enterprises develop only up to a point. Chinese well remember having their businesses nationalized four decades ago and fear getting too big. Today they are regularly harassed by Party officials who expropriate businesses for themselves. To deal with this problem, and the tremendous corruption it involves, the National People's Congress in March adopted new constitutional amendments raising the status of property -- a heresy akin to the College of Cardinals' passing a resolution reconsidering papal infallibility. Obversely, the reason citizens of colonial Hong Kong have ranked until recently as among the freest in Asia is not because of political rights: They had none. What they did have were property rights, which translated into a larger private sphere -- in terms of churches, societies, institutions, banks and journals of opinion -- than most any place in Asia, certainly more than any Chinese had ever known.

As a veteran Chinese newsman said of Hong Kong just before his death in 1998, "This is the only Chinese society that, for a brief span of 100 years, lived through an ideal never realized at any time in the history of Chinese societies -- a time when no man had to live in fear of the midnight knock on the door."

Jefferson would have understood. So would Lenin and Marx. Do we?

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