Politics and Liberty

Liberty and Property

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 3

Track: 13

Dictation Name: RR102B3

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Introduction] … his lecture of last evening and we look forward with great anticipation to what he’s going to bring us now on the subject of liberty and property.

[Rushdoony] Our analysis of liberty and property this morning will be first of all historical and then we will attempt to analyze briefly the biblical foundations.

It is very difficult in our day to find anything on property that is acceptable from the Christian perspective because in virtually every textbook and every bit of research on the subject, in all college and university teaching, the approach to the subject of property is evolutionary. As a result, it is definitely hostile to property. The evolutionary approach sees property as having developed out of the communism of the {?}. Originally, according to this perspective, men ran in a pack. They had all things—property, women, food—in common. Then certain men by brute force said this piece of land, this cave, and these women are mine, and this ostensibly is the origin of private property.

Unfortunately, this evolutionary perspective has received a body blow in recent years as the result of biological studies. Some years ago it was commonplace to assert that the sexual instinct was the basic instinct among animals. This seemed to be true as the result of the observation of biologists, but unfortunately, biologists were observing zoo animals, not animals in the wild. And in recent years, studies of animals, of birds have shown that animals have two basic instincts. The first is territoriality (or property), the second is a sense of status or class.

Those of you who are birdwatchers or those of you who sit in your kitchen, look out of the window, look at the birds in your back yard have come to recognize that your yard is probably the property of certain birds. And these birds will have a strict territory, a certain portion of the yard, a certain branch of the tree is their property, and no other bird of their kind dares trespass without fear of being attacked.

If you go out into the woods, you will find that, for example, having lived in the inter-mountain area of the west, a certain area will be a cougar’s territory, and his territory will extend to a particular rock, to a particular stream, to a particular tree, and cover a number of miles. No other cougar dare trespass. If a man trespasses his territory, he is alarmed and he follows you around suspiciously. What is this enemy doing on my property?

The sense of property is extremely strong among animals. It is one of the two basic instincts. The other is a sense of class, of status. Those of you who’ve grown up on a farm know that there is a pecking order in the hen yard. There is a top rooster and a top hen. And there is a strict pecking order down to the most miserable rooster or hen. And those of you who have milked cows know that there is a butting order among the cows. There is one cow who will take the chosen stall and none other dare trespass and that cow will go in first. Any other cow that dares step in their way gets butted. And right on down to the cow who is at the bottom of the butting order—a strict sense of class, of status.

So that the biologists have found that the idea that property is a late development evolutionarily speaking is nonsense. Even so, they have not conceded the point in sociology.

All the same, these approaches are futile to our subject, because we are going to analyze first of all, the American tradition which was in its origins thoroughly Christian to the subject of property and then evaluate what has taken place in that tradition in terms of the biblical standard.

The founders of the United States, the men of the colonial period were consistently Christian. They were interested in developing a thoroughly Christian republic. Our history books have so thoroughly falsified our history that we have forgotten, for example, that it was once routine for judges, when they found that nothing in the statue book fitted a case, to go to the Bible and give a decision from the Bible. That was valid. And we have forgotten that once in every state of the union, you had to be a Christian, you had to affirm the infallibility of the scripture and the Doctrine of the Trinity to be able to vote. Moreover, it was once the rule in these United States that you could not testify in a court of law unless you were a defendant; in other words, you could not be a witness for any man unless you were a Christian. You testimony was otherwise invalid. It could not be heard. Indeed, it’s only been in the last two or three years that in some states the courts have thrown out such legislation. The perspective in this country was consistently biblical.

It recognized moreover, that the writs of law are inescapably religious. Every law system is enacted morality and behind that enacted morality is a theology. And as Sir Patrick Devlin with whom we need not agree in other respects, has clearly stated, if you destroy the theology behind the law, you destroy the law. And you are then in process of looking for a new theology and a new law system. The writs of law are inescapably religious.

And as a result, in Christian Europe, there were several areas of law. What we today call the “ghetto system,” as though it were something horrible, was once one of the glories of Europe. What was the ghetto? The {?} idea behind the Ghetto System was simply this: that law, being religious, meant that some people, because they were of another religion, lived in terms of another law. And therefore, you recognized their rights to organize under that type of a law and have a community of their own. The ghetto, therefore, was an area, not where Jews, for example, were compelled to live and lived very miserably. Instead, it was part of the medieval city which belonged to the Jews which was totally under Jewish law, and to which no outsider could enter except by permission. And instead of being something they disliked, they fought bitterly 150 years ago against the attempt to destroy the ghetto, because it meant they were going to lose their law, and they were going to be under the Christian courts.

And if in the medieval period, you were a student, for example, at the University of Paris, and you were an Englishman or a German, you were not subject to the law of Paris, but you lived in a separate area and you were a part of the English nation and if you in any way offended the university authorities, handed you over to your area for punishment by your own court, because you came from an Anglo-Saxon tradition and an Anglo-Saxon Christian body of law, or from a Germanic body of law in a Christian context.

Now in the United States, from the colonial period on through, this sense of the local context of law, and the thoroughly theological writ was basic; so that the basic unit of law was the county, and it still is to this day. And the county represented a theological entity, and this lingers to this day. Your basic law in the United States, criminal and civil, is county law. If you are tried for a criminal offense, it is before a jury of your peers in a court of the county. Civil and criminal law alike is almost entirely under the county jurisdiction. In {?} counties in the America system, they were settlements of a particular religious group. They were Lutherans, or Presbyterians, or they were Baptist. And they went into a particular area and this became their county, and they established the law and they established their own church.

Do you realize to this day this lingers so heavily in the United States that most of the counties, the overwhelming majority of the over 3,000 counties in the Unites States are still dominated by a particular church group with the majority of people in that county of a particular church? They may be all Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian, or they may be mostly German and Lutheran, and so on, because originally, the counties represented a law area of a particular theological timbre. And basic to all of them was the biblical perspective on property.

And so there was no tax on real property, on land, because the Bible has no tax on real property. And it was only on the eve of the War of Independence that one or two New England colonies introduced a very minor tax on land. Indeed one of the things that alarmed the colonists was the idea of any tax on real property. And in the First Continental Congress, in its first session, 1774, they denied the rights of Parliament to have any jurisdiction over any individuals and over property. As Gottfried Dietz, a German scholar has said, as to property, the delegates thought it should be free from seizure and taxation. They insisted, moreover, that all questions of life and property were a local concern, and they had “no intentions of submitting to or” (and I’m quoting from their own statement) “concepting the omnipotence of Parliament and acquiescing in whatever disposition they might think proper to make of their lives and property.” In an appeal to Quebec, October 26, 1774, the First Continental Congress asked, “What can protect your property from taxing edicts and the rapacity of necessitous and cruel masters?”

The property tax, when it came in, came in very slowly. It’s a curious thing, but a very significant thing, that the property tax spread as Unitarianism spread. It began where Unitarianism began and spread with it. The last area to adopt a property tax was the South. It came in very slowly; in many areas of the South it did not come in until Reconstruction brought it in. And until the Civil War, no right was granted to the Federal government to tax persons in any way. And it was held that there was a total immunity of individuals from federal tax with respect to persons, property, income and inheritance. And that the Federal government could not interfere in the life of the states even to the point of road construction.

Only one president even imagined it might be constitutional prior to 1860, John Quincy Adams. Every other president thought the suggestion from a few radicals was outrageous and unconstitutional.

When the property tax did come in, it was trusted only to the county, this local group which was basically of an ethnic and a theological group, and then because it was the local property owners taxing themselves to maintain their local self-government. And this is the hedge with which they surrounded the property tax. And to surrender this right to any other body is of course a total surrender of liberty.

When the State can come and assess your property and tax it, it means that the power to control your property is passed from the local governmental unit to a larger body and you no longer truly own your property. This is why there is a steady move today to remove the control of the assessment of property taxes and the collection of them from the county to the state level. There’s an all-out move in many states in this direction.

Moreover, the police power rests significantly on local foundations, on the county form of government, and on the constituent unit, and on the property tax. In fact, in the American system, the sole means of support for the police power is the property tax and its framework is the protection of local life and property. A true police force has no national or political reference or responsibility. It is not a political police, nor does it have any political or national reference or responsibility. It is a non-military and a civilian body.

In the American system, the police power is a citizen power, not a state or a county power, and it is a citizen power delegated without surrender to locally-controlled and a locally-created agency. Now, this is significant. When you vote in your state or county government, in the board of commissioners or your parish, or in your state assembly, or in congress, you vote only by delegation. This is the right you hold only by delegation. But the police power is a right you hold even when you delegate it; you have the citizen’s power of arrest which is the same as the policeman’s power of arrest. And the writs of this are very clearly, very openly in the America system, in the Biblical Law, whereby you have the right to kill under certain circumstances anyone who trespassed on your property, to defend your life. And these were enacted into the American legal system. In fact, the very Bible verses originally were simply put into the legal code.

And this is the basis of the citizen’s police power in the United States. You do not have it in the rest of the world. In most of the world today, you have no true police force because they have lost this Christian sense of the person’s right under God to defend himself and his property according to the Mosaic Law. You only have a national force, which is a political body—not a police. In the Soviet Union, there are no police officers. There are simply military barracks throughout the cities and in the countryside. And there are army detachments that are stationed there, and they patrol the area. And these army detachments move around regularly so they will not develop local roots. Moreover, the Soviet Union does not trust even its own army men when it has them patrol, not only within the Soviet Union, but on the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall. They are given only so many shells when they patrol; usually in the Soviet cities, three. When they return from patrol, they either have to turn in the three cartridges full or empty. They don’t trust them. It’s the same when they are on the rifle range. They bring back the loaded or the empty cartridges and they are in trouble if they cannot account for even one.

There are no police in England because it has forsaken Christian law. The people have no right of self-defense. The Bobbies are paid by Parliament and they are disarmed. This is true in most of the world, and the reason for it is that the old biblical, the Mosaic standard concerning the right of the people of God to defend themselves and their property has been lost and only the State now, in these systems, has the right of self-defense.

Originally, in the American system, because of this strong biblical sense of property, suffrage was closely linked to property. You could not vote unless you owned real property. In the Constitutional Convention, this was discussed. Should the Federal government have a property requirement for suffrage? And they decided against it because they said, the basic unit in the United States is the county and the county area is the area that has this requirement and since their property and the people of property are the government, they should have the requirement, but on the Federal government, we don’t touch property; we have no connection with individuals of property, and so we will not require it, but would facilitate the States and the counties to maintain this standard, we will require that in every new territory, as the local self-government is established, there be a property requirement of 50 acres, and this was enacted both before and after the Constitutional Convention by the Northwest Ordinance.

You’ll find a long defense of this position and an excellent one in a book written in the 1830s or 40s by James Fennimore Cooper, The American Democrat. In the 1860s, a European observer, as he commented on the relationship of property and suffrage, wrote as follows, a most important statement. “Man proclaims politically that private property is abolished as soon as he abolishes the property qualification for the vote. Is not private property as an idea abolished when the non-owner becomes legislator for the owner? The property qualification for the vote is the ultimate political form of the recognition of private property.” The man who made that statement was Karl Marx. He said in effect, that the way to abolish property and to have communism is simply to give the people who do not own property the right to vote taxes against property, and you ultimately abolish property. And this is what is happening.

There are a few areas in the country where there still is a limitation on suffrage if you are not a property owner, but they are disappearing. And today we are seeing, not the responsible people of God as voters. We have dropped any theological requirement for suffrage. We are dropping property requirements for suffrage, and as a result, we are having progressively the rule of slaves.

And whether we like it or not, the Bible recognizes slavery as legitimate. And says quite plainly that while the believer is to be a free man (“ye have been bought with a price, therefore be not ye servants of men,” although you are not to be in rebellion against the condition in which you find yourself, but you are to strive lawfully to disentangle yourself), nevertheless, many men are slaves by nature because the basic slavery is a slavery to sin. And if you are a slave of sin, then you will be a slave politically. You will be a slave economically. This is simply the reality of your spiritual condition. And slavery is in fact the reality of the spiritual condition of these United States today. Most Americans, because they have forsaken the Gospel, are spiritually slaves, and therefore they are in search of a slave master in the form of Washington, D.C. and President Johnson or whoever else is in office.

They are slaves in search of a master and we need to preach liberty through the saving power of Jesus Christ to people, and the implications of that liberty. And one of the implications, which are, people need to be reminded of is this—owe no man anything save to love one another. And as Solomon declared, he that is a borrower is slave or servant to the lender. Debt is slavery. And the Bible does not give us the right—this is in the Law—to go into debt beyond a six-year period and except for emergency reason. We have no right under God to mortgage our future, or our children’s future, as individuals or as a people. Debt is slavery.

But many people are slaves and you have to live with the reality of it. And today because we have forsaken the biblical standards, we are becoming a slave people and we are being ruled increasingly by a slave State and people of a slave mentality. I was not at all surprised therefore, to read in a news item for Sunday, January 23, this item, “Mrs. Gladys Kiles, 38, the mother of 11 children, is our Sergeant Shriver’s choice to represent Chicago on the nation-wide 28-member Advisory Counsel for the War on Poverty, a recipient of Aid to Dependent Children, and an active civic worker, Mrs. Kiles said that she has not seen her husband since 1957 when they were separated. Her eldest son is 21. Her youngest children are 5- , 4-, and 2-years old.” This is how the War on Poverty is being run and the people by whom it is being run. It’s a War on Poverty.

Liberty and property are closely linked to each other, and together two Christian faiths. A very interesting statement was made some few years ago, in 1957, by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, before a congressional committee. And I’d like to quote that statement to you; you’ll find it also in my book, This Independent Republic, on page 52. I quote:

“There are several reasons why there is no place for God in Communism. One is because of its concept of freedom. Suppose I correlate the problem of religion and the problem of freedom in answering your question and let me begin with freedom and then go to religion. A man is free on the inside because he has a soul that he can call his own. Wherever you have this spirit, you have freedom. A pencil has no freedom. Ice has no freedom to be warm. Fire has no freedom to be cold. You begin to have freedom only when you have something immaterial or spiritual. Now freedom must have some external guarantee of itself. The external guarantee of human freedom is property. A man is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own. He is free on the outside because he can call something he has his own. Therefore, private property is the economic guarantee of human freedom.

“Suppose now, you concoct a system in which you want to possess man totally. On what conditions could you erect a Totalitarian system so that man belongs to you completely? 1) You have got to deny spirit. 2) You have got to deny property. That is why the existence of God and private property are both denied simultaneously by Communism. If a man has no soul, he cannot allege he has any relationship with anyone outside of the State. If he has no property, he is dependent upon the State, even for his physical existence. Therefore, the denial of God and the denial of freedom are both conditions of slavery.” With difference with respect to his theological framework, we can essentially agree with Bishop Sheen.

And the purpose of the Biblical Land Law, which placed property beyond taxation, was to preserve man from the attempts of the State to become god over man and to assert instead of the total dominion of God over society, the total dominion of the State. In the biblical perspective, the tax as well as the tithe was on a man’s increase, never upon his property. It was immune to taxation. It preserved the independence of the individual from the powers of the State and confirmed him in his liberty under God.

But today, we see the steady erosion of liberty and property because we have had the steady erosion of any respect for the Biblical Law. In terms of scripture, we find that biblical religion is first of all land based—property based. Ours is a thoroughly materialistic religion in the healthy sense of that word. It has a firm basis in the realities of this world. It is not as Hinduism and other religions are, spiritual in its total context. It recognizes the realities of this world and it recognizes the realities of our bodies and its destiny for us is not only our spiritual resurrection, our regeneration, but the resurrection of the body. And so the Biblical Law governs not only things spiritual, but things material. And therefore in terms of the Biblical Law, property has a very great importance, a centrality, an immunity from any kind of taxation as man’s defense against State’s power.

And finally, in the biblical context, not only is the land seen as important to man’s independence from the state and his freedom, his liberty under God, but it is seen as important in terms of the Christian destiny of men and of nations. David declared in Psalm 37:11, “The meek shall inherit the earth and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” And our Lord, in the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:5 echoed this as one of the Beatitudes, one of the blessings that he pronounced upon his disciples. “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

I don’t see how you can spiritualize that way without destroying the plain meaning of the scripture. And we cannot inherit the earth when we become slaves unto sin. And fall therefore slaves unto our covetousness which leads us into debt and into demanding things from the State which leads into Socialism, which leads to the destruction of property and to laying waste of man and the earth.

Only by returning to the full-orbed biblical faith, and to recognize that the land has a place in the promises of God and it has a place in the promises of God according to the Word and the Law of God, can we see again a society in which Christian men under God inherit the earth and delight themselves in the abundance of peace.

May God speed the day!

[Closing speaker] Thank you, Mr. Rushdoony, for a most thought-provoking lecture. Again, let me remind you that we will have a question hour following the next lecture, and that you get your questions to Mr. F{?} or to any one of us as far as that goes, but Mr. F{?} will be conducting that question hour.

Again, we’ll take a few-minute break. There is coffee in the building to the rear, and the book table is open. Registration desk will be open sessions as well. Let’s take about a ten-minute break. We’ll come back when the piano begins to play again.