Private property

“ The idea that the institution of private property involves the right of the owner to use it, or refrain from using it, in such a way as he may please, and that its principal significance is to supply him with an income, irrespective of any duties which he may discharge, would not have been understood by most public men of that age, and, if understood, would have been repudiated with indignation by the more reputable among them. ”

“ The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. They have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where only a qualified property ought to exist. ”

“ Land never was private property in that personal sense of property in which we speak of a thing as our own, with which we may do as we please; and in the administration of estates, as indeed in the administration of all property whatsoever, duty to the State was at all times supposed to override private interest or inclination. ”

“ In the first place, it is established by a series of cases that an ulterior public advantage may justify a comparatively insignificant taking of private property for what, in its immediate purpose, is a private use. ”

“ Private property is strictly competitive, a necessity of the struggle for life, and has no ethical implication. Neither is it subject to the will of any person outside the proprietor him- self. When, therefore, order and right are injected into property, we may say the state has appeared. ”

“ It is well, in discussing private property, to rid the mind at once of the idea that it is an absolute and unchanging thing. Few realize the manifold ways in which property rights are limited. Unmodified private control of property is unknown; the public makes many reservations in its own interest. ”

“ All that I now wish to remark is that that portion of the land which is held as private property, has for a long time been divided into such small holdings, and from absence of settlements, trusts, and charges, has been so completely at the disposal of existing proprietors, as would probably satisfy the most extreme Internationalist, who was in favour of permitting any private rights at all in the land. ”

“ As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. ”

“ The State recognizes and protects private property as a natural means for the execution of individual, family and social functions. All forms of property are subordinate to the supreme interests of the Nation, whose interpreter is the State. ”

“ While it is our purpose to maintain inviolate the right, of private property, we must not pay more than what is just compensation therefore, taking into con­sideration the value at which the property has been assessed upon the owner’s own declaration or with his consent. ”

“ Every individual has the right to private property and can transfer it during his or her lifetime or on death, in accordance with the law.
2. Private property should not be used to the detriment of its social purpose. ”

“ Nothing that is of earth or on earth is beyond the dreams of one who owns enough private property. Therefore, the subject may be worth a little more than ordinary consideration.
What, then, is property? Let us look around us. One man has property in land. ”

“ Private property shall not be appropriated without the consent of the owner, except for the sake of public use, and with previous indemnification. The law shall determine the authority which may make the appropriation and the conditions under which it may be carried out. No corporation, civil or ecclesiastical, whatever may be its character, denomination, or object, shall have legal capacity to acquire in proprietorship or administer for itself real estate, with the single exception of edifices destined immediately and directly to the service and object of the institution. ”

“ The common reasons for the establishment of private property in land are deduced from the necessity, of offering to individuals sufficient motives for cultivating the ground, and of preventing the wasteful destruction of the immature products of the earth. ”

“ Of course the government at times must have property which may belong to a private person. The public must at times take property belonging to an individual. Property may be taken, even when the owner will not consent to it, when it is taken for public use. One man's property cannot be taken by the government and given to another person. ”

“ You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. ”

“ In fact, they are always either deeds of gift, or of sale, or of exchange, or of the grant of precaria. It is impossible not to allow that the thousands of deeds of this kind are so many proofs of private property, since you can neither sell nor give away what is not already your own. ”

“ I can conceive of cases where corporations have been authorized to acquire a limited amount of real estate such as the legislature may conceive to be useful and necessary to the purpose for which they are organized, or to take property for specific uses, in which the question as to whether they have exceeded that amount or perverted the use may be one for the state alone, and not of any private citizen. ”

“ He says the idea of private property, which is just and reasonable in relation to intimate personal things, to clothes, appliances, books, one’s home or apartments, the garden one loves or the horse one rides, has become unreasonably exaggerated until it obsesses the world ”

“ Whatsoever citizens have bought with money for their private use—not for trade, which is under the supervision of the state—all furniture, clothing, jewelry, etc., etc., is, for the same reason, absolute property. ”

“ But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of the many by the few. ”

“ Like man himself, every form of the property of man possesses, besides its special character which makes it the private possession of an individual, a universal side which men gives the community a well-grounded claim to a right to it. That the State and the municipality appropriate a part of the property of every citizen as taxes we all consider a matter of course, or that the law limits the free control of the individual's property. ”

“ And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice. ”

“ It has control over property within its limits; and the condition of ownership of real estate therein, whether the owner be stranger or citizen, is subjection to its rules concerning the holding, the transfer, liability to obligations, private or public, and the modes of establishing titles thereto. ”

“ In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. ”

“ Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. ”

“ "Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interest of its owners that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. ”

“ It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition. ”

“ Should there be the slightest irregularity in the method of transfer, men, members of society, imprescriptible possessors of the land, might be deprived at one blow of property, possession, and the means of production. ”

“ The man who owns a house has the right to benefit by enjoying its shelter, by selling it, or by renting it. This right, the right to or in the benefits of wealth—or more briefly, the right to or in the wealth itself—is called a "property right" or simply "property." ”

“ But since all have an equal right of occupancy, every man is by the same title a proprietor. Every man has a right to an income equal to a fraction of his product. If, then, the laborer is obliged by the right of property to pay a rent to the proprietor, the proprietor is obliged by the same right to pay the same amount of rent to the laborer ”

“ If, then, a certain number of men are the sole dealers in articles of primary necessity, it follows that the public treasury, in passing and repassing through their hands, deposits and accumulates real property there. ”

“ Those who are giving their time and energy to the production of wealth, face the fact that property rights have been so construed as to give property owners a first claim on production and to make property income a fixed charge on the industry of the community. ”

“ In order that the question of proprietorship may not remain too long unsettled, and thereby injure the public welfare, disturbing the peace of families and the stability of social transactions, the law has fixed a time when all claims shall be cancelled, and possession shall regain its ancient prerogative through its transformation into property. ”

“ Toullier: "Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact." The tenant, the farmer, the commandite, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor. ”

“ Let us admit, then, with the most careful writers, that if transient property, or the right of preference resulting from occupation, existed prior to the establishment of civil society, permanent property, as we know it to-day, is the work of civil law. It is the civil law which holds that, when once acquired, property can be lost only by the action of the proprietor, and that it exists even after the proprietor has relinquished possession of the thing, and it has fallen into the hands of a third party. ”

“ Property is the right to use and abuse. If, then, government is economy,—if its object is production and consumption, and the distribution of labor and products,—how is government possible while property exists? And if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings—kings in proportion to their facultés bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion? ”

“ On the other hand, it is equally evident that the same proprietors could not overestimate the value of their property, in order to increase their incomes beyond the limits of the law, since the tenants and farmers, with their old leases in their hands, would enter a protest. ”

“ If the idea so constantly appealed to in justification of property law is to be realised; if the fruits of each man’s labor [68] are to be guaranteed to him and he is to own the instruments with which he works; if the laws of property are not to establish a parasitic class taking tribute from the labor of others in the forms of Rent and Interest, then we must modify our administration of property. ”

“ Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write every statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power of property will do, either through the law or else in defiance of it. Of course I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns something, if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms, and so has that property to dispose of. ”

“ It cannot be denied that inheritance, assessment, commerce, industry, labor, and wages require the most important modifications."
You wish, proletaires, to REGULATE PROPERTY; that is, you wish to destroy it and reduce it to the right of possession. For to regulate property without the consent of the proprietors is to deny the right OF DOMAIN; to associate employees with proprietors is to destroy the EMINENT right; to suppress or even reduce farm-rent, house-rent, revenue, and increase generally, is to annihilate PERFECT property. ”

“ Little by little the government will become manufacturer, commission-merchant, and retail dealer. It will be the sole proprietor. Why, at all epochs, have the ministers of State been so reluctant to meddle with the question of wages? Why have they always refused to interfere between the master and the workman? Because they knew the touchy and jealous nature of property, and, regarding it as the principle of all civilization, felt that to meddle with it would be to unsettle the very foundations of society. ”