July 4, 2009: Private ownership of the land is the source not just of our freedom but of our civility and of our humanity itself
The "cap and trade" bill that passed in the House of Representatives last week contains within it the seeds of a national building code. It rarely rains in Phoenix and it rarely fails to rain in Portland, but both cities will build new structures according to the dictates of some Washington bureaucrat.Drive along 19th Avenue in Phoenix and you'll pass block after block of condemned houses. They were taken by the city for the planned light rail expansion, now delayed. The neighbors are left to fight off the kind of vermin vacant homes attract while they worry what that blight is doing to their home values.
In Glendale, the city government is doing everything it can to prevent the Tohono O'Odham tribe from developing its own sovereign land as a casino.
The essence of the freedom we celebrate on Independence Day is the free ownership of the land. The Hoplite Greeks fought and died to protect their own lands. The Roman Legionnaires fought and died because their farms were their own property. A Cincinnatus -- or a George Washington -- lays down his arms because being a dictator is nothing when you can instead be a freeholder in the land.
The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.
This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge -- the men who make up murderous mobs -- are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land -- each man to his own parcel -- that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.
By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor's home. But when the time comes that we all seem to own our homes only by sufferance, none of us will have anything left to defend.
Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.
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