When I suggest to my Christian brothers and sisters that God has given to individual people three basic human rights: life, liberty, and property, and that the only legitimate function of government is to prohibit and punish the violation of these rights, I find that they willingly support my assertion regarding the first two. Yet they are not sure about a human right to property.
Our anti-abortion stance is grounded on the God-given right to life.
American Christians almost universally oppose involuntary servitude as a violation of the human right to liberty.
I contend that the God-given human right to liberty is in fact synonymous with the right to property.
Each of us has been given a mind to think what we will, a mouth to speak what we will, and hands and feet to go and do where and what we will. These gifts are properly ours and belong to us and no one else. Our right to liberty is nothing if we have no property to exercise.
Though we are accountable to God for our use of this property He still grants liberty to use them as we will.
God alone accurately weighs our thoughts, words and actions but when we use these faculties to deprive our fellow men of their life, liberty and property God commits prohibiting and punishing power to men in the form of the civil authorities.
From these bodily faculties--our most intimate property--come all other property rights. As we trade the use of them for wages those wages become wholly ours and no one else's.
The same is true as we find, gather, and develop limited resources with our bodily property. These resources become ours.
