“Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.”
Squatter’s Rights, Cultural Property, Marxist Goals and a Founder’s Quote
With a recent explosion of coverage targeted at squatter’s rights, I thought it might be helpful to explore the truth of this so-called crisis and the concept of property. There is a lot of argument about an individual’s right to property and what property is that underlies our culture wars.
“Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.” — John Adams (Discourses on Davla,” 1790)
You may have heard about people being arrested for trying to protect their own homes, and that is truly happening. There are a couple of anecdotes like this one where landlord Jaskaran Singh who organized a protest in-front of property he owned, and got arrested for violating a restraining order the squatter had against him.
Or the case of Adele Andaloro who was arrested for changing the locks on her home that her recently deceased parents left her. Apparently it made it really inconvenient for her squatters to get back onto the property.
Even though these anecdotes are infuriating for anyone with any common sense, the extent to which it happens is truly unknown. It can be easy to find several instances of it and explode that into a national crisis, as media outlets often like to do. Here is a critical look at recent squatter coverage. It likely isn’t happening as much as we think. The only place that it seems to have any real crisis feel is New York City, where squatting for 30 days means police cannot evict your squatters and you have to go through civil court to get them evicted, which can tie up your property for months.
Cynical people will often paint this as landlords getting what they deserve or at the least not care about something as trivial as property. The perception is that it’s a bunch of rich people whining. We saw a lot of this during the BLM protests and riots of 2020, where pundits, our new NPR Chief, and some politicians rationalized the actions against property owners in a social justice framework. They’d never admit or maybe they don’t even know this, but it’s all rooted in Marxist views of private property.
Our Founding Fathers along with anyone supporting the uniquely American principles knew that liberty was secured only when government was established to protect property and those rights. Property can refer to a piece of land, and that is usually how we think of it. But property is anything acquired as we work and earn and create. Metallica was chided in the late 90’s for going after individuals illegally downloading their music on Napster or LimeWire, but they were protecting their property. Property is your land, your clothing, your food, and anything you work to create and/or possess.
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