Our Current Chaos is not All About the Death of George Floyd
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Our Current Chaos is not All About the Death of George Floyd
Do not, for one moment,
make the mistake of believing that the violence and vandalism we are seeing in
recent riots area are about the horrific death of George Floyd at the hands of
Minneapolis police officers. This is not to say that there are not
protestors among the groups that are genuinely outraged, and who seek to
peaceably assemble to petition the government for a meaningful change to police
policy and demand justice, all of which is explicitly protected by the First
Amendment to our Constitution. But it is to say that any lawful means of
protest ends when it violates an innocent person’s private property rights.
First, the obvious.
The vandals who pillaged a Louis
Vuitton store weren’t driven to do so because of their sense of moral
indignation about Floyd’s death. They were driven to do so because they
liked the idea of smashing a window to steal designer items more than the idea
of working and saving to earn those expensive items.
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But let’s imagine for a
moment that it actually was Floyd’s death that drove them to the act. The
owners of the business had precisely nothing to do with Floyd’s death, so even
then, in what meaningful sense would this be considered “justice”?
Imagine this moral
question differently. Imagine that my friend has his car stolen, and the
thief is arrested, awaiting trial. A lot of people like my friend have
their cars stolen these days, I conclude, so I’m understandably angry about
it. Rather than await justice from the courts, I instead find some other
innocent person who has some expensive wheels, and assault him and steal his
car.
Now, I would, and should,
go to jail for that crime, and for good reason. And that’s because the
other person has innate rights to property, and those rights are every bit as
important as, say, my right to life and liberty.
Many people would consider John
Locke the “intellectual father of our country,” and he held a “central political
principle: that rights in property are the basis of human freedom and
government exists to protect them and to preserve public order.” At the
time of the nation’s Founding, and throughout most of our history, it was
accepted that government exists primarily to preserve life and property.
It might be important to
note, however, that the Founders often didn’t believe it necessary to denote a
distinction between the right to life and the right to property, because they
believed them both to be elements of the same natural right. But “insofar
as the Founders made any distinction between property rights and other
individual rights,” writes David
Upham at the Foundation for Economic Education, “they insisted that property
rights were at least as important as personal rights,” citing Madison in
Federalist 54, who states unequivocally that “Government is instituted no less
for the protection of property than of the persons of individuals.”
Madison goes on to say at
the Virginia Convention:
It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the
two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of
persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of
which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated. The
personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to
property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right.
It is this American
“social right” which the rioters are explicitly challenging, and demanding be
replaced by their brand of “social justice” that is more akin to communism than
anything American governance has ever been.
For most of the rioters,
this isn’t about race. It’s about unmaking America. And we’ve been
cobbling the path to this moment for a long time. What we do now will
determine whether or not America’s future is as a constitutional republic or a
new socialist experiment that is based upon countless failed ones.
John Adams predicted the
path up to this moment, and its logical end, in his three-volume work, A
Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.
Like Madison, he acknowledges the presupposition that “[p]roperty is surely a
right of mankind as really as liberty,” and he goes on to say that the “moment
the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws
of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it,
anarchy and tyranny commence.”
This would occur, he
argues, as a sequence of falling dominoes:
Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle
or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from
usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and
enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the
majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it
equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished
first; taxes laid heavily on the rich, and not at all on the others;
and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded, and
voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the
vicious, the intemperate would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery,
sell and spend their share, and then demand a new division of those who
purchased from them.
All of this has either
happened already, or is being presented by progressives today as a means to
“transform the country,” as even the supposedly moderate Joe Biden is openly offering as
his goal.
To save what’s left of
the core essence of the American idea, President Trump, the state governors,
and local officials must commit to the notion that property rights are every
bit as worthy of protection as the rights to life and liberty, and that there
is a force of low and public justice that is capable of protecting it.
And if we fail to do that, I fear that America may become what Cornell West suggests it
already has become: a failed social experiment.
1:26
Chaos erupted early in Philadelphia on Sunday as protesters destroyed a line of police vehicles, smashing windows and setting them ablaze as a state of anarchy descended upon the streets.
Aerial footage shows rioters vandalizing a line of police vehicles, even smashing one into another and setting them on fire. According to FOX 29’s Steve Keeley, officers arrived to “help save businesses where many of the poorest residents shop,” and rioters vandalized the vehicles as officers were outside the stores:
The @PhillyPolice arrived to help save businesses where many of the poorest residents shop for food&clothes on S. 52nd Street. Many are minority owned businesses&police vehicles were then Vandalized as officers were outside at the stores, then vehicles set on fire @FOX29philly
Officers are continuing in their efforts to protect local businesses, many of which are minority owned, from from vandals and looters:
Just up S.52nd Street from where police protecting other businesses the Sun Ray Drug Store being looted at 52nd&Walnut @FOX29philly
BREAKING: Line of @PhillyPolice vehicles being destroyed along South 52nd Street in West Philadelphia @FOX29philly
Philadelphia businesses have been instructed to close, and Mayor Jim Kenney ordered a curfew starting at 6 p.m. as part of the greater effort to curb the violence ravaging the city.
President Trump has responded to the mayhem in the city, demanding “Law & Order in Philadelphia, NOW!”:
The president earlier announced that the U.S. will be designating Antifa, the violent left-wing group suspected of fanning the flames in several U.S. cities, as a terrorist organization. Additionally, Attorney General William Barr stated that the violence carried out by Antifa “and other similar groups” is akin to domestic terrorism and added that it will be “treated accordingly.”
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