Private Property Gives Way to the Public Good

Abstract

We make no small point of the tendency of an economic empire to divert its attention away from private production and toward the more ethereal production of public goods. When governments fall into this trap, they, too, contribute to consumerism.

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.

(Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816)