Sources & Extracts

Review this excerpt and then go back to the main thread.

The idea that strong property rights are a necessary condition for other freedoms has been a common argument made by political conservatives. In this excerpt it is stated very clearly by William F. Buckley, Jr., perhaps the best known spokesman for conservatism in the United States in the last half of the 20th century.

Conservatives have failed to alert the community to the interconnection between economic freedom and -- freedom. No government would dare be so abusive as ours is of our economic freedoms if we were alive to the relationship. It is a part of the conservative intuition that economic freedom is the most precious temporal freedom, for the reason that it alone gives to each one of us, in our comings and goings in our complex society, sovereignty -- and over that part of existence in which by far the most choices have in fact to be made, and in which it is possible to make choices, involving oneself, without damage to other people. And for the further reason that without economic freedom, political and other freedoms are likely to be taken from us. [William F. Buckley, Jr. Up From Liberalism, p. 179].