Who Owns You?

If you don't own yourself then who does? The State? The "majority?" A slave owner?

I believe that every person has "a property in his own person." In other words, every person is a self-proprietor, a self-owner. I believe that self-ownership is the essential and most fundamental element of liberty. I believe that you own you and I own me. My freedom ends where your nose begins.  But not everyone agrees with me. The argument about who owns you and who owns me has been raging for centuries.

This argument about "who owns you" is the fundamental element upon which virtually all political arguments are based. The question of “who owns you” is the ground zero point of difference in two competing world views that philosophers describe as individualism vs. collectivism.

In his Second Treatise of Government, the philosopher John Locke, whose writings greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson, wrote:

Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a "property" in his own "person." This nobody has any right to but himself. The "labour" of his body and the "work" of his hands, we may say, are properly his. - John Locke, 1690

Thomas Jefferson and the Founders established the individualist world-view as the basis of our government when they wrote,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

So there's just one question you have to ask yourself. Do you believe in individualism or collectivism (i.e. capitalism or socialism, liberty or serfdom, self-ownership or slavery)? Where do you stand?

By Mark Van Schuyver