James Madison Quotes About Property Rights
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If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.
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Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.
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The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.
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Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.
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The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents.
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Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
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It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
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The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.
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In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
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As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
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A distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring it.
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The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
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I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
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Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.
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With respect to the words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
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The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.
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Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.
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Related Authors
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Benjamin Franklin Founding Father of the United States -
Dolley Madison Former First Lady of the United States -
Alexander Hamilton Founding Father of the United States -
James K. Polk 11th U.S. President -
James Buchanan 15th U.S. President -
Andrew Jackson 7th U.S. President -
Martin Van Buren 8th U.S. President -
John Locke Philosopher -
Thomas Jefferson 3rd U.S. President -
George Washington 1st U.S. President -
George Mason Statesman -
William Henry Harrison 9th U.S. President -
James A. Garfield 20th U.S. President -
Patrick Henry Governor of Virginia -
Abraham Lincoln 16th U.S. President -
John Adams 2nd U.S. President -
Aaron Burr Former Vice President of the United States -
John Quincy Adams 6th U.S. President -
James Monroe 5th U.S. President -
Thomas Paine Author