They're Coming to Take it Away Ha-Ha!

"the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property"

"In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend."

The shocking quotations above from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto reveal what progressives and the left have sought to keep quietly under wraps since the beginning.  In the cause of "fairness", their intention is to do away with distinct and cherished property rights for every individual.   

But this goal of theirs will involve "stealing."   In order to achieve the Marxist or leftist utopia, they must employ force in the removal of property from one in order to give it to another.

In this, they come directly against an ideal formulated not last week, last year or the last generation, not even with our founding fathers, but in the very foundation of the human experience itself, in fact in the ancient writings of Moses:  "thou shall not steal" - Exodus 20:15.    

The principle stands etched in stone as an abiding moral axiom which assumes at least these three ideas:

-Existence of private property

-Legitimacy of its pursuit (origin of the "Protestant work ethic")

-Consequequences if violated 

The struggle for this principle, the conflict between Marx and liberty has cost some 100 million valuable human lives in just the last century alone - ever since nations bagan to play with ideas generated in a single document written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.  

Can we please see these lives as something more than a statistic, and use the sorrow to fuel our fight? 

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But how often do we consider "thou shall not steal"  as a foundation in our current fight for freedom?   We commonly just have have three levels of conscious formative consideration in the fight for freedom:

-Our current circumstances - we don't want to lose what we have.  While we are motivated to share, consider the poor, etc, we do NOT want government forcing our hand.

-Founding Fathers - this is our country.  The country we built, our Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence.  It's how our country is supposed to behave.

-God's clear directive: "Thou shall not steal", respect toward other's private ownership of things.

As the place of God erodes in our culture, the sanctity of private property rights does as well, and down we go.  Consequently our work ethic will continue to be replaced by the delusion of entitlement - a nation of unmotivated, hyper-dependent slaves dancing around cherished Marxian concepts.

If history affords us an opportunity to fix it, the true origin and author of private property and free markets must be honored in a new, resurgent way.

This time (as in the early Christian church), we must join a spirit of charity with private property rights, lest we once again smother by our greed, a well-founded, well loved and workable political framework - free market capitalism.  Marxism is simply not an option.

The state will never take the place of God, in our thinking at least.

"Thou shalt not steal" - and that means you, whoever you are.