Freedom to think and the freedom to express require the freedom to act.

We usually think of private property as the things in which we enjoy exclusive rights of ownership and use: principally our homes and their furnishings and the lots our homes stand o­n. But private property has a deeper significance. It is synonymous with individual self-ownership. It begins with our persons--our ownership of our bodies. And it extends to our thoughts, expressions, and actions: the productive actions that implement our expressions, which in turn reflect our prior thought. Because private property is so intimately connected to our very beings, it is essential to our self-interest and self-esteem.

Liberty Garden began with a thought. I thought about how to improve the landscape to create value, both as an achievement of my own expression and as a means to procure mutually beneficial trade with others. I wanted to create a place where people would come to enjoy the beauty of a stewarded California landscape. I determined that to best express that thought I ought to create a human-occupied landscape within an unusually productive and diverse native-plant wild land. The actions I took at Liberty Garden brought that expression to life, made the thought a reality. Motivated by the idea of achievement and prospect for trade, my productive effort at Liberty Garden transformed my original private property—a littered weed lot—into a property that expressed my idea of what the land could be. Suppose, though, that government blocks productive activity by complicating or outlawing human uses of private property and threatens physical force for non¬ compliance. The effect of this threat is to destroy individual liberty and an individual’s pursuit of being who o­ne is. Such harm blocks the path for personal achievement and the societal gains that come from production and trade. When you know that your productive action will result in personal harm, you usually choose not to carry out that action. When thoughts can no longer find expression in action, thought becomes suppressed.

For precisely this reason, innovation and improvement did not occur in the Soviet Union. For the same reason, the innovation and improvement necessary to reverse the degradation of the American landscape are not occurring.



Spontaneous order results from voluntary trade, causing mutual benefit and leading to societal gains.

Private property is freely created and freely exchanged. In a society rooted in private property, all the people who contribute to the manufacture, distribution, sale, and purchase of an item are each seeking personal gain. To achieve their goal, they must obtain the voluntary consent of those with whom they deal; no o­ne can be forced to carry out his part of the bargain.

For instance, when you go to the market with a dollar in your pocket and a desire for a quart of milk, the trade that follows benefits you because you value the milk more than the dollar; the market’s owner values the dollar more than the milk. Those engaged in the supply of milk also each seek personal gain: farmers, feed lot operators, distributors, truckers, equipment manufacturers, the suppliers of the resources used to make the equipment, the processors of those resources, the land managers where the resources came from, and so o­n through the dizzying series of interactions that enables you to give your child a glass of nourishing milk. Each achieved personal gain by contributing to the production of a quality product at a reasonable price. This uncoordinated cooperation is repeated in industry after industry for the benefit of each of us. This spontaneous order, which no government bureaucracy could successfully orchestrate, makes possible the ease and affordability of obtaining all the products we enjoy. The decentralized knowledge that produces such achievement can be accomplished o­nly in a society operating within the institutions of individual liberty and their corollary, private property.

Productive effort and voluntary trade are the characteristics of private property that promote peace (voluntary consent-based interaction) and rising prosperity through the competitive efforts that cause improvement.