We have a "right" to own guns, but not a right to health care, food, shelter, clothing, employment

[JDPriestly]

132. People have never been entirely on their own in this country.

Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson are just two of our Founding Fathers who were very active in promoting civic organizations to provide for mutual benefit in times of need. Madison even disapproved allowing a church to fund a project because he said that was a "public and civil duty."

Jefferson on education:

As part of his work in revising the laws of Virginia during the late 1770s and early 1780s, Thomas Jefferson put forth a bill that has become one of his most enduring works on the subject of education: Bill 79, "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge." Its oft-quoted preamble reads as follows:

Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes; And whereas it is generally true that that people will be happiest whose laws are best, and are best administered, and that laws will be wisely formed, and honestly administered, in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise and honest; whence it becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those person, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance; but the indigence of the greater number disabling them from so educating, at their own expence, those of their children whom nature hath fitly formed and disposed to become useful instruments for the public, it is better that such should be sought for and educated at the common expence of all, than that the happiness of all should be confided to the weak or wicked:...[1]

http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/bill-more-general-diffusion-knowledge

If you are among those surptided by Jefferson's commitment to public education, you may be even more surprised at his thoughts about the unequal distribution of wealth in France in pre-revolutionary France. Here is what he wrote to James Madison after befriending a peasant woman, asking her about her income and position in life and giving her some money.

"This little attendrissement, with the solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, and tradesmen, and lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured. I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state."

Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.

\\\http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s32.html

Note: That was Thomas Jefferson, not Marx, not Lenin, not Thomas Paine.

In the early history of our country, we permitted slavery and indentured servitude. Lincoln ended those "institutions" but not without destroying the "property rights" of some very wealthy and powerful people.

Republicans seem to have forgotten that slaves were viewed as property, and that when Lincoln, their hero and first president freed the slaves, in the view of the conservatives of the time, he confiscated and redistributed more property than any other American before or since.

It is ironic that the conservatives who claim to be heirs of Abraham Lincoln reject the idea of the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, from employers to employees, from those with property to those without.

I hope that no one will think that I agree with what was the Southern view of slavery -- that slaves were property. But if you read the Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court, which was one of the big issues prior to Lincoln's presidency, you will understand that slaves, repugnant as it is to us today to admit it, were viewed as property. And Lincoln's great achievement was to redistribute that property, the great wealth of Southern masters to the very poorest, the slaves themselves.