Wynne’s Ontario government has no business meddling in markets

Richard M. Weaver, in his book Ideas have Consequences, claimed that private property was the “last metaphysical right” recognized in a Western world that had thrown off the governing principles of Christianity.

The right to private property, Weaver noted, feels no need to justify itself according to what every other ‘right’ has ultimately been forced to bow:  its social utility.  [That is because private property was the basis upon which the French Revolutionaries against the Crown] The sense that the right to private property was inalienable, and did not need to justify itself, meant that it could not fall under the state’s utilitarian rationalizing, which was otherwise subduing all of nature under its technocratic control on behalf of society.

This metaphysical nature of private property rights derives from the natural connection between honor, responsibility, and the relationship of a person to property.  Other personal rights, freedoms, and responsibilities, can be built upon it.

Weaver also noted that the ownership of private property can serve as a check on the pressures of majority opinion, allowing anyone to think and to act as he or she chooses without having to appease the majority opinion to secure a place to live or food to eat. Private property was a metaphysical ‘right’ because it is not based in the changing, temporal material order, but rather in the unchanging, eternal order of the spiritual.

If Weaver is correct, and it seems to me that he is, then it is hardly surprising that it is in Canada that the fundamental freedoms laid out in section two of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms are being interpreted by the courts, using their favoured ‘living tree’ model of legal interpretation, to deprive Canadians of fundamental freedoms.

These fundamental freedoms are not grounded in any metaphysical right that would constrain the judges’ interpretation.

And there is no right to private property listed in the Charter.

Nothing is left sacred or inviolable.

It is also unsurprising that this violation of fundamental freedoms is taking place under Liberal governments leaning hard to the left.

The author of this article in the Globe and Mail notes how outrageous it is that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government has “expanded rent controls, involving government more deeply in determining what private owners can charge for private rental housing; announced a dramatic and sudden rise in the minimum wage, in effect dictating what many companies pay their workers; and, finally declared this month that Ontario would be setting up a chain of government-run retail stores to sell marijuana when it becomes legal next year.”

All these things are characteristic of Communist regimes.  They are also characteristic of fascism.  Freedom cannot survive in a technological age that has expanded bureaucratic age without a strong sense of the inalienable right to property, and to the fruit of one’s own labour.

The alternative is tyranny.

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