Why Americans are so fussy about private property, and possessions

If you know Americans, you know that they're very fussy about private property, and possessions, especially land, and guns. And there's a deep historical reason for that, which is why so many Americans have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that sounds like "The Divine Right of Kings". And that's because the United States was based on something different than the Divine Right of Kings, it was based on the ownership of personal property.

When the United States began, it threw away the Divine Right of Kings, which sounded like a recipe for disaster to most of the people in the world, who still relied on kings. The world really didn't think it would work, and even Abe Lincoln despaired for its continuance a mere eighty-seven years later. And it's the basis of the United States Constitution, and so deeply ingrained into Americans nowadays that even people who don't know a word of that document understand the concept.

To understand it better, I'm going to have to have us time-travel to England before the birth of the United States of America. Like most countries, they have a king, who owned everything (technically this is still true with the Queen of England owning everything today, although it's not true in practice). The king owned everything, every person, every piece of land. He had the power (given divinely) to allow certain people to control his land, and those people looked after things, including collecting rent. They were called Lords, and it's where we get the slightly sarcastic term "landlord" today. And these Lords and the King could do anything they wanted, at any time. The land, the animals, even the lives of the peasants belonged to the King, and the Lords.

George Washington and his co-conspirators who defied England in 1776 didn't like this idea at all. They wanted to try something different, something that would be protected by the Constitution of the United States, the ownership of private property. Yes, of course these rights didn't originally extend to everyone who lived in the United States at that time, but little by little those rights did expand to everyone. If you're an adult citizen of the United States you can own land. You can also own goats, and the barns to put them in. That doesn't sound like much, but compared to not being able to own ANYTHING (even your own life) under a king, it means a lot.

Of course it's one thing to just write stuff down, and another thing to defend those rights. And Americans have nervous since day one that at any moment someone would come and take their stuff away. Americans don't like kings, they don't like dictators, and they don't like the idea of everybody just trying to share everything (which ultimately led so some of the world's worst atrocities, under Communism).

Too much power held in the hands of too few people (like Lords and Kings) has often become a problem in the United States, when wealthy people started monopolizing. Laws were put into place, but nothing that would undercut the concept that the country was founded on. If you're wealthy, you get to keep it.

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