by Sigfredo A. Cabrera

About the author: Sigfredo A. Cabrera is the director of communications for the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California, a nonprofit legal foundation that fights for individual rights and economic freedom.

The moment that idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the Laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. —JOHN ADAMS

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, the term property “embraces everything which is or may be the subject of ownership.” It is the “unrestricted and exclusive right to a thing; the right to dispose of a thing in every legal way, to possess it, to use it, and to exclude everyone else from interfering with it.&rdquo...