Dear Editor:

County Commission president Martin Saffer on his web-site states, “All property rights are first derived from the power of the federal and state government. Without original government grants, lawful deeds, county and state records, statutes and laws extending back to Magna Carta, private property would not exist as we enjoy it today. It exists because government creates, protects and defines it. “

I applaud him for stating clearly his own principles, such as they are.

However, his notion that rights, including property rights, are the gift, by implication perhaps even merely the loan, of Government, is logically absurd, historically false and deadly dangerous to every reader.

As stated in our Declaration of Independence, one of the foundational documents upon which the law which Saffer affects to practice is based, it is to secure these rights that governments are instituted among men. Government is not the grantor of rights, but is a mere tool, created to be  their defender. Government may have enumerated and limited powers, granted to it by the People, for the execution of its purposes, but Rights by definition belong to People, and derive from our relationship with our Creator.

Now, although it was considered in early drafts, the Declaration finally adopted does not specify the Right to Property, which is perhaps a good thing since such a right could be misconstrued to mean that everyone should have property, rather than that possessors of property should be secure in that possession.

But historically, Government is never the originator of any right to property. When land is seized by conquest, the soldiers paid for it with their blood and toil, and often soldiers were rewarded by their commands, whose power derived solely from their consent, with land.

Our own country's Homestead Act bestowed title to land on the condition of, and in implied compensation for, the settler's labor upon that land. Government administers the acquisition, and documents and defends the title, but the land homesteaded was clearly never in a proper sense the property of the government, because the government never occupied nor improved it. The very criteria set up by the Government under which settlers could acquire title, proved that Government had none, and was merely documenting and defending the lawful process of acquisition by occupancy and improvement..

The land patents of the 17th and 18th centuries were in no real sense gifts of land from a sovereign who had never seen the land, but offers to secure a title to be earned by the patentee's surveying, occupancy and improvement of that land.

Magna Carta documented the security of landowners in their persons and property, but did nothing to reinforce the polite fiction that the King had original title to anything which he could hand out or revoke. The feudal holding of land "of the King" was most often a grant by the original landowner to the King, and signified that the King and his other allies would defend the landowner's title, if the landowner would participate in mutual defense of other similar titles and the king's throne.

The root of the word “feudal” is the same as that of the word, “faith,” and the essence of the Feudal System was mutual obligation, the king, lords, and peasants bound in mutual obligations of mutual support and defense. That greedy and faithless Lords sometimes accepted more support and provided less defense than they ought, does not change the fundamental legal nature of the relationship, any more than shoplifting alters the nature of retailing.

Our own Martin Saffer was elected to administer an institution whose sole legitimate purpose is the defense of the rights of us citizens. That he now advances a contrahistorical theory and promotes an agenda which would make us slaves, with no rights but only the privileges offered or revoked at his whim, should earn him every man's opprobrium, and swift removal from the office which he dishonors.

John Leyzorek
Elk Mountain