Property and freedom of association

It has often been said that “a man’s home is his castle.” And by this, we mean that a man’s home is his own private property.
He can invite whomever he wants to his home, which, conversely, also means that he can refuse anyone access to his home. After all, it is his home, not the government’s home, not the community’s home.

A man can do this because he has certain inalienable and constitutional private property rights. He can also do it because he has the individual, personal right to freedom of association. No one can punish him for inviting his house guests on the basis of race, religion, or sex.

A man is completely free to allow or disallow anyone from entering his home, using whatever criteria he may please, however rational or irrational those criteria might be. In other words, there is no Federal “Equal House Invitation Commission” to sue him for racial, religious, or other types of discrimination.
There are no Federal house guest quotas either. Nor does a white private homeowner get a tax break for inviting a certain number of Asians, blacks, or Hispanics to his home.

By the same reasoning (private property and freedom of association), a man is also completely free to choose any spouse he can successfully woo. To date, no Federal agency can penalize a man for defying “diversity” by marrying within his own race or religion. Big Government has no right to deprive us of our ultimate private property rights to ourselves, to our own bodies, to use and dispose of however we may see fit, so long as we do not violate the legitimate rights of others in the process of pursuing our own happiness or unhappiness.

But this is a moral proclamation. From a legal standpoint, however, we must concern ourselves with the following question is: If we each have the legal right–as individuals–to invite people over to our homes based on whatever criteria we may select, arbitrary or non-arbitrary, based on private property rights and freedom of association, then why don’t we also have these very same rights collectively, as a group? That is to say, if private citizen Bob can marry anyone he may entice, if Bob can invite anyone to his home, based on whatever criteria he wants, then why is it wrong– then why should it be illegal–for Bob to organize a private corporation with Jim, Jack and John and hire whomever they want, regardless of race or religion?

Do we–or do we not–have private property rights? Do we–or do we not–have freedom of association rights? Why are we allowed certain legal rights as private individuals that we cannot then claim for ourselves as a collection of individuals in a private group or organization (e.g., civil rights and anti-trust laws)? Why do we have the EEOC?

The irony is that, while we each, as private individuals, have no right to rob our neighbors, we can do so collectively, as a group, by voting to tax certain groups and deliver the proceeds to certain other groups. Something is amiss here.