It's important to remember that the constitutional system was not designed in the first place to defend the rights of people. Rather, the rights of people had to be balanced, as Madison put it, against what he called "the rights of property." Well of course, property has no rights: my pen has no rights. Maybe I have a right to it, but the pen has no rights. So, this is just a code phrase for the rights of people with property. The constitutional system was founded on the principle that the rights of people with property have to be privileged; they have rights because they're people, but they also have special rights because they have property. As Madison put it in the constitutional debates, the goal of government must be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." That's the way the system was set up.
Noam Chomsky on Microsoft (read whole article at http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1408)
The modern idea of a fluid society in which individuals readily move, either eographically or, more importantly, in the social hierarchy, was anathama to the proprietarian order, and today it is the language of the market place that dominates legal discourse about property. The essence of this discourse is the idea of property as a bundle of rights...Property satisfies individual preferences most effectively through the process of market exchange.
Marie Battiste, James (Sa'ke'j) Youngblood Henderson.
Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge
