The idea of communal ownership was not prevalent at the time of the Revolution, nor had it ever found many adherents throughout recorded history prior to the Bolshevik Revolution (the Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Münster come to mind.) Even the French revolutionaries believed in private property. So did the founders. Those Americans, generally on the left, who have viewed the founders’ Lockean convictions as a problem that needs to be remedied may be right or wrong from some other philosophical and moral perspective, but such a view was fundamentally at odds with the liberal principles and
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