Will Roberts, Sr. Director of Government Affairs
Oklahoma REALTORS® ensures that our members are able to help people buy, sell, and lease real property in Oklahoma.
Political scientists often view the world through the lens of a particular political philosopher. Ideas which have endured for generations, and even centuries, are articulated by all kinds of citizens from many countries across the world’s history. Many of these ideas are uniform with regard to moral and legal codes and are the basis of the societies of many of the nations on Earth. While these philosophers are many and their views even greater, in the Western world the viewpoints of government are often boiled down to the competing visions of two great political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
Hobbes viewed the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short” and advocated for stringent controls over the populace by an overarching government that ensured order and that the social contract between people only remained in place because of the intervention against violence by the government. Those controls were what are articulated in many of the constitutions of monarchies of the preceding centuries and ascribe power to a monarch or other despotic individual at the head of a state. One could argue that this is the quintessential European form of government in the times prior to the 20th century.
Locke, in contrast, viewed the state of nature as one in which liberal ideas are to be celebrated and civil liberties are protected by the government. Locke’s ideas are the foundation of the private property rights enshrined in our nation’s founding documents and believed that the labor created by citizens leads to the ownership of property and that that property precedes the government. Our federal Constitution affirms and supports those rights and is a direct descendant of the ideas of John Locke.
REALTORS® know that the rights of men and women in America are enshrined and protected by our federal and state constitutions. Every year, we go to the Capitol with the goals of protecting our way of life as REALTORS® and our rights as property owners. We know that the great ideals that ensure the continued prosperity of our nation and our state include those of private property and the ability for Oklahomans and Americans of all stripes to forge their own paths and make their own choices. The social fabric of our country depends on this ability and the continued prudent regulation of all markets, including the market for private property, is paramount for ensuring that REALTORS®, their clients, and all of those who believe in capitalism and property ownership, are able to buy, sell, and lease real property in Oklahoma.
