"When the Constitution's protection of private property was disregarded, so that politicians could rob from the rich to give to the poor, that also gave politicians the power to rob from the poor and give to the rich -- such as seizing homes in low-income neighborhoods and turning that property over to developers."So, basically the 17th Amendment turned one of the fundamental tenets of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence on its head. Without the protection of private property rights, there is no such thing as liberty and freedom. As a matter of fact, the most-influential philosopher for our Founding Fathers, John Locke, expressed the tenets of individual freedom as the concepts of "life, liberty, and estate (or property)". Later, Adam Smith coined the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property".
When Thomas Jefferson, wrote the words in the Declaration of Independence, he took a slight departure from the philosophies of Locke and Smith. Since Jefferson viewed the right to property, a concept tied to feudalism and such, as being potentially antithetical to liberty, he replaced the right to property with the right to the pursuit of happiness. However, he was still very much in support of the philosophies that prevented government from forcibly taking a private citizens property.
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