ABSTRACT
The group of authors that make up the “Blacksburg School” of public administration wrote on a wide variety of topics salient to creating an ethical public administration in a constitutional democracy. One of the topics that they did not discuss widely, however, is property. In this essay, I develop the position that a discussion of property has a place within the set of values that stand up to what John Rohr described as “regime values.” Rather than being a regime value itself, property is a prior good that supports values essential to democratic participation such as autonomy, self-possession, and recognition.
