What is Property?
In the "Postmodernism" discussion, engaged with AAshinoff, CBJ offered the image of a locked door. There, I replied:
Locks just stop honest people. Definitions of "property" seem to me to be socially contextual. I grant that fences are a universal indicator. But there are societies in which the huts have no doors, and the hut is still not to be transgressed. On the other hand, our retail establishments have very stout doors that open automatically for anyone and everyone. I once read that Eskimos (Aleuts), have a sense of property concerning driftwood. Wood is valuable, there being so little of it. But, if you find a piece of it, arbitrarily "far" up the shore away from the water, it was "obviously" dragged there by someone else and is not your property. That idea -- "not mine" -- is deep within our own culture: not everything left unattended is free for the taking.
I believe that one-liners are insufficient to understand property. The quip from John Locke that property is that "with which you mix your labor" is wholly insufficient, though it does identify at least one way to look at a complex phenomenon.
One challenge to understanding property is to differentiate "first instance" examples from "civilized" cases. In other words, Robinson Crusoe owned his island because it was isolated and uninhabited when he found it. What if, however, another person had landed on the opposite side, each thinking they owned the whole thing? It is easy to imagine many people each working the "whole island" planting here, hunting there, discovering each other... Now what?
For me, the single problem with "mixing your labor" is that breaking into a bank vault takes a lot of work. You might say that the vault is someone else's property. But Robinson Crusoe might have enjoyed 20 years on "his" island before the original owner returned to check on his property...
Locks just stop honest people. Definitions of "property" seem to me to be socially contextual. I grant that fences are a universal indicator. But there are societies in which the huts have no doors, and the hut is still not to be transgressed. On the other hand, our retail establishments have very stout doors that open automatically for anyone and everyone. I once read that Eskimos (Aleuts), have a sense of property concerning driftwood. Wood is valuable, there being so little of it. But, if you find a piece of it, arbitrarily "far" up the shore away from the water, it was "obviously" dragged there by someone else and is not your property. That idea -- "not mine" -- is deep within our own culture: not everything left unattended is free for the taking.
I believe that one-liners are insufficient to understand property. The quip from John Locke that property is that "with which you mix your labor" is wholly insufficient, though it does identify at least one way to look at a complex phenomenon.
One challenge to understanding property is to differentiate "first instance" examples from "civilized" cases. In other words, Robinson Crusoe owned his island because it was isolated and uninhabited when he found it. What if, however, another person had landed on the opposite side, each thinking they owned the whole thing? It is easy to imagine many people each working the "whole island" planting here, hunting there, discovering each other... Now what?
For me, the single problem with "mixing your labor" is that breaking into a bank vault takes a lot of work. You might say that the vault is someone else's property. But Robinson Crusoe might have enjoyed 20 years on "his" island before the original owner returned to check on his property...
More to the point, are in the individualist concepts of machinery, tools, and (most importantly) ideas as property.
Imagine going back in time and explaining to Cicero that you are going to perform a song so often that a million people will learn to sing it, but you are still going to claim that it is your property.
And we still have a long way to go...
Although, the Ghost Cult in the later 19th century did, to a certain extent.
Curious Currency: The Story of Money from the Stone Age to the Internet Age by Robert Leonard, Whitman, 2010
Odd & Curious Money by Charles Opitz, First Impression, 1986
An Ethnographic Study of Primitive Money by Charles Opitz, First Impression, 2001
Montesquieu says in "The Spirit of the Laws" regarding money: "...money becomes necessary; because a metal easily carried from place to place saves the great expenses which people would be obliged to be at if they always proceeded by exchange."
A simple explanation of this, is , if you need to go to Portugal to trade your sheep for wine, you sell your sheep in England for specie, then sail to Portugal to purchase the wine. Of course you still need to get your wine back to England, or preferably France, safely, so you "purchase" insurance.
He says quite a bit more about money, but you have to keep in mind the time and place in which he was writing.
(One of my majors was Finance---the time value of money is especially dear to my heart).
You are right that there was trade in copper in America, about 900-1200, give or take. How it started and why it stopped are not clear to us. We know of extensive patterns of trade in the Americas. None of those was analogous to the trading houses of the Middle Ages, or even to Sumeria vis-a-vis the Hittites. The natives were more "primitive" than that, or so the evidence seems to indicate. They exchanged gifts to seal friendships.
Ritual gift exchange is the origin of trade and commerce. But I look to the tradition of exchange beginning perhaps 20,000 YA between the two great ice ages, but in any case certainly no later than the most recent, about 12,000 YA.
It is not true that all societies have money indigenously. Many learned it; some still have not. Like writing, money began in one place, from one invention, and spread by cultural assimilation. They both spread rapidly.
In The Economy of Cities Jane Jacobs says that where we find pastoralists today, we should look for a lost city near the center of their range. (Farming was invented in cities. Cities did not evolve from agricultural communities.) Similarly, where we find ancient writing and ancient commerce, seemingly independent from Sumeria, when we are missing is the trade route and the moment of transfer.
But all of that is perhaps better addressed in a different topic.
Also, American Indians had a lingering "raider" mentality. Stealing, from other tribes, was considered a virtue, so they must have had some sense of "property".
New Amsterdam was traded by the Indians for beads and shiny things, and their thought was that they were getting the better of the Dutch, as no one could sell, or barter, what he didn't own.
I'm not one to whine too much over the "noble savage" concept.
The Dutch thought (as we do) that they "bought" the land. They did not. It was given to them. You can condemn it as "primitive" but we exchange gifts all the time and do not call it buying and selling.
I could give away someone else's car, too, but that would be stealing.
No one, and I mean no one, can give something away they don't believe they own.
You are being tongue-in-cheek, aren't you, Mike?
The Indians had no concept of property rights and mostly moved around over unsettled land. Their tribalist control was not a justification to prevent any European from settling on and claiming unowned land in the wilderness, and establishing a more civilized government. That is what they mostly did. They didn't begin by going after Indians where they were living to loot what they had. Some Indians did change to that system once they learned, and were then accepted along with their property rights.
The Native Americans did, indeed understand property, though not the same as we do today, not in every context, and not the same way across all tribes, or across all times. Lumping them all together is primitive, collectivist thinking.
More to the point, neither did the Vikings, Romans, or Greeks have our view of property. They, too, were primitive collectivists. Our understanding developed slowly and is still developing. We call land "real estate" or "real property" because the primitive collectivists of the Middle Ages did not understand machines, tools, or ideas as property. Only land was real. And they called it "estate" because title came from the state - "I hereby dub thee Duke of York." And the king could un-dub you from "your" property if you changed religions... Only in the 1990s did the UK make a dent in "treasure trove" laws that denied a farmer the right to any gold or silver coins found on his land because all gold and silver (indeed, ultimately, all land) was the property of the Crown.
As an counter-example, as an example of one step along the hard road of understanding, in the Middle Ages when only land was real property and only men could own it, in the County of Champaign, in the town of Troyez, where they held Great Fairs (with Capital Letter) and whence we have the "troy" ounce of precious metals, market stalls became heritable property, and could be owned by women. Of course, that was an exception. In most of the primitive collectivist world of Europe and America, women could not own property until the 20th century. (In Egypt of the 16th century CE and in other Muslim lands, women were legally entitled to inheritance by customary law. See Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma'Il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant by Nellie Hanna.
By the time John Locke penned his essays, Native Americans had converted to Christianity and moved into proximity with the Europeans. (I refer to Massachusetts Bay.) King Philip's War put an end to that. The natives who had acculturated were killed along with the rest. It was an injustice.
Calling them primitive tribalists does not excuse the wrong. Historical injustices exist, whether the Norman Conquest or the Holocaust. I know no way to undo it all. But the fact of injustice remains.
And, again, I insist on my opening point: how the natives organized their own lives had no bearing on the problem. If it did, there would be many excuses to rain death on other people. Ayn Rand was in favor of a pre-emptive nuclear strike, being herself undeterred by the presence there of "some non-communist blobs." I point out that the modern United Kingdom still maintains the fiction that the Crown is the primary owner of all land. Their error in philosophy does not grant you the right to hire mercenaries to seize a shire for yourself.
Natives were not all killed regardless of whether they accepted individualist property rights of civilization. There was some racism and injustice against innocent Indians, while many Indians successfully became part of civilization. All of it was in the context of a war against near stone-age primitives, most of whom would not give up their primitive, tribalist collectivist mentality leading to barbaric attacks on innocent families of settlers who had every right to be there.
That ongoing war across the continent was a serious problem during the early settlement to well beyond the establishment of the country. It took a very long time to contend with it using the technology of the time, and is not to be dismissed in terms of modern multiculturalist propaganda. Of course there were injustices. There are always are in war. We prefer civilization and do not look for war with excitement as if it were a sports tournament, but do the best we can when it comes.
Ayn Rand did not advocate "raining death on other people".
Advocating self defense against aggressor nations does not mean advocating as mere "blobs".
In 'The Girl Who Owned a City' -
the kid who has worked then was paid with a toy appreciated that toy more than ..
In Robinson Crusoe,
was the island owned by the king of Spain who had a document signed by the pope assigning all land between defined latitudes and longitudes?
Or the guy who was shipwrecked the day before Crusoe landed on the other side?
Or Man Friday who had visited years before that?
In Mitchener, Exodus I think,
Who owns the land-
the nomadic tribes who live in and roam over it?
The Ottoman empire?
Those whose ancestors lived there a millennium ago?
The settlers who drained swamps, built dams, irrigated the land, and grew fruit and vegetables?
Maybe the question is wrong, property is not fundamental, it derives from owner.
So what decides ownership?
As a fan of one-liners, there is of course-
'Whatever the court decides'.
Put aside law and social context and consider ethics alone then try-
Ownership comes only from sweat.
(This may be too biblical for some).
"“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
The Virtue of Selfishness “Man’s Rights,”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 92
For Rand morality exists for an individual on a deserted island. So if rights are part of morality then they exist separate from a social context, however in a social context they "are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
You seem to be saying that Crusoe would not have any property rights in things that he did not actively use. There is no "potential property."
But that rests on ewv's premise that intelligence is the source of property. RC must perceive his needs and understand how to fulfill them.
From that, suppose, he never perceives the guava as fruit he can eat. From your premise, the guava is never his property. He never owns the whole island, but only every bit of it that he actually uses.
That seems like a reductio fallacy to me...
But 'Robinson Crusoe' portrayals are at best relevant as extreme examples to illustrate the necessity of personal productivity, and otherwise emergency ethics of no particular significance to how principles for normal life are established.
Here is a short clip (under two minutes). http://bit.ly/2kdABpH
When our daughter was in school, a lot came up about "aair" and and "equality" I used to tell her there is no "fair" in nature, that it is a man made concept, which cannot be legislated.
Government control like NPS and BLM is statist control, not joint ownership rights. They specialize in seizing private property rights.
It is an oversight of Austrian economics that air, sunshine, and beauty are not subject to the market. Beauty in particular must be produced. So, beauty is something that someone can own as property.
Beauty may or may not be produced. No one produced the view of stars in the sky at night or sunshine or the air in the atmosphere. That is not an oversight of economics. If something becomes in limited supply it can then be a commodity.
The key thing is it's not excludable. If you do something that pollutes or improves the air, you can't exclude people who don't want to pay to improve it. You can with drinking water, though.
To me excludability is a basic issue in economics.
Suppose you have a like surrounded by plots of land with different owners. Some of the owners are using fertilizers that promote algae growth, polluting the lake. I don't have a perfect solution, but it seems like the courts or gov't should compare a group of properties by a polluted lake with a similar group of properties by an unpolluted lake, use those numbers to calculate a cost for each unit of fertilizer used, and make the people who use the fertilizer pay damages equal to how much value they're destroying.
If there were only two property owners, it could be handled by mutual agreement. The owners who doesn't want the fertilizer used could negotiate a price with the other owner for polluting the lake. This becomes problematic, though, when there's a group of owners sharing a lake, and there's one holdout who says that for whatever reason this lake is priceless to him. Maybe his family owned property next to it and swam there for generations.. I'm sympathetic to his position, but I don't think his property rights override all the other owners'. If he wants non-polluted water, he needs take the money paid in damages plus the money from selling his "damaged" property, and purchase land by a lake he owners or on which he owns a binding non-pollute agreement of some sort.
I am not sure that that is entirely correct. I do not know how patents on mathematical theorems would work. dbhalling and I have gone around on that, unproductively. (He is an IP attorney.) He has denied several times with me and others that two people can independently invent something. His real world argument is that in our society today, a professional inventor does literature searches before embarking or getting too far down the road with an idea.
I agree. I think you agree that some component of policing is excludable and others are not.
On a tangential note, I think the non-excludable part is bigger. If someone is bothering you and you call the police, there's a good chance they won't get there in time. The main benefit is after the crime or attempted crime they collect evidence that could be used to help other citizens, including full-service subscribers in an excludable subscription model.
I overheard the police confront someone in front of my house. They said, "you say you're out here selling magazines, but you don't have any sales materials and you don't live here. You just got out of jail for burglary. I am not going to arrest you. I'm not your father but I'm telling you in a fatherly way if you break into my house at night I'm gonna blow you away. You're going to break into the wrong place eventually, and I don't want to see that happen." He was benefiting everyone in the neighborhood.
The Indians have an interesting 'claim' on the land in that they were an indigenous people compared to the Europeans when they began to appear, but they had invaded the country from Asia, what gives them the right to ownership because no one else is around? The tribes of the Americas were anything but cooperative and could take another tribes property at any time. It is interesting that they all want to band together when there is the opportunity to aggrandize their property any time there is some connection to them and their ancestors to the land; to wit: a local tribe suddenly claimed an area was their sacred ground when someone discovered ancient petroglyphs on the land. Up until then the local tribe knew nothing about the petroglyphs and they have no clue as to what message they might have but once discovered they wanted 'their' land returned to them.
One thing I am certain of, no government no matter how small or large should ever be allowed to own or control any property (land, intellectual, goods or etc.) under any condition for any purpose. When the entity that has the right to use violence against its citizens has the right to property it is simply one more abuse they will use to its maximum extent; to wit: The BLM, Forest Service, Park Service etc.
Anyone had a right to settle on the unowned land, most of which wasn't even being used in the very sparsely inhabited wilderness. And anyone had a right to institute a free society with a better government protecting the rights of the individual for civilization.
Tribes claiming control over "ancient sacred ground" have no more right to it today than centuries before, only a superior force in the form of the National Park Service, etc. helping them to destroy civilization and private property.
I agree that the "ancient sacred ground" argument has no legal or moral justification.
“Indian removal was a policy of the United States government in the 19th century whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River, thereafter known as Indian Territory.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_...
Also:
“In 1823, a landmark decision was made by the Supreme Court (Johnson v. M'Intosh) that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans, because Indians could not hold title to their own lands, even if they had occupied them for years. This was because their 'right of occupancy' was subordinate to the United States' 'right of discovery.' This decision would become a staple in federal and state cases related to Indian land title for the next two centuries.” http://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-pu...
And:
http://www.history.com/topics/native-...
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroom...
Prohibitions on private citizens buying land from Indians pertained to tribes on reservations, in accordance with Federal policy, because they would not live as individuals. Private citizens could not override government reservation policy. It was not about Indians living as private citizens assimilated into the civilized population with private land ownership.
None of the standard multicultural political correctness and revisionism is an argument for the White Guilt line denouncing the settlement of the continent and establishing a civilized society.
“The Indian Removal Act was put in place to give to the southern states the land that Indians had settled on.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_... The “civilized society” that benefitted from this policy was primarily a society of (civilized?) slaveholders who regarded Native Americans, like African-Americans, as inferior beings not deserving of rights. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 did not distinguish between peaceful and warlike Native American settlements – it lumped them all into a collective category in order to carry out a statist land grab.
This persisted for centuries. It doesn't make any difference when the word "reservation" was first used to designate areas confining tribes which had no concept of individualism or private property rights.
Individual Indians did in fact assimilate into an individualist culture and there were few Indian slaves even in the south. The overwhelming Indian problem was the tribalists who had no concept of rights or individualism and acted accordingly. That set the context for the entire Indian war problems and how they were viewed by civilized people defending their rights and frightened by the Indian raids. Individuals settling in the wilderness despite the tribalists were not a "statist land grab".
If you want to criticize systematic unjustified treatment of the Indians look at the late 19th century and early 20th century government actions like the "progressive" national parks where Indians were removed and otherwise treated as subhuman tourist attractions long after there was any threat of Indian wars. The whole welfare state reservation system today is destructive.
The leftist, multiculturalist sweeping trashing and misrepresentation of the settling and founding of this country as Evil White "racism" and "stealing the land from the Indians" is no better when dressed up in bizarre libertarian rhetoric of "statist land grab" that doesn't show any more conceptual understanding than the rest of the anarchist "idealist" fringe. It's no wonder that they simultaneously steal from and attack Ayn Rand and still pile on trying to resurrect the otherwise rightfully forgotten 1970s Rothbard-Liggio line.
I agree with you that “the whole welfare state reservation system today is destructive,” but I would point out that this treatment of Native Americans as “subhuman tourist attractions” was facilitated by the then-entrenched and widespread view of them as racially inferior. This is a clear example of a mindset that Ayn Rand considered abhorrent and described as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”
Nonetheless, after the collapse of Cahokia and Mound culture in general, in what became "Virginia" down to "Georgia" extensive agriculture and large villages were attractive enough that some English settlers abandoned their failing colonies and went native. This, of course, was before the English Revolution of 1688, John Locke's great thesis, the English Bill of Rights, and other roots of the new American civilization.
Also, for a graduate class in criminology theory, writing a term paper on traditional forms of punishment and remediation, I happened upon the Cheyenne. It seems that about 1780 give or take they had some sort of internal power struggle that was settled by a wise woman. She happened to be a slave from the Asinoboine tribe, but they recognized her authority on this matter. She set up a system of checks and balances in which local chiefs elected non-hereditary grand chiefs who formed a general council. Being spread out over the Great Plaines, they had four troops of "soldiers" - Dogs, Foxes, Crazy Dogs, and something else I forget - whose job it was to patrol the outer margins and herd the stragglers back to the center. We're talking about "margins" and "centers" many miles in extent: for the annual gathering of the tribes each summer, the ceremonial "center" was a mile across. (Though ethnologists called them "soldiers" they did not actually fight external enemies, because hardly anyone was out there until we showed up.)
That entire theme was widely promoted by the New Left and the radical Indian ethnicity movement decades ago where it was picked up by libertarians and anarchists attracted to and pandering to the leftist counter culture. Strained arguments couching in "libertarian" rhetoric and re-interpretations of "documentation" do not make it true.
This page is about property rights and their defense, not revisionist ethnic rationalizations on behalf of tribalists and the poetic propaganda of supposedly innocent noble savages and their "ancestral homelands". There was no moral equivalency between the primitive Indian savagery and settlers fighting back, including herding the tribes out of the way up through the late 19th century. Settlers had every right to live in the unowned wilderness and no duty to submit to primitive tribal control.
The land base of this country was not "stolen" by "statist land grabs" of "peaceful villages". That sweeping misrepresentation was not the basis of this country, which was founded on the rights of the individual despite the primitive tribes sparsely inhabiting the continent and despite injustices like slavery in the south that were eliminated precisely because of what the country was.
Re: “The land base of this country was not ‘stolen’ by ‘statist land grabs’ of ‘peaceful villages’.” Most of it wasn’t, but some of it was, as I discussed above.
Re: “There was no moral equivalency between the primitive Indian savagery and settlers fighting back, including herding the tribes out of the way up through the late 19th century.” The moral status of interactions among Native Americans and European colonizers is context-dependent. It pertains to individual acts that took place at varying times and places and under varying circumstances. There is no single blanket “moral status” that can cover all of these interactions. Sometimes settlers were in the right, sometimes Native Americans were, and sometimes neither side was. The claim that it was all about “primitive Indian savagery and settlers fighting back” is a vast oversimplification.
Re: “Settlers had every right to live in the unowned wilderness and no duty to submit to primitive tribal control.” It logically follows, then, that “Native Americans had every right to live in the unowned wilderness and no duty to submit to colonial, state or federal government control.” Both statements are correct.
The problem of the United States versus the Native Americans reflects the many contradictions in the theory of property and property rights that we inherited. While the Europeans depended on finely grained understandings among themselves - "virtual" wealth in credit, for instance - they did not extend the same theories to the Natives whose lands they wanted.
I point out that if you look at a picture of "Earth at Night" you will see that mostly, we are concentrated in a few places. Aliens from outer space might recognize that fact and still insist on building their own spaceports in the greatly "unoccupied" expanses of Nebraska ...
I pointed out that "air rights" are a new understanding that did not exist before the industrial age brought the skyscraper and aviation.
You deny the "wedge into outer space" but it is known that a commercial enterprise on the
ground sold the space above it to a skyscraper that was built over it.
In your view, they could just have built the structure over the store and screwed the owner for his primitive lack of knowledge.
NYC 2012 here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...
Air Rights in Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rig...
There is no right "as a land-owner... to a wedge from the center of the Earth extending infinitely into space". Skyscrapers are not built in an infinite outer space.
someone does something to make it his property; that is, to farm it, cultivate it, or at least to put some sign or barrier on it to differentiate it from other land, such as a fence, or at least some sort of marker. I read that the
American Indians used to never put up fences to differentiate, so as to indicate "This is my land,
not my neighbor's." (There may have been differ-
ences in tribes on that custom; I don't know).
But, at a minimum, there should be at least
some physical sign of ownership or possession.
(There is a stolen concept here. The 640 acres was already deeded to the owner under the laws of the Territory. So, the concept of title created the right to property.)
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
Once original ownership has been established for the first time through discovery or labor, then I think it is pretty simple. The property belongs to that individual until he decides and agrees to not own it any more by any means he sees fit. Whether he decides to sell, gift, abandon, etc. makes no difference. It is his until it isn't by his choice. I am simply talking about the ethics of how ownership "ought" to be.
Action is greater than thought.
Also, you do not need to actually build anything to get it patented. You did back in 1793. That changed in the 19th century. A few years ago, Randall L. Mills was granted a patent for "hydrino energy." Complaints from other scientists caused the USPTO to withdraw its grant.
In theory right now in common real estate law in the USA (or at least the Eastern part of it), as a land-owner you have a wedge from the center of the Earth extending infinitely into space. Of course, the practical reality is different, especially regarding air rights. However, in New York City, for example, air rights are real. You can have your property on the ground and sell the space above it.
In a aerial society of airships, dirigibles, blimps, and balloons, very clear and complex concepts of "air rights" would make us look like Native Americans of the skies.
Just for example, considering the airways, the federal government almost followed what Ayn Rand identified as the proper way for the govenrment to privatize frontier lands. In the 1920s through 1950s, there were radio beacon airways that connected cities. Better navigation devices made those radio beacon airways obsolete. But they could have been privatized.
There is no reason why three-dimensional airspaces cannot be demarcated, owned, bought, sold, leased, rented, ...
The same is true of spaces under the surface of the oceans.
Land owners do not have a right to infinite space above them. You can't block air travel or satellites in space and a lot more.
Wait, where did it go??
Now please excuse me while I file my claim to a distant galaxy and let the inhabitants know that there's a new sheriff in town. :-)
Can I build a space station that blocks the Sun? It has been considered.
However, I have an interest in laws regarding "freedom of the seas". These are still being hashed out, and certainly change from era to era. For instance, as regards the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, I believe Turkey has been given international sanction to "govern" them, for certain types of ships.
See "The Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits"---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux...
Make that "intellectual capital".
To me, in order for something to be considered property it must be associated with an ownership claim - whether by me or by someone else. And my claim can exist regardless of any social context. If I existed to the exclusion of everyone else, I would still claim my body and my mind my own first be recognition of the basic idea of me. Nothing else has boundaries or can be subject to a claim of ownership until they are differentiated from me. Thus the very first identification of property rights has to do with this primary identification and separation.
Second, I then must evaluate my relationship in context with everything else which is not me. If I have an exclusive right of control and use of something, I assert personal property rights to that object. If I have shared right of control or use I assert shared or co-mingled property rights. And if I acknowledge someone else's personal property rights to something I acknowledge my lack of even shared right of control.
As soon as I breathe air, I assert a personal property ownership over it. When it leaves my body I forego that ownership. It is fleeting. Water is the same way. When we talk about water rights (which are a big deal in my area), what we are talking about are water use rights - who gets to make first claim on water from such-and-such a source.
"Bundle of rights" refers to the fact that you can have a partial right of use, such as an easement over land, so the full right of use is divided among different individuals in a well-defined manner.
Using guns to steal and violate rights does not negate the principle of the rights. The raw cynicism of 'guns make for property rights' is anti-intellectual 'might makes right' hooliganism, not a theory of property rights.
Of course you lose your possessions (or your life) to thugs who get away with it; your rights have been abrogated. That is why we require a government to protect our rights from arbitrary use of force.
Hitlers and Obamas don't justify the cynical principle that "guns make for property rights", which reduces the whole intellectual argument to one gang against another.
Looking at you intellectualizing I have to wonder if you have ever been in a street fight....do you understand that there really are people in the world that just don't give a shit about all your high minded ideals? These people do exist outside of the television and the internet chat rooms. They are real. You will occupy the moral high ground...but if they are strong enough they take what you think is yours.
I defend property rights on principle in addition to having spend many years, fighting in the political realm and stopping government agencies taking private property rights, accomplishing far more than you can imagine while you stand by cynically chuckling against what you call "intellectualizing".
"Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights - they didn't have a settled society; they had predominantly nomadic "cultures" - they didn't have rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights they had not conceived of and were not using. It's wrong to attack a country that respects (even tries to respect) individual rights. If you do, you are an aggressor and are morally wrong. But if a "country" does not protect rights - if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief- why should you respect the "rights" that they don't have or respect." -- Ayn Rand Answers: the Best of Q&A edited by Robert Mayhew. New American Library, 2005, 1st ed., p. 103)
The Right to Rob Banks
Ayn Rand's statements there are wrong on several grounds. First and foremost, this "Cowboys and Indians" view of the natives is wholly incomplete. Most were settled into communities that depended on farming enhanced with hunting. Some of those communities were larger than Boston, Philadelphia, New York, or Charleston of the time -- and remained so for perhaps 100 years. In particular, the Cherokee had adapted many of the customs of the Europeans, including an alphabet -- and slavery.
Our conceptual failure is rooted in the White maps of the time that showed rough areas - Seneca, Iroquois, Erie, etc. - and never put "dots" with names where those "villages" of 10,000 were -- and never gave those villages special names like "New York." (If you think that "Home" is not a name, just keep that in mind when space aliens claim our planet because we only call it "Dirt" not something special like New Sirius 7.)
How is this the right to rob banks?
Violent right wing militias rob banks by displaying "warrants" and "court orders." The Federal government has effectively nationalized the banks, even our much-touted BB&T. They are socialist non-property... as are the public parks, airports, schools, roads... So, any "civilized" person has the right to take those un-propertied non-assets -- or so it could be claimed.
By Ayn Rand's theory that the better man has more rights, anyone can take anything from anyone else whom they can condemn. It is unlikely that Switzerland, Lichtenstein, the Cayman Islands, and Singapore could unite to militarily conquer the United States. But a cartel of economically unfettered capitalist nations could conquer America financially - and maybe already have...
Maybe that conquest was not carried out by primitive tribal collections called "nations." Perhaps it was done by advanced capitalist organizations called "corporations." The complaints that "our" "nation" is being "sold" by "debt" is just the cry of uncivilized primitives who cannot conceptualized modern financial management.
... or so it could be claimed...
Lest you read the wrong intention here, all I am saying is that Ayn Rand's condemnation of the native Americans is not sufficient for the conceptual foundation of property.
I agree with the statements in this discussion that the concept of property begins with "mine." Property is created by human intelligence.
"For me, the single problem with "mixing your labor" is that breaking into a bank vault takes a lot of work. You might say that the vault is someone else's property. But Robinson Crusoe might have enjoyed 20 years on "his" island before the original owner returned to check on his property."
This is complete nonsense. Locke was about creating value not random effort or destructive effort. There is an Adam Mossoff paper on point.
Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property—by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “The Property Status of the Airwaves,”
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 122
Are you saying Locke was not part of the Enlightenment?
Locke had to understand that at least implicitly -- the same way the founders of this country with their 'right to life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness' understood an implicit egoism despite the explicit traditional ethics of the time -- even though Locke did not have the Objectivist ethics.
Without that he could not have thought the way he did about property rights. Today there is a lot of confusion over Locke's 'mixing labor' argument: there is so much Rationalism today that it's often expected that property rights must be somehow deduced rationalistically, and seeing nothing but 'mixing labor' think it's a non sequitur.
Yes there is a lot of purposeful distortion of Locke;s ideas on property.
The basic unit of property is your person; body and mind-(assuming you have one) AND the results of your labor, physical or Mental.
I am dino~
Hear me ROAR!
The clip is about a bad guy but the scene sprang into my head~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAs0b...
They've convinced millions of people not to read their own laws, nor comprehend what they read.
. . .
In America, under the republican form, absolutely owned property is known as private property - a constitutionally protected endowed right.
Qualified ownership is known as estate (like "real estate") and is a revenue taxable privilege.
Since rights protected by law cannot be taxed by law, only privileges can be taxed. That's why you will never find one statute nor constitution that levies an excise tax on private property ownership.
You may want to ask your public servants how your endowed right to absolutely own private property transformed into the revenue taxable privilege to hold real estate.
But do not be surprised at their silence. . .
It's a fortunate thing that so much value comes from things people build. In pre-industrial times, when the value was in the land, the strong controlled the land and said gods wanted it that way. Critics said the gods actually wanted humans to share the land fairly.
This is becoming a moot point when most value in the world is in things people create for one another. Maybe not moot, but less important. Someone on the island can get a Raspberry Pi an old TV set, and place to access the Internet, and she can write code worth the cost of the equipment plus a bunch of land plus labor and equipment to farm it. It doesn't matter whether she owns land because it's not a key factor of production anymore.
I don't have many answers here, just questions to frame the problems.
Also, see Lucky's comment above.
I would argue that "property" is a moral concept. Once understood as such, then rational determination of its definition involving "ownership" can then be derived.