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...
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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.
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...
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.
Here is a short clip (under two minutes). http://bit.ly/2kdABpH
Yes there is a lot of purposeful distortion of Locke;s ideas on property.
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.
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".
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.
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