More on property

As I wrote recently, the concept of private property is a social construct. It isn't a fact of nature, "out there" to be discovered. It's an invention. The social conventions about what can and cannot be property, and what rights inhere in various kinds of property, and who can own what property, vary from time to time and place to place. And possession of property is not inevitably or inherently just.

In the United States, for example -- as in many other times and places -- people could be property. The people who were owned, of course, had no property rights. Slave owners maintained that depriving the of the right to own other people who violate their liberty, and their political rights to govern their own states as they saw fit. Even today some people claim that the principle of liberty gives them the right to discriminate against people of African descent, that equal employment or housing or public accommodation laws are contrary to freedom. As one can readily see, that would depend on one's point of view.

The property rights of slave owners may seem to have been unrestricted. They could rape or kill their slaves if they wished, and they often did. But they were restricted after all, in that they could not dispatch their slaves to assault or steal from other white people. And that brings us to the inescapable point that property rights are always and everywhere limited, for the obvious reason that how you use your property can affect my use and enjoyment of my own. If you erect a building on your property that blocks the sun from my garden or blocks my view of the valley, you have deprived me of some of the use of my property. If you build a lead smelter next to a golf course, you have destroyed 100% of the value of the golf course. That is why there are zoning laws -- to protect some property rights by restricting others.

So liberty for one person inevitably means loss of liberty for another. The essential nature of property is not that it incorporates a universal principle the respect of which answers all arguments. On the contrary, laws and conventions regarding property trade off one set of interests against another. They are determined by political power, not by nature or a deity or any abstract principle. Keep all this in mind as we continue to review the Great Transformation and the origins of our society.