Chapter 1: Property and Ownership

The significance of property ownership has rarely been fully appreciated. All sentient life is concerned with property, either instrinctively or rationally. No organism capable of volitional action can escape the demands arising within it for some kind of property relationship. Survival of all beings capable of consciousness is predicated directly upon some kind of property relationship.

Simple forms of life are propelled instinctively toward food, which they possess and ingest. Possession is a property relationship. Complex forms of life are guided, partly by instinct and partly by rational processes, toward the mastery of their environment which occurs when property is acquired and utilized. A propertyless living organism is inconceivable.

Man, the most complex of all living creatures, has the most numerous and varied demands to express in relation to property. Guided by reason or by a few residual instinctive drives, man dominates his environment more than any other living thing. His master of environment is primarily if not totally a matter of property acquisition and utilization.

Since the concern of this study relates entirety to man's well-being, and is not concerned with the well-being of other living things, the approach here will be to develop a philosophy of property ownership within a human context. Since virtually all struggle for existence and for improving the conditions of existence deals directly or indirectly with property, this philosophy must include an examination of the gigantic role property plays in human living. Any philosophy must include an examination of the facts and principles of reality, and since property comprises an order of fact and principle of overwhelming magniture, no philosophy of practical significance can overlook this area. Nearly all philosophical studies up to the present time have concentrated their inquiry in the theological, mystical, and metaphysical realms, seeking to probe the mystery of life's origins and to chart the methods and epistemology of knowledge, yet circumventing the question of property or, at best, skimming briefly over the surface.

One of the obvious reasons for this avoidance appears to be the very early assumption that property and property relationships were somehow crass and materialistic. The yearning of the early lovers of wisom was for an unfoldment of the real character of life. Property was viewed more or less as impedimentia. But this is probably because the early tendency was to look at property as "things," or simply as land, and to fail to realize that the desire and drive for property, the yearning for ownership, is one of the most fundamental facts of life. Human beings long to possess items which they admire and appreciate. Conceivably, love, recognized as fundamental with humans, is somehow related to this deeply imbedded drive to possess, to own, to master personally, to exclude the rest of the world.

Property viewed as the object or objects of man's drive to own, is of far less importance than the drive itself. To own, to possess, to control and master, to acquire and utilize—these motivations are basic to man. The objects of these drives vary and are essentially incidental to them, many different kinds of property serving satisfactorily as the targets for men's yearnings.

Had the attention of the early savants focused primarily upon the human propensity to own, they might have recognized its fundamental nature. Instead, they focused upon the objects to be owned, the "things," which were deemed of less importance than man. Thus, in early efforts to understand, property and ownership meant the same thing. Property (the item to be owned) and ownership (the act of owning) were somehow indiscriminately merged, which led to oversimplifications and devious thinking. While these philosophers evaluted correctly the primacy of man in relation to property, they considered man's yearning to possess it an undesirable trait which superior men could and would sublimate.

This type of reasoning is implicit in Plato's Republic; the Stoics adopted it. The Epicureans, who rejected the proposition and reversed it, were viewed as hedonistic or as gross sensualists. Christainity, which borrowed so much from both Plato and the Stoics, carried forward the idea that virtue was somehow related to propertylessness; the poor were in a more favored position because they were not burdened with possessions. To follow the Master, one was admonished to give away what he possessed.

Buddhism, which preceded Christianity, proposed that it is desire itself which constitutes man's major problem. It is not enough to abandon property; mental and emotional discipline must be imposed to the point where the individual loses all desire. Nirvana, the state of transcendent nothingness, arrives only for the individual who has stopped all yearning, including even the yearning for Nirvana.

After the study of economics had been organized and its first monumental work published, economic examination was viewed by Carlyle as "the dismal science." What could be less inspiring than an examination of the physical facts of reality dealing with production and distribution? But the economists, too, tended to overlook the significance of ownership. They became engrossed in property itself, as well as its utilization. Most of them became preoccupied with statistics in an effort to prove either that there are natural laws which govern the flow of goods and services in the market, or that there are no such natural laws.

Criticism of classical economists is not intended. They pointed out that man is acquisitive, that his wants are apparently insatiable, that he will struggle, indeed, he must struggle for the scarce items that make survivial possible. But the classicists, along with many others, called for a central agency of force to regulate man and his relationships to property. Man's desire to own was viewed as both a natural endowment and something that was fraught with much danger.

In all this, men were viewed as either workers or laborers, or as consumers. Those few who served as capitalists and entrepreneurs were rarely recognized for what they were, merely specialized kinds of workers or consumers. Almost all men play both roles, serving as producers and then as consumers. Workers, entrepreneurs, capitalists—producers all—unite in being consumers. But popular misconceptions place capitalists and entrepreneurs in a separate category, under the supposition that they were extracting wealth or money from the market and hence preventing workers as well as consumers from their full and deserved rewards. The argument became heated and political. Less and less thought was given to the nature of man as an owner, and more and more thought was given to amounts of property owned and to the social and collective implications of scared amounts of property (poverty) and abundant amounts of property (riches).

Man's true role as an owner was first glimpsed by Austrians who, in developing the theory of marginal utility, recognized that value is a peculiarly human characteristic placed upon items of property, having little to do with production or the costs of production. Praxeologists have emphasized that it is acting man who must be understood. But even here, a search into the desire to own has faltered, for again most attention has pursued property, and its ebb and flow in relation to supply and demand. The nature of property, its acquisition, development, production, distribution, maintenance, preservation, and protection must not be overlooked. But the first and most important effort must be made to separate property from ownership, which is a relationship between man, the owner, and property, the item to be owned.

Property is anything that is subject to ownership. Property exists whether owned or not. In a virgin area, where men have not yet penetrated, the land and all the natural appurtenances are property. The advent of man does not change the character of the land, as property. But the relationship of the land to man does change when men acquire this land. I would identify this kind of property before the appearance of an owner as unowned property. I would similarly identify items in discard, which men have once owned and which they now disclaim.

A second classification of property encompasses property that is correctly owned. In this relationship an owner (man) has assumed sovereign control over that property which he claims as his own. Assuming that there are no prior or rival claims to the property, and thus decisions respecting the property derive from the authority of the rightful owner, and assuming that the exercise of authority is limited to the property owned, then the ownership is complete and a condition of correct or proper ownership ensures.

A third classification is property that is incorrectly owned.

1. A man may presume to own something that is not property.

2. A man may acquire ownership of a property through theft or fraud wherein the rightful owner is deprived of what is his through the establishment of a conflicting claim resting solely upon the physical possession or control of the property, but denying the rightful claim of the real owner.

3. A man may acquire a property, paying for it in full, yet find that another man or a group of men, who have not paid for the property, are empowered to interfere with his sovereign control of the property, thus denying his authority over what he owns.

The search for a single word that conveys the meaning intended insofar as incorrect ownership is concerned has been fruitless. The person of institution that possesses property through force or fraud can, after possession becomes a fact, act as though the property thus acquired were correctly owned. A contest over its control may or may not ensue, depending on legal or compulsory intervention. But the property acquired by force or fraud does not retain some special characteristic that makes it possible for us, upon seeing it, to declare unequivocally, "That property is not correctly owned." The onus of theft, fraud, or force attaches to persons, not to property. Property remains innocent.

All property is subject to sovereign control by some human being. Someone somewhere has the ultimate decision-making power. When the claimant to property has paid for the property in full or has rightfully acquired the property through first claim, sovereign control rightfully belongs to him. If a man or an agency exists to which the owner must repair for permissions to use his property as he wishes, or to dispose of it as he sees fit, then in fact he is not the sovereign owner, but some other man or agency has sovereign control.

In the present age, a discussion of the ownership of property is vital. For many years it was supposed that conflicting ideologies disputed the question as to whether a system of capitalism would pertain. Social was viewed as the antithesis of capitalist. But this question has long since been settled. Capitalism will survive. By capitalism is meant an economic system in which wealth, in the form either of natural resources or of manufactured goods, can be employed for the production of more wealth. There is no longer a question plaguing humanity at this point. Wealth will be employed in the production of further wealth. The question that remains to be answered relates to the ownership of wealth.

Is wealth to be owned by private persons who will manage what they own (private capitalism)? Or is wealth to be taken from private persons under one pretext or another, and collectively owned and managed (state capitalism)? Or is wealth to be retained in a kind of ownership by private persons, but its management relegated to collective groups, either governmental or otherwise, which, while not owning, may exercise certain prerogatives of ownership (mixed capitalism — fascism)?

If a system of private capitalism exists, it must be founded upon private ownership and management of the tools of production and distribution. In a word, capital goods (entrepreneurial) are to be retained and controlled by private persons.

Socialism, either wholly or in part, champions the abolition of private ownership of the tools of production and distribution. Private property of a non-productive character may remain, but productive goods (capital goods) are to be owned and controlled by the state of by some other collective agency (not a privately owned corporation) under some type of centrally planned economy.

There is a particularly popular brand of socialism now prevalent which is usually classes as fascism. Fascism is "national socialism" (nazi-ism) in which the uses and management of property have been nationalized (socialized) while private ownership shorn of its management and regulatory functions, continues.

In all types of socialism, the good of the social whole is sought. Individual rights to property may be abrogated at any time by the controlling group. A centrally planned economy is implicit with private ownership limited to consumer goods.

It is instructive that in those nations which have adopted socialism either under a communist banner or the banner of a welfare state, a kind of state capitalism ensures. Government becomes ever more active as a partner in economic matters, serving as producer, manufacturer, distributor, and financier. Thus socialism does not lead to the abolition of capitalism; it leads to the abolition of the private ownership and management of capital goods.

The correct antonym of socialism is individualism. In an economic system of individualism, private ownership and management of the tools, production, and finance would be preserved.