In principle, all property is a theft from the community. But even Bakunin wasn't thinking about socializing his socks.
Instead of signing up to maximalist and unrealistic ideas, it is more normal to establish the conditions under which private property can violate people's fundamental rights. This does not necessarily imply a form of socialism, as the ultra-liberal right claims. For a long time there have been communal rights that the lords of the land had to respect.


The problem, with or without socialism, is where to set the limits of those rights. And the problem needs an urgent solution, because the neoliberal offensive is privatizing basic rights such as health, water, education and justice.

It seems to me that issues such as the ownership of ideas are of a different order than the ownership of land, labour or the means of production.

It seems to me that issues such as the ownership of ideas are of a different order than the ownership of land, labour or the means of production. — David Mo

The ownership of ideas is closely related to the ownership of labor and the means of production, because if one company owns the idea of doing some work a particular way, then nobody else is permitted to do that unless they pay the owner of the idea of doing that.

Burglary is experienced as a violation almost like an assault - almost like rape. — unenlightened

As to property, there are legal distinctions between real property (land and it's attachments) and personal property. You can further subdivide personal property into tangibles (chattel, which would include your car, your books, and your dog) and intangible (e.g. intellectual property, stocks, and bank accounts).

In terms of real property, you can distinguish between your dwelling and all other items of real property. You have certain rights to your dwelling that exceed other items of real estate in terms of your right to protect it with deadly force, as it is considered an extension of you and your family. Your home is your castle. The same cannot be said of your barn, your business, or other items of real estate you might own.

Where you divide it this way:

A. Beings.
B. Goods.
C. Real estate.
D. Ideas.

I divide it:

A. Real Estate
1. Dwelling
2. All other forms of real estate

B. Personal Property
1. Tangible
2. Intangible

In terms of "beings," that would historically have been classified as tangible personal property (chattel). Fortunately, that is no longer the case. A dog remains chattel to this day. In terms of parental rights over children or a state having rights over inmates and whatnot, I would not consider those to be property rights at all, but that of custody, which I take to be a certain protective duty one has. We typically say that one has custodial rights to people, not possessory rights.

People identify with their property very strongly. — unenlightened

People had less property before the 20th Century and hence the laws especially in the US reflect this. Stealing a horse was a really severe crime back in the days. It's not so universally anymore.

If a burglar entered my house and I would shoot him dead, in my country I would be the one in serious trouble with the law. The court would likely see it as excessive use of force. Was I and my family really in peril? Why did I have the firearm? Did I fire a warning shot? Was it necessary to shoot to kill? In a country where you simply do not get to carry a firearm for personal defense, but only for hunting or shooting hobby, the law looks for an American to be quite lax and in favor of the criminal.

Hence this is a societal issue.

People had less property before the 20th Century and hence the laws especially in the US reflect this. Stealing a horse was a really severe crime back in the days. It's not so universally anymore. — ssu

Laws allowing deadly force for the protection of one's home are often referenced as castle laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine

These laws came to the US from England as part of the common law and were first enunciated in 1628 by the English courts (from the same wiki article):

"In English common law the term is derived from the dictum that 'an Englishman's home is his castle' This concept was established as English law by the 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, in his The Institutes of the Laws of England, 1628. ' For a man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man's home is his safest refuge].'"

The article also states, "The legal concept of the inviolability of the home has been known in Western civilization since the age of the Roman Republic." The Roman Republic existed from 509 BCE to 27 BCE.

That is to say that the right to protect one's domicile is not a 20th century American invention.

Anyone can acquire property through a fair and willing exchange, like Branson. A community can also do this, perhaps forming a community garden or farm or park. One can also purchase property and donate it to any community he sees fit. But if it is not property, and is instead anyone’s land, willing exchange and fair use are thrown out the window. Anyone mighty enough can come along and say you’re not allowed to go there anymore, and you’d have little recourse save for violence.

The very nature of procedural justice (as opposed to distributive justice) is connected to issues of property. Because just like analytic knowledge is about following the correct steps in sequence from the assigned meaning of words, so too procedural justice is about following the correct steps in sequence from the assigned rights that who has over what, which is identical to the concept of ownership, i.e. to have rights over something is what it means to own it.

When we assign ownership of certain things to certain people, which is to say that the will of those people controls what it is permissible to do to or with those things, we enter the realm of property rights, things that are right or wrong just in virtue of who owns what and what they do or don't want done with it, regardless of whether it actually inflicts hedonic suffering or not. This is a matter of perfect duties, of things being obligatory or forbidden, not just about merely supererogatory goods.

But that kind of justice in turn depends on the assignment of ownership of the things in question, and that is not something that is itself a matter of perfect duty, but only imperfect duty. Nobody inherently owns anything but themselves. Rather, sociopolitical communities arbitrarily assign ownership of property to people, and could assign it differently. Like words mean whatever the linguistic community agrees that they mean, people own what other people agree that they own, and so long as everyone involved agrees on who owns what, that is all that is necessary for that ownership to be legitimate.

But when people disagree about who rightly owns what, we must have some method of deciding who is correct, if we are to salvage the possibility of any procedural justice at all; for if, for example, two people each claim ownership of a tract of land and are each wanting to deny the other the use of it, they will find no agreement on who is morally in the right to do so because they disagree about who owns it and so who has any rights over it at all. Such a conflict could be resolved in a creative and cooperative way by dividing up the land into two parcels, one owned by each person, that would permit both people to get the use that they want out of it without hindering the other's use of it. Or the same property can have multiple owners, so long as the uses of the property by those multiple owners do not conflict in context.

(Initially, all property is owned by everyone, and in doing so effectively owned by no one; it is the division of the world into those people who own the property and those who don't that constitutes the assignment of ownership to it.)

But if no such cooperative resolution is to be found, and an answer must be found as to which party to the conflict actually has the correct claim to the property in question, I propose that that answer be found by looking back through the history of the property's usage until the most recent uncontested usage can be found: the most recent claim to ownership that was accepted by the entire community. That is then to be held as the correct assignment of ownership.

(NB that this means just taking or enclosing something by force doesn't make it rightfully yours, if everyone else protests but just can't do anything about it. If later on they get the force together to take it back from you, they have every right to do so; "hey I stole that first fair and square" is no retort).


From these two types of procedural justice, the perfect duties of respecting ownership and the imperfect duties of assigning ownership, we can derive a set of rights, which can be formulated in terms of obligations and their negations. Rights have been categorized, following the work of authors such as Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, into four groups organized across two different distinctions: the distinction between active and passive rights (not to be confused with positive and negative rights; either an active or a passive right can be either positive or negative), and the distinction between first-order and second-order rights. Active first-order rights are also termed "liberties", while passive first-order rights are "claims", passive second-order rights are "immunities", and active second-order rights are "powers".

A liberty is something that you are not prohibited from doing. It is the negation of the obligation of a negation, and so it is equivalent to a permission. Something you have the liberty to do may nevertheless be bad, but you are not forbidden from doing so; it is an action that you are within your rights to do. A claim, conversely, is a limit on others' liberty: it is something that it is forbidden to deny you, which is just to say that it is obligatory.

I, like most libertarians (at least nominally) do, hold that people have maximal liberty, limited only by the claim to non-aggression: the only things forbidden to do are things that flatly contradict the will of the owner of the thing you are acting upon, such as the body of a person.

But there is in turn an exception to that claim: there is still liberty to contradict the will of the owner of the thing you are acting upon when that someone was already contradicting the will of the owner of the thing they were acting upon. There is a liberty to defend against aggression, which constitutes an exception to the claim to non-aggression: an aggressor cannot invoke the claim to non-aggression to bar you from acting upon him or his property as necessary to stop him from aggressing upon someone else, or to undo the effects of his aggression upon someone else.

For example, someone trying to punch you has no claim against you punching him as necessary to stop him from punching you; and someone who destroys something of yours has no claim against being forced to repair or replace it. But that qualifier "as necessary" is very important: unnecessary violence, in excess of what is necessary to prevent or reverse other violence, constitutes an act of aggression itself, no longer merely an exception to the claim to non-aggression.


And that all depends, of course, on who rightfully owns what, which is where the second-order rights come in to play, which have to do with changing what is or isn't obligatory, by changing the assignment of ownership. A power is the liberty to do so, to change who has what rights, which is equivalent to changing who owns what, as ownership consists entirely of having rights over something. An immunity, conversely, is a limit on others' power, just as a claim is a limit on others' liberty.

I, like most libertarians again, hold that people have maximal immunity — nobody gets to change who has rights over what out from under them, things continue belonging to whoever they belonged to before — limited only by the power to contract, to mutually agree upon an exchange of rights (and consequently permissions and obligations), which power is how that ownership was initially assigned to begin with.

But that power, in turn, has its own exception, in the reflexive case just as with the exception to the claim to non-aggression above: nobody has the power to agree to agree (or not) to any change of rights or ownership, such as by agreeing not to enter into other contracts (as in non-compete agreements), or agreeing to accept whatever terms the other party later dictates (as in selling oneself into slavery, or as in the "social contract" sometimes held to justify a state's right to rule), or agreeing to grant someone a temporary liberty upon certain conditions ("selling" someone the temporary use of your property, as in contracts of rent or interest; letting someone do something is not itself doing something).

In short, the power to contract is limited to the simple trade of goods and services, and cannot create second-order obligations between people that place one person in a position of ongoing power over another person.

The implications of that limitation on rental contracts is especially important to my view on governance. And the limitations on both slavery and rental contracts by the same principle is no coincidence, for just as vandalism is an abstraction of battery (the latter regarding one's body and the former regarding one's other property), and theft is an abstraction of abduction (the latter regarding one's body and the former regarding one's other property), I hold that rent is likewise an abstraction of slavery (again, the latter regarding one's body and the former regarding one's other property).


At first glance, one would think a maximally libertarian society would be one in which there were no claims at all (because every claim is a limit on someone else's liberty), and no powers at all (because powers at that point could only serve to increase claims, and so to limit liberties).

But that would leave nobody with any claims against others using violence to establish authority in practice even if not in the abstract rules of justice, and no claims to hold anybody to their promises either making reliable cooperation nigh impossible.

So it is necessary that liberties be limited at least by claims against such violence, and that people not be immune from the power to establish mutually agreed-upon obligations between each other in contracts.

But those claims and powers could themselves be abused, with those who violate the claim against such violence using that claim to protect themselves from those who would stop them, and those who would like for contracts not to require mutual agreement to leverage practical power over others to establish broader deontic power over them.

So too those claims to property and powers to contract, which limit the unrestricted liberty and immunity that one would at first think would prevail in a maximally libertarian society, must themselves be limited as described above in order to better preserve that liberty.

Take up the White Man's burden — Rudyard Kipling

Damn right!

More:

And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought. — Rudyard Kipling

Exactly! Those miserable lazy heathens are always screwing up progress. Where's the whip?

One might think that Kipling was talking about the British Empire, but Kipling was actually encouraging The United States to conquer the Philippines. The full title of the poem is ""The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands". Well he should have, of course -- the Philippines still has a lot of heathens who was never uplifted into the sweet knowledge of Jesus and the blessings of The American Way. Pity, that. Not too late, of course, just messier now,

The poem was written in 1899 -- the white men of the British Empire had already shouldered their burden pretty well by that time. And a burden it is, having to keep up one's property, keep the natives in line, extract wealth from the barely willing, and then cart it back home. It's soooo tiresome!

One of the reasons Prince Leopold of Belgium did so well in the Congo is that he didn't suffer from a sickly unwillingness to use force. He mowed 'em down if they didn't work fast enough, hauling in wild latex, ivory, and so on. Good Old Imperialists, laying the foundations of 21st Century First World wealth for us all.

The ownership of ideas is closely related to the ownership of labor and the means of production, because if one company owns the idea of doing some work a particular way, — Pfhorrest

Or writer, artist, entertainer. Plagiarism is a thing, and I don't want the hard work of some to be copied by others without compensation. That's why I've never been a fan of online free music distribution. Maybe it doesn't matter for the big stars, but what about everyone else?

On the contrary, it is the landless peasants that become the serfs who exchange their labour for the loan of a patch to grow their own food on. Great for the entitled, for the propertied. — unenlightened

Good thing feudalism got replaced by capitalism. But I supposed a society could be structured around there being no substantial property ownership. We'd all be vagrants migrating from one place to another and just plopping down for the night wherever there was room.

Not sure how that works on the scale of millions of people, and there is the tragedy of the commons to worry about. Personally, I'd rather people have their own property to live on, if they so desire.

Or writer, artist, entertainer. Plagiarism is a thing, and I don't want the hard work of some to be copied by others without compensation. — Marchesk

Plagiarism is different from copyright infringement, or any other kind of "intellectual property" (which is only a very recent coinage; older US law refers to the granting of temporary monopolies, not "property" in ideas). There's at least four different things to keep separate here:

Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's work.

Trademark infringement is kind of the opposite of that: putting someone else's name on your work.

Both of those should be pretty well covered by prohibitions of fraud, because in both cases you're claiming something false.

Copyright infringement is making something that too closely resembles something someone else created. Even if you give them full credit, so no plagiarism. Even if you're clear that you are not them, so no trademark infringement. Even if it's free, non-commercial use. If someone else plays you a song they made up, and then later you play someone else that same song, for free, even if you say you got it from the first guy, copyright says you're not allowed to do that... without permission, which will cost you. If someone else tells you a story they made up and then you tell someone else that story, for free, even if you give the first guy credit, that's still copyright infringement. Never mind that people have been doing that for literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of years and that's how all of culture has been generated.

Patent infringement is doing something in a way that's too similar to how someone else does something. So if someone else has a good idea for how to do something better, you can't do it that way unless you pay them to let you. You have to keep doing it the worse way, even though you now know a better way to do it, and you doing it doesn't stop them from doing it too.


If you want to get paid for doing some creative work, get someone to agree to pay you for the work before you do it. You shouldn't be able to expect to do something unprompted, and get the government to force people not to use their own minds and bodies and equipment to share your ideas with each other, just so that you can then after-the-fact force them to pay you for the right to do so.

Good thing feudalism got replaced by capitalism [...] Personally, I'd rather people have their own property to live on — Marchesk

The problem with capitalism, like feudalism, is that most people don't get to own their own property to live on, and are then beholden to those who do, needing to borrow at interest ("rent") from those who own more than they need to live on themselves (otherwise they couldn't lend it out), which then retards their ability to buy their own property, and accelerates the ability of the property-owners to buy more property to further increase that advantage, etc.

If you got rid of rent, then you'd have a truly free market, a usury-free market, and the consequence of that would be the end of capitalism (because you'd no longer have an owning class and a working class, once the usury-free market forces shuffled property around), and the start of market socialism instead.

The very nature of procedural justice (as opposed to distributive justice) is connected to issues of property. Because just like analytic knowledge is about following the correct steps in sequence from the assigned meaning of words, so too procedural justice is about following the correct steps in sequence from the assigned rights that who has over what, which is identical to the concept of ownership, i.e. to have rights over something is what it means to own it. — Pfhorrest

Read most of what you said, but it was really long.

Apply your theory to an actual case of disputed land, like the Palestine/Israel situation. Do you see Israel's right to Israel legitimate? What about to the disputed lands of the West Bank? If Israel follows its own rules in determining which land it settles does that matter?

Apply your theory to an actual case of disputed land, like the Palestine/Israel situation. Do you see Israel's right to Israel legitimate? What about to the disputed lands of the West Bank? If Israel follows its own rules in determining which land it settles does that matter? — Hanover

I don't know enough of the contingent particulars to apply the principle accurately.

In any case, much of the property is and was owned by individuals or families, not by states. If particular Jewish immigrants can show that they in particular had claim to a particular piece of land that was wrongfully taken from them in the past, then they deserve some kind of recompense for that, from the people who wronged them.

Some Arab who happens to be living there now, having acquired it fairly from someone who acquired it fairly from... etc... doesn't deserve to lose their home because someone else long ago wronged a third party.

If no perpetrator of any particular crime is identifiable, then those suffering from long-obscured harms deserve recompense from the public at large just like anyone else suffering from any other harm does.

In general, from what I know of the situation, I think the establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine was illegitimate, even more so than the usual establishment of any state. If Jewish people wanted to create a Jewish-majority and so Jewish-controlled democratic polity, and they didn't have particular historical claims to enforce (as above) to achieve that, then they could have done so by peacefully moving into some territory by ordinary legitimate means and then peacefully using ordinary legitimate political means to make the changes to the law of that territory that they wanted. (And if someone tried to use illegitimate violence to stop them, then violence in defense is warranted too).

The ownership of ideas is closely related to the ownership of labor and the means of production, because if one company owns the idea of doing some work a particular way, then nobody else is permitted to do that unless they pay the owner of the idea of doing that. — Pfhorrest

The problem then lies in two points:
-Can a work I've done negatively affect a fundamental right of the community?
-To what extent can I sell my work without alienating my personal dignity?

I think the theoretical answers are:
-Maybe.
- Less easily than is assumed in capitalism.

I suppose they need to be nuanced.

As if the way things are cannot and should not ever be otherwise than they are. — unenlightened

I am not all that interested in cataloguing the details of property law through history and across geography. I think we know that slavery is not a recognised form of property any more. So rules can change and sometimes they should change. There have been property rules since the time of the pharaohs at least, and it seems obvious that even if one disregards the property rights of indigenous people, and treats a land as vacant ab origin, a colonial government can only grant land to settlers as long as there is vacant land to grant.

As far as real estate goes, some such process must originate property rights. Lines drawn on maps fences built on boundaries, must be allowed and declared to initiate ownership. Land was wilderness, and became property.

The legitimacy of such processes is nothing other than the belief that is placed in them. That is why there can be such disputes as between Israeli and Palestinian declarations. Faith in Mammon is a sin.

I want to emphasise the ephemeral quality of ownership, it is a relationship of declaration and identification, a composition of faith and social acceptance. In case of dispute, war and weapons are the resolution. There is no justice in property, and no fact of the matter beyond the reality of the farmer's shotgun, or the lock on my front door. It is a social fiction.

So if you want to justify property as an institution, you need to show how it is fair, how the Palestinian is compensated for the loss of land, how the landless poor are compensated for the deprivation of all the Earth that they inherit none of.

This is how we do things, but it is based on no principle that I can see ,of justice or fairness that gives reason to assent to it.

That is to say that the right to protect one's domicile is not a 20th century American invention. — Hanover

And that's exactly why I said "before the 20th Century". Only now it is more common to have the kind of legal system that actually thinks about what is going to happen to an underage thief if he locked up for five years for stealing money from a kiosk. And we'll say "The owner had insurance, right?"

Hey if you don't like it, move to Anarres.

A particularly stupid and offensive comment. As it happens, I own my own house and am doing quite nicely from this radically unjust system. It's something that can be said to anyone who wants to change reform or improve anything, and it is a completely fatuous rhetorical nonsense. Hey, if you don't like what I say, break your computer.

A particularly stupid and offensive comment. — unenlightened

The competition's stiff around here.

Patent infringement is doing something in a way that's too similar to how someone else does something. So if someone else has a good idea for how to do something better, you can't do it that way unless you pay them to let you. You have to keep doing it the worse way, even though you now know a better way to do it, and you doing it doesn't stop them from doing it too. — Pfhorrest

This places patent rights in too negative a light. If someone can prove that the way they are doing something, typically manufacturing a product, has been invented by the applicant - because you patent a system or a specific custom tool therein, or sometimes a process or quantifiable formula/recipe - then there is nothing at all stopping such a person from using that system to manufacture that product, or product line...

The patent rights stop someone else from copying your invention(s). This is particularly important as a means to prohibit theft of one's own ability to earn a comfortable living as a result of their own hard work by those who have much greater means to produce and market the product line.

Anyway, just wanted to add a bit of positive support for patent rights. That's just scratching the surface though. Patents rights are held for a limited time only.

Where's the whip? — Bitter Crank

I think they've got it in the objectification of women thread.

The competition's stiff around here — fishfry

With you top of the pile.

In principle, all property is a theft from the community. — David Mo

Then it follows that community ownership is theft from the individual.

In principle, all property is a theft from the community. — David Mo

Then it follows that community ownership is theft from the individual. — A Seagull

"Stealing" something from someone who stole it from you first isn't theft, it's justice.

In principle, all property is a theft from the community. — David Mo

Then it follows that community ownership is theft from the individual. — A Seagull
"Stealing" something from someone who stole it from you first isn't theft, it's justice. — Pfhorrest

So if you steal something from the community that stole it from you in the first place it is 'justice'?

Or are you referring to some fantasy world?

So if you steal something from the community that stole it from you in the first place it is 'justice'? — A Seagull

If the community actually stole it from you, yes. But David's point was that everything belonged to the community initially, and everything that is privatized ("property") is therefore theft from the community. The community can't steal something that rightfully belonged to it, so them taking it back is justice, and you taking it back again is just theft again.

I don't agree that everything privately owned is stolen from the community, and I think if pressed David and those like him won't either, making a distinction between "personal" and "private" property, where "personal" is rightfully owned by an individual and "private" is something that rightfully belongs to the community but from which most of said community are wrongly excluded. That's just a terminological thing though. Some things owned by individuals ("private property") are rightfully so, others aren't. If the community takes the latter, that's not theft but justice, and an individual taking it back again is just theft again.

A dog remains chattel to this day. — Hanover

Not really: you can mutilate and destroy your hammer if you like, but you cannot legally, or ethically, mutilate and destroy your dog.

The problem is that if you own something under the current law, then any future expropriation can be seen as theft, or else the abiding law must be seen as merely arbitrary and the whole concept of property, whether communal or private, becomes ultimately arbitrary.

But David's point was that everything belonged to the community initially — Pfhorrest

And that is the point that I am disagreeing with. It is only valid in a communist or fantasy world. Not one that I inhabit.

The problem is that if you own something under the current law, then any future expropriation can be seen as theft, or else the abiding law must be seen as merely arbitrary and the whole concept of property, whether communal or private, becomes ultimately arbitrary. — Janus

True. I think talk of 'theft' is unhelpful here because it implies some law. The law (at least in my country) allows for the recovery of the proceeds of crime, but only where the law made the act criminal at the time it was committed.

Where the problem arises though is when this Wendell-Holmes-ian concept of pragmatic law is treated differently when it comes to collective ownership movements. Often I've heard the argument that the original acquisition of land (say from native tribes) was not theft because no laws against it existed at the time, held by the same people who argue against things like public ownership of utilities as if they were illegitimate government intervention in rightfully owned property. It obviously can't be both. Either property (and theft) are inalienable rights (in which case the original acquisition of land was almost certainly theft), or property (and theft) are just pragmatic legal definitions of the current community, in which case a government stepping in to change them is nothing bu democracy in action and should be supported.

And that is the point that I am disagreeing with. It is only valid in a communist or fantasy world. Not one that I inhabit. — A Seagull

This seems like an odd point to disagree on. Unless you have some odd definition of 'belong' that you're not sharing, it's almost universally agreed on that the land 'belonged' to indigenous tribal communities initially. No areas (that I know of) were settled by modern societies (ones with a legal concept of ownership) from virgin, unoccupied land.