Many people think that they have a natural right to their property, like their rights to life and liberty. Others claim that our property rights exist by law, not by nature.
On the natural right side is the thought of seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, who claimed that people have natural rights to life, liberty, and property. As for property, an item belongs to whoever put in the labor to produce it from materials that lacked an owner. Anticipating this thought by two generations, the Pilgrims’ rule in 1620 was that everyone would own the house that he had built himself out of trees in the area.
Some residents of Plymouth also respected the natives’ natural right to property. Robert Cushman visited the colony in 1621 and later recalled, “We found … eight bushels of corn hid up in a cave, and knew no owners of it, yet afterwards hearing of the owners of it, we gave them (in their estimation) double the value of it.” Cushman and his Pilgrim companions assumed that an agricultural crop produced through human labor belonged by natural right to whoever produced it. They didn’t need any state, law, or government to validate the Indians’ rights.
This view seems correct to me in the Pilgrims’ context. Today, however, we don’t make what we own from unowned objects. You can’t make a car or a TV out of driftwood. Today, we own property by law, not by nature. When marijuana was illegal, people were charged with possession, not ownership, because ownership was impossible no matter how much work the possessor did to raise the plants and dry the leaves. The law didn’t allow most people to own pot, just as they now deny people ownership of meth labs.
I own my house and my TV because I bought them. The people who made them bought the materials from those who owned the materials. You might think that if we go back far enough we’ll find people who worked on unowned materials, had a natural right to what they produced, and that natural right is transferred through honest work and trading to the products we buy today. However, if you go back, you’ll find that just about every place on earth was conquered by invading armies who took resources in disregard of natural rights. So, if current products inherit anything, it’s the violation of natural rights.
In addition, many property rights exist only because laws created property. The original Fab Four – Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John – made no money from what they wrote because the concept of intellectual property rights didn’t exist. The more recent Fab Four made a lot of money because copyright laws turned songs into property.
Property rights can diminish as well as expand. Two centuries ago, a landowner owned the sky above his property to the limits of the heavens. If such property was respected now, air travelers would be trespassing on the property of all the landowners whose land was beneath the plane unless they got permission to fly over it. This is impractical, so the notion of land ownership was reduced the that portion of air above the land that was integral to the landowners’ legitimate use.
Here’s another kind of case. Certain transactions in Illinois aren’t finalized until three days after the contract is signed. This includes home repair, fitness center memberships, and campground memberships. The seller can’t claim money from the buyer if the buyer cancels within three days. The money owned by the seller is a matter of law, not natural right.
Even some of the most important owners of property are created by law. These are corporations. How can corporations have a natural right to property when they don’t exist by nature? Nevertheless, you can’t dismiss your utility bill by claiming that the corporation has no right to your money. Corporations exist and have rights to their property by law, not by nature.
If you had a natural right to property, you could give your property away to whomever you wished. But you can’t. Microsoft decided to give away its web browser Explorer by bundling it with their popular Windows operating system. This violated anti-trust legislation that disallows using a monopoly position in a market (Windows) to avoid competition, in this case from Netscape’s Navigator.
Because your property rights are a matter of law, not nature, when you earn money it isn’t all yours if the legal system specifies that a certain percentage belongs to the government. This isn’t theft, because the property, the money, is yours only by law, so the only part that was yours in the first place is what the laws stipulate. Of course, some tax laws may be ill advised, but it’s not because they violate anyone’s natural right to property.
Comments