What exactly is property?

But have we even agreed on what property is?  Many with strong opinions are already sure.  My property is what belongs to me.  That clears up exactly nothing.  So let’s try to do better.  Property is nothing but a publicly-recognized claim on a particular resource.  To claim property is to demand the removal of that specific resource from the realm of common use and reserve it for the exclusive use of a particular person.  Property, then, is fundamentally an act of exclusion.  It excludes all but the nominal right-holder from the use of that particular resource.  It is therefore a restriction on the freedom of others who might conceivably have better need or use of that resource.  It is at least an assertion of inequality, perhaps of dominion.

We have already observed that a newborn human has no more inherent claim upon any particular natural resource than any other newborn of the species, or of any other species.  All newborns are equal in need—however different their needs may be—and all will make use of whatever resources are at hand to meet their needs.  Human children are unique only in having an unusually long period of dependency.  They will use whatever resources their guardians are able to secure, in cooperation (or competition) with other members of their communities.  This is the only right of property that nature bestows—the right to use whatever resources are near enough to meet the needs of a specific animal in a particular moment.  All that remains of what we call the right of property is found exclusively in the imaginations of human animals.

Nature is highly consistent in its behavior yet never remains in the same balance for long.  We make up for this deficiency by creating more expansive notions of use than nature will allow.  This piece of land and all of its uses are mine in perpetuity.  Even the state’s land registry office will pretend that your monopolistic claim to a resource is without temporal limit.  And yet a thousand years ago this specific tract of land that I call mine was only a rough path used by local hunter-gatherers, perhaps occasionally defended against encroaching tribes.  In another thousand years it may become so again, if it has not been buried by sea, glacier or volcanic eruption.  I can be reasonably sure that I will not be on it.  It is possible that some of my genetic descendants will be living on or near to it.  Probably not.  In any case, they will not remember me.  To imagine that this land now being used to meet my temporal needs is somehow my permanent property is a momentary fantasy.  The notion of personal property is a time-bound trick we play on ourselves.  We get away with it only because everyone else around us seems to be doing the same sort of thing.  It works in the moment, so we let the trick pass with a wink and a nod.

Property—or any notion of ownership—is a stand-in for control, an assertion of domination, of personal will over an intractable world.  We like to believe that we own things because we so desperately wish to control the changeableness around us—and the more things we can control in an uncertain world the better.  We wish to impose our will without conditions or restraint.  We even try to control things from beyond the grave, through wills, monuments, entails, foundations.  Perhaps we are overcompensating for the relentless press of mortality.  But any notion of perpetual property or control remains a fantasy.  All of our attempts to manage the future, no matter what resources we may command in the moment, will end up the same.

Property does not exist in nature.  It exists only in the human imagination.  But this does not mean that property is meaningless or that it cannot be considered objectively.  Each human imagination will insist on its particular requirements, yet the shared notion of property that emerges in the public sphere will necessarily be the consequence of a negotiation among the many individual imaginations that take an interest in the resources of our common world.  Our public establishment of a system of property-holding is a remarkable exercise of the cooperative human imagination, but can never be the expression of a singular will.

This way of speaking about property will annoy conservative thinkers, those most likely to imagine that personal rights of property cannot be constrained, or that they are both fixed and unlimited.  But even America does not believe in the absolute or eternal right of property, as the history of eminent domain suggests—there are public ends that justify setting aside individual property rights.  More significantly, democracy itself is inimical to any such monopoly of power or aggressive control of common resources by the private members of a society.  Democracy insists that all powers are only temporary, all resources ultimately for the collective good.

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Our thinking about property can be improved with a few careful distinctions.  We can, with little difficulty, separate a personal notion of property (my shirt, my bed, my notebook, my desk, my room, my lunch) from a more expansive notion of ownership (my lakefront chalet, my investment properties, my factory, my forest, my shares in an energy company with mining interests in Indonesia).  Not many, even among socialists, would object to the first notion of property.  Most of us recognize that every individual human being should enjoy a few daily-use items that belong to them exclusively, even if these things are not very different from comparable things reserved by others (my toothbrush is blue, yours is yellow).  Few would object to an individual commanding private use of a bed, a room, even a private house and garden.  It is the second conception of property—that which a title-holder claims as his own, though he has little personal connection to or particular need of it—that causes most of the heat in public controversies.  We will distinguish, then, between consumptive or personal property and productive or financial property.  The first is unlikely to need much of our attention.  It is called property only in the sense that it is for one’s personal and daily use—even children and pets are considered to have informal rights to this kind of property.  The second kind of property—a resource claimed exclusively by one person though beyond the personal and daily use of that individual—is fundamentally more controversial and deserving of public debate.  Few object to the notion that a family should have adequate shelter, clothing and furnishings, even a small plot to consider its exclusive and private domain.  Slightly less obvious is that family’s need for a third vehicle, a speedboat in storage, a shorefront vacation property occupied for two weeks of the year.  Even less clear is the notion that a private individual may legitimately claim exclusive control of vast stretches of forested land in far-flung locations that might otherwise provide livings to many local families (or species of animal).

Those who defend the sacrosanctity of private property tend to resist such distinctions.  Property is property, they declare, suggesting it is entirely unreasonable to tell another individual how much is too much for their personal use.  If they aspire to own a private island, who are the rest of us to object?  This may be simple mental slippage—their thoughts passing easily from the home they occupy nearly every day to a residence they see only occasionally.  They get just as upset at the thought of a burglar breaking into the other as into their familiar home.  They may complain that it is not at all obvious where one’s personal needs justly end and one’s slightly-less-immediate claims begin.  So why should we draw the line at all?  We need vacations on our summer property, dammit—we work hard and have stressful jobs!  Besides, they quickly add, we earned that property as much as anything else—meaning that they bought it with their own money.  We can do with our money what we like!  The law recognizes documented titles, their lawyers chime in, not abstract notions of need.  And the courts will uphold those titles, as long as their clients submit all the proper forms, pay the registration fees, file the taxes.  (Judges have summer cottages too.)  And was it not they who hired the architect to design that vacation home to their own careful specifications.  How could it be more personal than that?  They made that property the wonderful retreat that it is.  It is theirs as much as anything else they own.

But then, what of those born into property?  They did not work for it, though they use their unearned wealth to hire lawyers, accountants and property managers to labor cleverly on their behalf so as to increase what they never made for themselves.  So if you claim your property is yours because you earned it through personal hard work, you will have to find some other argument if you wish to pass the same resource to your biological heirs.  It’s mine and I can do with it as I wish, even give it to my chosen heirs.  None of your business if I do.  Now this is indeed a different sort of argument, and one that effectively abandons the hard work justification.  It also suggests that the private use of a resource is of no concern to others, perhaps has no effect on them whatever.  But this is clearly untrue.  The world we occupy together has a finite quantity of resources (Oh, the old fixed-pie fallacy, groan the economists, rolling their eyes), and what is taken exclusively by one is made unavailable to others.  So it does affect them, even if the cost is not immediately apparent.  But resorting to the It’s mine and I can do with it what I want argument returns us to the question of how that particular resource or bundle of resources fell within your exclusive and perpetual domain in the first place, and thereby removed from the potential use of others.  I worked hard for it—  Yes, we’ve heard that.  Such a claim may be of some use to the way we agree to divvy up our present and available resources, as long as we understand the limits and scope of its application.  We are quite able, for example, to draw lines between personal and investment sorts of property, but we cannot thereby bind the uses of those resources forever.  The public concern over property—that is, over the distribution and use of our collectively-available resources—must ask how an individual justly acquires a claim over a particular resource in the first place, what further claims on this resource the individual can expect to exercise once it has been acquired, and how much inequality of resource distribution a society of nominally-equal citizens can reasonably tolerate.

Ask any adult in the modern, industrialized world how they manage to be so well-fed, live in sturdy and comfortable homes with many rooms and amenities, enjoy access to up-to-date medical care, accumulate years of profitable education, acquire substantial leisure time with countless entertainment possibilities, and retain confidence that they will enjoy a long and poverty-free retirement, they will likely look at you with faint bemusement and answer that they worked hard all their lives and played by the rules.  They will declare that they have earned all these good things (though they still fall short of what they really deserved).  But they will insist it was largely their own doing.  Now if you asked this same adult why the majority of people living in the world today (as well as nearly every human who ever lived before the twentieth century) cannot be so confident of basic nutrition, housing, health care, education, retirement and entertainment—despite countless hours of hard and unpleasant labor—they will probably have a less ready answer.  Oh—well, they must have deserved their poverty, just as surely as we have earned our comforts.  No, they do not say that.  We mostly understand that we must not say such things out loud.  But if all those hard-working people did not earn their poverty and insecurity, how exactly do we think we have earned all of our good things with no more striving?  And why is it that the not-terribly-hardworking and not-especially-gifted-or-motivated people in our industrialized society are still comfortably fed, housed, entertained, educated and medicated?  Why are so many people in developing countries condemned to work absurdly hard and still spend their lives in miserable slums?  The answer is not very agreeable to our middle-class sensibilities.  The uncomfortable truth is that you and I have these advantages not entirely because of our personal brilliance and hard work.  We were born to it.  We entered by luck into a prosperous part of the world, to an auspicious social situation, in a fortunate age.  The vast majority of human beings have never known such luck.  We were born into a country where the good things in life are easy to acquire, even if it feels like hard work.  At the very least, we were born into a country where hard work, talent and ambition will pay off handsomely!  Most are born into places where endless hard work is required just to get by, with little chance of advance.

But we don’t judge ourselves by the comparative misfortune of those far away.  (What can we do about it anyways?)  We rate ourselves by how well we are doing compared to those near by, the people like us in our own neighborhood.  We know what wealth looks like and we’re pretty sure we don’t have it!  (Never mind that we have control of ten times the value of resources that even a lower middle-class family would typically enjoy in the developing world.)  If wealth is a problem, we know that we are not part of that problem.  We sigh and acknowledge that there is a lot of poverty in the world and admit that we’re lucky to be far removed from such daily misery.  But we’re just trying to get by where we happen to live.  We don’t think we’re really using more resources than we need (or deserve) to use.  Can’t we just stick to local issues?  Fair enough.  If we live in a democracy, we’re responsible primarily for the conditions found in our own locality.  (We can try to be decent world citizens once we’ve dealt with things closer by.)  But isn’t all this unequal bestowing of property (all right, resources, if you insist!) that I see around us just the way things are?  Hasn’t this always been so?  Could it really be different?  We’re used to what we’re used to, and have trouble imagining things any other way.

Are there other possibilities?