The Philosophy of Ownership

The Philosophy of Ownership by Robert LeFevre First Printing 1966 Second Printing 1971 Robert LeFevre is president of Rampart College. He is the author of The Nature of Man and His Government, This Bread Is Mine, The Philosophy of Ownership, and numerous other published works. A noted speaker, he conducts seminars for advanced student and business-oriented groups. Table of Contents Chapter I. Property and Ownership 1 Chapter II. Coercion and Ownership 7 Chapter III. Earliest Property Concepts 12 Chapter IV. Self-Ownership 23 Chapter V. Rights and Property 28 Chapter VI. Sovereign Ownership 34 Chapter VII. Joint Ownership 43 Chapter VIII. Ownership of Land 46 Chapter IX. Ownership of Objects 54 Chapter X. Ownership of Intangibles 61 Chapter XI. Authority and Responsibility 68 Chapter XII. The Desire to Share 83 Chapter I Property and Ownership The significance of property ownership has rarely been fully ap- preciated. All sentient life is concerned with property, either instinctively 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 predi- cated 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 dom- inates his environment more than any other living thing. His mastery of environment is primarily if not totally a matter of property acquisition and utilization. Since the concern of this study relates entirely 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 magnitude, 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, 1 2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF OWNERSHIP mystical, and metaphysical realms, seeking to probe the mystery of life's origins and to chart the methods and epistemology of knowl- edge, yet circumventing the question of property or, at best, skim- ming 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 wisdom was for an unfoldment of the real character of life. Prop- erty was viewed more or less as impedimentia. But this is prob- ably 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 for personal and individual identification. The desire to own property contains the concept of exclusiveness, of individualization. Ownership is an expression of this longing. Human beings long to possess items which they ad- mire 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 satis- factorily 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. V^hile these philosophers evaluated 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.1 The Epicureans, who rejected the proposition and re- 1Whitney J. Oates (ed.), The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Random House, 1940). PROPERTY AND OWNERSHIP 3 versed it, were viewed as hedonistic or as gross sensualists. Chris- tianity, which borrowed so much from both Plato and the Stoics, carried forward the idea that virtue was somehow related to proper- tylessness; 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 im- posed 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,2 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 pre- occupied 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 the 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 survival 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 and 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 mis- conceptions placed capitalists and entrepreneurs in a separate cate- gory, under the supposition that they were extracting wealth or 2Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776). 4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF OWNERSHIP 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 scarce amounts of property (poverty) and abundant amounts of property (riches). Man's true role as an owner was first glimpsed by the 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 more attention has pursued property, and its ebb and flow in relation to supply and demand. The nature of property, its acquisition, development, production, distribution, main- tenance, 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.

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