A new look at property.
(This post represents a departure from the normal domain of this blog. Instead of talking about talesmanship, storytelling, and the arts, I examine a theory of ownership. Just as with my thoughts about talesmanship, however, the following represents some opinions and theories that I would like to share with the wider world.)
To begin with, let us say that there are two broad categories of property: first, private property, and second, public property.
Private property is anything personal that pertains to an individual, is more or less portable, and is impermanent. Examples of this might be clothing, a hair brush, a toothbrush, a book, a bed.
Public property is anything over which an individual has some measure of control, but which will in all likelihood helped lay of the individual, and whose usage and disposal will have an effect upon the community as a whole – and therefore the community has a certain vested interest in how this property is used and disposed of.
We can further divide public property into the following three categories:
- Property that the individual develops
- Property that the individual enhances
- Property that the individual finds
The first of these, any public property that the individual develops, would not exist in its current form without the knowledge, efforts, skills and labor that the individual has put into it. An example here would be a house. Another example would be a field of corn, which the individual has plowed and sown and watered and tended to.
The second, any public property that the individual enhances, also would not exist in its current form without some labor from the individual. In this case however the individual’s labor is of much smaller import than the labor he has put into transforming the first category of public property. An example here might be a mine whose main value is the mineral deposits which the individual has found and made available for extraction.
The third, any public property that the individual finds, would exist pretty much in its current form whether the individual involved did anything or not – all he did was to find something. An example of this kind of property might be a lake or a river.
I make these three distinctions over public property in order to set forth three stages of private prerogative and control over property that, in its essence, was not created by the individual and therefore cannot be said to be entirely his – it is not, in other words, private property. The more the individual is required in both his labor and his skill to create the property as it exists in its current state, the more control the individual ought to have over that property’s use and disposal. To grow a crop is to make of seeds and earth and water something which may be eaten. In some sense, the farmer has ‘created’ the foodstuff. To extract an ore from the earth is not to create it, but rather to make it available to the individual and his fellow men. To find a river only makes available the knowledge of the existence of the river, without transforming or altering the character or attributes of the river.
There are in addition certain properties that no one discovers, enhances, or creates – these are the common properties of the earth itself, and do not properly belong to anyone. Rather, they must belong to everyone (and perhaps to all living inhabitants of the earth). Examples of this kind of property include the air, the seas, and the deep water in the earth.
We might go even farther and say that all crucial components of the global ecosystem belong to this final category of property, which belongs to all of us as a whole and to none of us as individuals. For if any crucial component of the ecosystem could be disposed of by any individual or group, then that individual or group holds the entire ecosystem hostage, and all our lives and future existence depend upon their goodwill.
I’ll have more to say in future posts on the implication of these theories.
(Composed by dictation Monday 13 October 2008)
