C4SS trustee and senior fellow Gary Chartier is a Professor of Law and Business Ethics, and Associate Dean of the School of Business, at La Sierra University. He is the author of Economic Justice and Natural Law (Cambridge University Press 2009), The Analogy of Love (Imprint Academic 20007), The Conscience of an Anarchist and Anarchy and Legal Order (Cambridge 2012), as well as articles in journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Theory, Religious Studies, and the Journal of Social Philosophy. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a JD from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Due to the crash’s violence, it took a week to transport Campos’s remains back to Recife, Pernambuco, the state he governed for eight years. His funeral was televised as an all-day Sunday spectacle. His pitiful performance in Tuesday’s interview was all but forgotten, his malformed thoughts elevated to slogans. “We can’t give Brazil up!” is shared and exploited as a catchphrase, while Recife’s people take the streets to sing “Eduardo/warrior/of the Brazilian people!” during the funeral.

Perhaps the exploitation of a famous politician’s death by the army of individuals who salivate for a piece of his memory is natural. Campos has been described as a “promising leadership,” a “negotiator,” a “statesman” who “transcended party lines.” All of these are lies. And that’s why it’s even more necessary to set the record straight on what Campos was and represented. He was an old school politician, inserted in the old system by the old elite, who protected our old crony capitalism; a personalistic politician firmly entrenched in the old habits of the Brazilian northeast’s elites.

Powerful institutions tend to perpetuate themselves and fluster attempts by outsiders to enact change. But Eduardo Campos wasn’t an outsider. He lived his life comfortably positioned inside in the power ranks, where he was placed by his grandfather, former Pernambuco governor Miguel Arraes. Campos wasn’t trying to subvert structures, but to put them to his service.

The state government employs “at least a dozen” of his or his wife’s relatives. Having supported the allied base of the federal government for many years, Campos successfully campaigned for the appointment of his mother to the Federal Court of Accounts and placed two of his relatives in the state Court of Accounts, a branch of government responsible for overseeing his own actions. Recife’s mayor is one of his trusted men, an unknown before the election, but leveraged by Campos’s name. Eduardo Campos justified the omnipresence of his relatives in the state as a result of their “abilities.” A prodigious family indeed.

Eduardo Campos has been described by the international press as “amicable” to markets and the Sao Paulo stock exchange reacted poorly to his death. That’s unsurprising: Tax exemptions and direct subsidies signs are displayed in front of virtually every industrial plant in Pernambuco. The Pernambuco Military Police, under the direct control of Eduardo Campos, repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the construction companies from the Novo Recife project — consisting of the privatization of very well located land in the Pernambuco capital to benefit contractors — beating up protesters and, later on, stating they wanted to talk. Marina Silva, his vice-presidential candidate, then hypocritically said she was against police violence and that several people in the movement against Novo Recife were members of her party.

On other occasions, Campos had no problem in giving building companies the land they demanded, such as when they wanted to build Riomar Mall over a swamp area, displacing hundreds of people from their stilt houses. These people had similar fates to the thousands of families who were expropriated and forcefully evicted for the construction of the Arena Pernambuco for the World Cup. It’s not by chance that construction companies, formerly lukewarm toward Campos’s party, made generous donations this year to the Socialist Party of Brazil. And it’s not by chance that large banks, industries and agribusiness companies lamented the loss of such a trustworthy ally.

His mellifluous narrative of favoring the poor hid a policy of control, suppression and infiltration of social movements. Campos’s political choices were always obfuscated by the convenient lie of “efficiency” in public management. In a recent interview, he said that abortion should not be legalized, reaffirmed his support for the war on drugs, recycled the tired idea that crack cocaine is a vicious drug that enslaves people, and stated he wanted to put “drug dealers” behind bars.

The more than 100,000 people who cry on streets because Eduardo Campos is dead remember only his most cynical side: The “modern” politician, who wanted to rid the country of “cronyism” and “favoring,” someone who was willing to “build alliances,” promote “sustainable growth,” “think about the poor,” and to defend “more humane politics.”

Someone like that really would have a lot of problems in the political system. Eduardo Campos didn’t have many.

He died, but his ideals live on — unfortunately.

It’s vital not to forget Joseph’s wonderfully put and absolutely correct argument that private property is the only method by which people can peacefully interact and allocate scarce resources. It would be odd indeed if we ignored the volumes of work, such as Human Action or Man, Economy, and State, showing how and why property rights are important, indeed necessary, for a functioning and prosperous society. Still, it would be similarly odd if we ignored the volumes of work explaining why people have an inherent moral right to private property, such as The Ethics of Liberty or Two Treatises of Government.

Before answering if there is good reason to respect private property beyond just consequential considerations, we have to ask, is there good reason to respect individual sovereignty beyond just consequential considerations? It seems evident that there is. Arguably the entire libertarian and anarchist project is predicated on the idea of a certain moral worth that each individual is entitled to, by their very nature, which makes states and oppressive hierarchies unjust.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

We would be much better off if we weren’t tormented by scarcity. There would be no conflict or potential for conflict over physical goods. This hypothetical world — one of superabundance or post-scarcity or infinite supply or infinite reproducibility or whatever you want to call it — is preferable to both options presented in the libertarian dichotomy. Superabundance would also obviate and overcome other undesirable corollaries of scarcity, including opportunity cost, supply and demand, and ultimately economy itself. Unfortunately, this world doesn’t exist.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

On June 3, #OcupeEstelita had their victory (partial, up to this point) formalized by the municipality, whicht begrudgingly suspended the authorization of demolition of the warehouses.

Decades abandoned, the Estelita warehouses are relics from the old sugar cane economy of the state of Pernambuco, and used to belong to the now defunct Federal Railway Network. The land where the warehouses are located was auctioned off in very sweet terms to a consortium of developers who planned, along with the municipal authorities, the New Recife project.

New Recife consists in the building of 12 skyscrapers of over 40 stories in the area, one of the best located in town. Moreover, the project also consists in the capture of the debate by the government. By the mayor’s and the developer’s plutocratic logic, which has been able to find adherents, there’s the camp in favor of progress, new apartments and urban development, and there’s the team who favors the past, backwardness, the continued abandonment of an area potentially very valuable like the José Estelita Docks.

It’s obviously a bogus dichotomy and has been challenged by the Direitos Urbanos activists, who debate urban solutions for the city. As a forum for discussion and activism, Direitos Urbanos gathers many different positions on how to occupy and plan the city. Unfortunately, not only are they diverse, but they’re also vague and a little bit too slanted towards a middle class urban outlook. They emphasize not the legitimacy of use and property of urban land, but a specific view on how these spaces should be put to use: mixed communities, plazas, squares, trees, bicycle lanes instead of car roads, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with mixed urban spaces, which should be favored rather than disincentivized by legislation (as they are nowadays), but the fundamental problem of the use of urban land remains, even with a aesthetic rejection of the developers’ claim to Estelita’s warehouses. The fundamental discussion should be: Who should be able to use the land?

We can sort out the details about how later. First, we should talk about how to take the state out of public land. Clearly, a privatization that puts a huge and extremely well located plot of land in the hands of a consortium of developers is unjust.

And the government doesn’t have any legitimacy to sell them off and exclude the rest of the population of the possibility to homestead the area. Unfortunately, the details of such a process of taking the land out of the control of the government can be messy.

So, I’d like to advance a modest proposal.

In Brazil, it is calculated that between 200 and 250 thousand families have been evicted from their houses because of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Many have gotten laughable compensations for their property while others haven’t received rent assistance at all, or it has been insufficient to pay for any decent place to live.

I propose a solution: Developers can build all the skyscrapers they want in the area, but the apartments should be occupied by people who were violently evicted from their homes by the government.

It seems fair: If the government conducts an excluding process of privatization, it’s only natural it should favor those who were previously excluded. Land for the people.

If the victims of the World Cup benefit from it, we can think about urban impact later. What do you think, Urban Rights people?

He writes in reference to my defining of capitalism:

Pretty good, but.. to my mind, private property is a danger in itself because it creates disparities in economic power that could provide opportunities to demand rent, creating a feedback loop between power and wealth and power, allowing the private property owner to recreate capitalist-like structures.

Legitimate points, Jiminykrix. A way of approaching this particular analysis is to invoke the tried and true left-anarchist distinction between possession and property. If my memory serves me correctly, this demarcation pertains to what one personally uses as opposed to what one owns absentee under capitalist norms of legal ownership. A reliance on possession in the form of occupation and use would go a long ways towards remedying the problems raised by the commentator above.

Without absentee control or ownership, a massive disparity in wealth and power wouldn’t exist because they couldn’t exercise external control over you and extract rent. It was perhaps careless of me not to use the term, private possession, as opposed to private property. Lockean property rights wouldn’t of necessity lead to the conditions described above either. If there were widespread ownership due to more egalitarian freed market forces, the recreation of capitalist structures would be difficult to impossible. The difficulty would leave only a small minority of ardent seekers to push for it. Not exactly a powerful political, economic, and cultural force.

His final commentary relevant to this post is below:

It could be that the understanding of “ownership” in play in this definition is intended to be sufficiently strong to ward off this possibility, but I think it’s worth bearing in mind that legal ownership of something isn’t the only way someone ever extracts rent from someone else.

E.g., in politics under bourgeois democracy, if my fortune allows me to merely *threaten* to fund the opponent of a political candidate, I have power over politics even without spending money. It seems unlikely to me that someone with a hoard of gold (or bitcoin?) in, say, a mutualist society wouldn’t be able to extract rent from someone, somewhere.

The definition used was not intended to be strong enough to ward off this possibility, but it certainly is worth understanding in that manner. Not sure how a person extracts rent from someone else without legal ownership of something, so the commentator is kindly asked to provide further examples or explain the one given beter. The example provided is not understandable as one to me.

The author is correct to note that hoarding wealth in a mutualist society most likely wouldn’t allow one to extract rent. This is possibly due to the lack of absentee control over others, and what they actually use, but you happen to legally own under capitalism. Let’s work to put an end to said exploitation.

I’ve waited my whole life to come to realize, through some dawning revelation, why precisely I’m supposed to like the Symphonie Fantastique. Today, right now where I sit, I’m fully prepared to say what I’ve put off saying for as long as I can remember: the Symphonie Fantastique is wrongly named.

For numerous reasons, I vehemently disagreed with his assessment. But there’s one reason I want to focus on in particular. The individual who posted this also happens to be a libertarian like me and like Hector Berlioz, the composer of Symphonie Fantastique.

My response:

I’m going to have to disagree with you here…Symphonie Fantastique is a grand example of a composer breaking conventional molds of form and orchestration. Five movements. Strange instruments. An implied program. Intentionally irreverent use of religious cantus. One of my personal favorites. Hector Berlioz don’t care!

Hector Berlioz embraced an attitude of intentional, intelligent irreverence toward all things customary and conventional. Throughout his life, he challenged the status quo, musically and otherwise. He wasn’t a rebel just for the sake of being a rebel; he understood exactly what the state of the world was and how he could change it. He held individual expression up as a pinnacle virtue, harnessing his own to influence others peacefully and thoughtfully.

Like many libertarians, Berlioz was a voracious autodidact. Unlike many other composers of the era, he received no formal musical training early in his life. Nor was he precocious like Mozart. Rather, he diligently studied harmony textbooks, teaching himself how to write music.

When he turned eighteen, Berlioz left home to study medicine in Paris. After a short stint at the university (and a reviling experience of viewing a human corpse being dissected), he abandoned medicine and attended the Paris Conservatoire. There, under the tutelage of Jean-François Le Sueur and Anton Reicha, Berlioz refined his composition skills.

This was a time not unlike today: A “new economy” was emerging. “The decay of absolutism on the European continent spelled the end of artistic patronage on the part of the aristocracy and the church,” writes musicologist Richard Taruskin. “The broad middle-class public now replaced the traditional elite.”

According to historian Giorgio Pestelli, these economic allowed for the emergence of the modern freelance musician. “Free from immediate detailed instructions from his master or protector,” composers and musicians “could be subject in a similar way to the kind of demand imposed by the musical market.” The “new course” appealed “above all to the competitive spirit” and, in so doing, rewarded entrepreneurial insight.

Like many young entrepreneurs today, Berlioz needed to supplement his income. In addition to composing, young Hector also worked as chorus singer and vaudeville performer. Over time, his hard work paid off as he became famous as a composer and conductor across France and western Europe.

Berlioz’s most famous and most remembered work is Symphonie Fantastique—by far. Since its first public performance in 1830, critics and audiences alike have proffered their strong opinions on the 50-minute-long behemoth. Some love it. Some hate it. Some are downright flummoxed by it.

Symphonie Fantastique called for ninety instrumentalists at a time when the standard orchestra employed half that. Compared to contemporaneous scores, Berlioz’s presents dynamics, articulations, and other expressive markings with revolutionary explicitness and meticulous detail. Brass players need mutes and the timpanist needs “sponge-headed sticks.” The range of wind instruments extends from the piccolo to the tuba. While all of these things are commonplace now, they were utterly radical at the time.

To add to the uproar, Berlioz tied the music to a program in a particular way. Purely instrumental music was elevated, becoming sacrilegiously tantamount to opera. “Berlioz wished to have [the program] distributed to audiences to prepare them to understand the work,” says Taruskin. “[M]any in the Victorian era understandably found shocking.”

The program describes each of five (five!—as opposed to the standard four) movements in scenic detail. “Funeral knell, ludicrous parody of the Dies irae,” part of the fifth movement program, alludes to Berlioz’s satirical use of a Catholic funeral hymn in a movement entitled “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath.”

Libertarianism has an ideological component. Economic freedom, civil rights, free speech, private property—they’re all part of the package. But libertarianism also has an attitudinal component. Liberty lovers aren’t afraid to brazenly resist established norms and expectations. Like Hector Berlioz, we don’t fit nicely into the mold society prescribes. We question what others accept and rebuke anyone who stands in our way.

It would be odd, indeed, to declare, following some rigorous ethical constructivism, that property in anything is legitimate. I fear that is what I did in my first response because I never included a key part of libertarian property theory. That is, external property is only legitimate, only an extension of self-ownership, in the case of scarce goods.

You can’t homestead or acquire a good that is superabundant, such as air. To have a fully fleshed out theory of property, you need to account for the difference between scarce and non-scarce goods. I couldn’t claim a certain “area” of air as being rightfully mine since it is, for all intents and purposes, not scarce. As Rothbard puts it in “Man, Economy, and State,” air is “In most situations in unlimited abundance. It is therefore not a means and is not employed as a means to the fulfillment of ends….Air, then, though indispensable, is not a means, but a general condition of human action and welfare.”

Air, and other things of super abundance, are not goods in the economic sense. They are simply there. Therefore, they aren’t proper subjects of homesteading. That is, they can’t be owned. Suppose that we lived on the Enterprise and had access to the replicator: a machine which creates whatever we want out of thin air, at no cost (besides the few seconds it takes to work). In the world of Star Trek, everything is in super abundance (well, technically not everything since the replicator can’t create living organisms or dark matter, but it can create any economic good we know of).

Now, once I used the replicator to create a delicious pizza for me for lunch, and I am sitting down to eat it, I think it is rightfully mine. If Worf tried to come over and take it, I believe that would be, in effect, stealing. So, in a sense that pizza is rightfully mine since I made it part of my ongoing projects. However, Worf is able to use the replicator and make his own pizza, or whatever Klingons eat. There is no conflict since the resources are not scarce (ignore for the purposes of this discussion the scarcity and/or availability of the replicator itself).

This is exactly Joseph’s point. Without scarcity in goods, conflict over resources is impossible and the notion of external property becomes meaningless. He succinctly uses this point to argue against intellectual property. Let’s go back to the original quote, “At best, private property is a neutral concept in itself; based on given natural conditions, it can be either good or bad.” The theory of property is this: People have claim rights to external, scarce goods by mixing their labor with them and making them part of their ongoing uses. This is the part concerned with normative ethics.

We must delve deeper into each specific situation to apply this theory, to do applied ethics. We must first determine what is or isn’t scarce in the real world before we can see what property applies to. Pizzas and comics are scarce goods that can be legitimate property. Air and ideas are superabundant “goods” that can’t be legitimate property. The world of Star Trek, because of the “natural (the replicator isn’t really natural) conditions,” external property doesn’t really make sense. In our world, external property is a valid concept since there are scarce goods, but there are also things it doesn’t apply to.

Ultimately I believe Joseph and I are in full agreement on this issue. It only took some clarification to realize it. The issue is not consequential vs deontological reasons for external property. The issue is looking at the real world and seeing where valid property exists. It is conceivable that a world exists where they don’t. A world of superabundance. A world where I live on the Enterprise. However, I can only dream of that world. Scarcity, so far, is a fact of our world. Joseph and I agree that property only applies to those scarce objects.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange began as a feature by Joseph S. Diedrich, Private Property, the Least Bad Option. Cory Massimino and Diedrich have prepared a series of articles challenging and exploring the themes presented in Driedrich original article. Over the next week, every other day, C4SS will publish one of their responses. The final series can be followed under the title: Private Property: How, When and Why. 

In response to my recent article, “Private Property, the Least Bad Option,” Cory Massimino has penned a well-articulated rebuttal. I find myself in agreement (more or less) with everything he says, yet I don’t believe my article is in any way contradicted or undermined. In my opinion, Cory asserts that my article claims more than it actually does, and for that, I am at least partially responsible. Allow me to clarify my positions.

My central argument is as follows. Many libertarians operate under the assumption that private property alone fosters peaceful interaction. From there, many conclude that its structure and function — viz., exclusive control of resources — make private property inherently good. They assign to it the status of a universally applicable ethic (valid in all cases, regardless of given conditions).

There are two problems with that: First, private property is not sufficient to promote peaceful interaction; however, under certain circumstances, it is necessary. I say “certain circumstances” because another factor must be considered. There are two classes of resources: scarce and non-scarce. Scarce resources are excludable, and absent a system of exclusive control, conflict over their use is unavoidable. Non-scarce resources are not excludable, and therefore no conflict over their use naturally occurs. Only if we attempt to apply private property norms to them does conflict over their use become a reality.

Second, as a corollary, private property cannot be assigned the status of a universally applicable ethic. Rather, its status is contingent upon the uncontrollable dictates of nature. Its structure and function (exclusive control) dissuades conflict over scarce resources, but actually promotes conflict over non-scarce resources.

Moreover, in the realm of scarcity, private property is not only necessary for peaceful interaction. It is also logically unavoidable. There are various theories that demonstrate the logical necessity of private property, including “rights-skepticism,” Stephan Kinsella’s “estoppel” theory, and Hans-Herman Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics,” to name a few.

Hoppe begins by proposing that rational discourse (argumentation) proves self-ownership, “Justification — proof, conjecture, refutation — is argumentative justification. Anyone who denied this proposition would become involved in a performative contradiction because his denial would itself constitute an argument.” To engage in rational argumentation presupposes exclusive control over one’s own physical body:

No one could propose anything and expect the other party to convince himself of the validity of this proposition or deny it and propose something else unless his and his opponent’s right to exclusive control over their respective bodies and standing rooms were presupposed.

From there, Hoppe proceeds to deduce the logical validity of private property rights in “other scarce means.”

There are other ways to arrive at the same general conclusions; argumentation ethics is but one example. Yet all valid arguments and theories of this sort have at least one fundamental commonality—a consideration of scarcity. Hoppe mentions it explicitly. Self-ownership is a priori justified only because our bodies and standing room are scarce. In other words, private property attains validity and becomes just only because the possibility of conflict exists.

Private property in scarce resources, then, is a universally applicable human ethic. It allows each individual to assess his or her actions prior to acting. We can determine ex ante whether or not the actions we intend to take will be just or unjust.

Consider the other class of resources—those that are non-scarce. In this case, private property (exclusive control) has the opposite effect. It promotes conflict where none would otherwise arise. In addition, from an abstract theoretical viewpoint, private property is ultimately logically impossible in non-scarce resources. I argue this in an article at the MacIver Institute:

[I]f indeed property, [non-scarce] resources can be sold, rented (licensed), given away, or stolen…

To be sold, rented, given away, or stolen, however, property must obviously be owned, a requisite that makes necessary the consideration of unowned proprietary resources…

If the prognostication of universal appropriation is fulfilled, eventually a world will exist in which all [non-scarce] resources are appropriated. Every idea will be owned—every concept, every design, every plan, every thought. Indeed, even the abstract idea of an “idea” will be owned. In other words, the concept of action will be under exclusive control.

As a corollary, anyone who uses the concept of action—i.e., acts—without prior permission from its owner would be engaging in an illegitimate form of property acquisition, viz., theft. In order to seek said permission to use (or rent or buy) the concept of action, one must talk or write using words and concepts—in other words, one must act…

Via reduction ad absurdum, we expose an undeniable contradiction. Nevertheless, even though theoretically impossible in the long-run, we still have the ability to impose private property onto non-scarce resources. And we do it all the time, most notably with intellectual “property.”

My intention with “Private Property, the Least Bad Option,” was to be both descriptive and prescriptive. Hence, when I wrote, “Scarcity doesn’t govern the non-physical world, and thus it is unnecessary, imprudent, and patently foolish to impose coercive private property strictures onto it,” I was making not a theoretical observation but a precise recommendation. We should never impose artificial scarcity upon the non-scarce world of ideal resources and digital “space.”

Furthermore, when I said, “private property isn’t morally meritorious or great in itself,” I meant that in a very specific sense. Merit can only be interpersonally determined based on the ability of a means to lead to an end. Private property (which, even when it is our only logically coherent possibility, is still only a means) can be morally meritorious and great, but only insofar as it aligns with our ultimate ends.

If our ultimate end is increased social welfare and a higher standard of living (a desire predicated on peaceful interaction), then private property in scarce resources must be upheld. On the other hand, private property (or the attempt thereat) in non-scarce resources must be rejected. At best, private property is a neutral concept in itself; based on given natural conditions, it can be either good or bad.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange began as a feature by Joseph S. Diedrich, Private Property, the Least Bad Option. Cory Massimino and Diedrich have prepared a series of articles challenging and exploring the themes presented in Driedrich original article. Over the next week, every other day, C4SS will publish one of their responses. The final series can be followed under the title: Private Property: How, When and Why.

What reasons do people have to respect property rights, if any? It’s not an easy conundrum considering political theorists and moral philosophers have been grappling with it for centuries. In an excellent and ideologically significant article, Joseph Diedrich argues,

The right to private property isn’t some intuitive, natural axiom… on the contrary, private property evolved as the best and only method of peacefully allocating scarce resources.

I agree with this conclusion. Libertarians often wrongfully treat private property as a foundational rule, which presupposes all their arguments. This is the wrong approach since we need to justify private property on some grounds. Joseph says, “Private property isn’t morally meritorious or great in itself, but only insofar as it is the best and only way to avoid conflict given the reality of scarcity in the physical world.” However, I believe there are reasons to respect property rights beyond just its socially positive consequences.

It’s vital not to forget Joseph’s wonderfully put and absolutely correct argument that private property is the only method by which people can peacefully interact and allocate scarce resources. It would be odd indeed if we ignored the volumes of work, such as Human Action or Man, Economy, and State, showing how and why property rights are important, indeed necessary, for a functioning and prosperous society. Still, it would be similarly odd if we ignored the volumes of work explaining why people have an inherent moral right to private property, such as The Ethics of Liberty or Two Treatises of Government.

Before answering if there is good reason to respect private property beyond just consequential considerations, we have to ask, is there good reason to respect individual sovereignty beyond just consequential considerations? It seems evident that there is. Arguably the entire libertarian and anarchist project is predicated on the idea of a certain moral worth that each individual is entitled to, by their very nature, which makes states and oppressive hierarchies unjust.

Certainly the only reason I don’t drive to Joseph’s house and punch him in the face isn’t just that I have figured out the consequences would be harmful to me and/or society. I ought to respect his autonomy because of his nature and mine. Resorting to coercion and abandoning reason would go against my nature as a rational creature. It would be acting subhuman. I shouldn’t treat him as a means to my ends, even if I could get good effects out of doing so. Whether we call this idea “self-ownership” or not is not of huge importance here. I simply want to establish there are moral reasons to respect personal autonomy and not cross peoples’ “boundaries” without their permission, beyond the consequential considerations.

But why does this mean people are also morally obligated to respect property? Suppose I decided I was really in the mood for some pizza. I even got the dough, the cheese, and the sauce all together and made it step by step. I toiled for hours putting the ingredients together. Now, right when I was about to take a big bite out of the pizza Joseph sneaks in and takes it. He takes all eight slices. Now it could be that he ought not to do this because that action, along with the rule associated with that action, would result in bad social consequences. But, aside from that, did, in some way, Joseph violate my personal autonomy? Did he invade my “boundary,” despite never laying a hand on me?

It seems implausible to say that he didn’t just because the pizza was external to my physical body. I spent the whole day cooking that pizza just to have it taken away from me. I altered physical matter to create something new, something delicious. While we do this all the time with external objects, we also do it with our own body. The particles that make up our bodies currently weren’t always there. We constantly gain new ones and lose old ones. We take external matter and make it part of us. We make it part of our ongoing projects.

This is exactly what I’ve done with the dough, cheese, and sauce. I utilized previously unclaimed or traded particles and made them part of my ongoing project. That project being eating pizza. External property that we mix our labor with, and make part of our ongoing uses, is an extension of our individual boundary. If you don’t respect my justly acquired property, you aren’t respecting my personal autonomy.

Joseph is right in that we have good reason to respect private property because of its social consequences. The system of private property is vital to social cooperation and the efficient allocation of resources. However, that isn’t the whole story. We have other reasons to respect private property, too. Matter that is altered and made part of one’s ongoing uses is an extension of their person. Just as we have good reason to respect peoples’ individual autonomy regardless of the consequences, we have good reason to respect peoples’ property claims regardless of the consequences.