They had a much saner (IMnshO) view that land isn't something that can be owned, but just a thing you happen to live on while you're here. Thinking through what this could possibly mean for property law is left as an exercise for the student. Not to mention how their view would have changed once they started building domiciles with more permanent foundations.

Off the top of my head, I think there are at least 4 categories of property:

1) Ephemeral - Front row seat at a concert. You can't share it, you can't store it, it's only good for a specific period of time then it doesn't exist any more.

2) Perishable - Food. You can't share it, only one person can ever use it. Once it's used it doesn't exist any more.

3) Transferable - A car. Only one person can have it at a time. You can use it, save it, sell it, pass it on.

4) Eternal - Land. It's fixed, it doesn't change because of who is using it,* it will be there after the current user is gone.
* The stuff you build on the land is different from the land itself.

It seems reasonable to me that different rules would apply to different types of property. If we thought about property rights this granularly, and understood that the rules are different for different classes, I'd have less of a problem with the concept of intellectual property.

Instead, we call all these things "property" and apply rules that make sense for one class to the different classes in inconsistent ways.

1) Ticket "classes" are a red herring. Any particular seat, anywhere in the venue, can only have one ass in it. Planes are actually a better example than a concert, because no, you can't share it or exchange it (after take-off). If there are 10 seats, only 10 people can board. Tickets determine who those 10 people are.

2) I should have called this "consumable" instead of "perishable". Yes, you can share food with someone else, but you can't share that particular bite of food that you just swallowed. Whatever portion you consume can't be shared. Only one person gets to consume it.


Difference between 3 & 4: A car is made, sold, re-sold, donated, destroyed. It is "owned" by someone while it exists, and at some point it no longer exists, but until then "ownership" is how we define who is allowed to use it, or assign permission to use it.

The land bounded by points A B C & D existed before man. We may build it up, or dig down into it. We may mine it, or flood it, or fence it off. When we "sell" that land, we are defining who has permission to do all those things to it. We already recognize that we can assign permission to build a house on it to one person, permission to mine under it to a second, and permission to fly over it to a third. What no one can do is make it no longer exist.

You seem to be defining ownership as something that transcends death so that you can refute it. For the rest of us it's simply shorthand for who gets to make decisions about a limited resource.

"Limited resource" is the key point in what I view as "property". If I sit in the seat, you can't. If I eat the sandwich, you can't. If I drive the car, you can't. If I'm allowed to build a house on the land, you aren't. This is why I have an issue with "intellectual property". It's not because, as you insist - via expanding the definition of "own" - no one can own anything. Rather it's because there's no limitation on all of us having it at the same time.

One last thing:

This obsession with "private property" derives almost exclusively from a capitalist theocracy that essentially negates all notions of community. And that must be taught. It isn't natural.

If you've ever seen toddlers fight over toys you know that isn't true. Sharing is the thing we have to teach.

We'd never used mine, yours or hers at our house. Everything was "ours."

When getting dressed and you told her to put on shoes, did you say, "Put on our shoes"?
If she couldn't find "our" shoes, did you tell her, "They're in our bedroom"?
Do all of you share "our" toothbrush?

Possessive pronouns aren't indoctrination, they're description. The house I grew up in was "my" house, even though my parents' names were on the deed. The woman I sleep with is "my" wife, even though clearly no one owns her.

Oh wait, I just realized you're even more full of shit than that.

We'd never used mine, yours or hers at our house. Everything was "ours."

You do use possessive pronouns. I guess your family is allowed to own things then? Or can anyone just walk in to your house the house you live in and walk out with "our" VCR?

There's a specific way property law is just like nutrition and drug labeling. When done well, it's a way to remove lawyers from day-to-day transactions. I'll explain. (It takes a minute, but comes back around at the end.)

Some people vehemently oppose any kind of nutrition labeling.* Their argument is that as long as they accurately describe what's in the package, it's up to the consumer to decide whether they want to consume it.

Of course none of us has time to independently research everything we could possibly put in our bodies, so we rely on third parties to do the testing for us. And since that research is expensive, the only people with a motivation to do it are the same people with a motivation to lie if they don't like the results. This applies both to health claims for the ingredients, as well as verification that the ingredients actually are as listed.

We go through our daily lives reading labels and trusting that things are generally as stated, because a government agency somewhere is acting on our behalf to ensure that's true. If we couldn't rely on that every purchase would require independent investigation, and if the contents of a package don't match the ingredients it would be up to individual consumers to sue the manufacturers for redress, which is the official stated preference of libertarian-leaning Republicans.

If they get their way, there will be only two ways to trust you're getting what you pay for:
1) Have a fleet of lawyers on retainer, standing by to enforce your rights.
2) Only barter with people you personally know and trust.

So, how is this like property law?

Forget about philosophical "ownership" that transcends death and just answer this question: Who gets to decide who can drive the car parked in the driveway next to where I live? Who controls that car? I think it's me, because I "own" that car. Most of society agrees with me.

But let's do away with private property. Now who controls it? "The community." Okay, fine. But now I need to go to work. Today I get in "my" car and I go. If "the community" controls it, who has the keys? How do I get permission to take the keys? How far in advance do I need to reserve it?

I suspect "the community" will organize itself into various levels of administration. You'll need a lawyer to negotiate every request to use the car.

As long as there are scarce resources, you need a way to allocate them. You can either do that once, via policy - AKA property law - or you can do it at the point of every transaction.

Property law, done well, would mean it's clear who controls a resource, and that control is at an appropriate level. It doesn't make sense for "the community" to control my car, just as it doesn't make sense for a single person to control what can be dumped into a lake.


* "Nutritional supplements" already fall into a black hole, where they routinely make medical-sounding claims but aren't classified as drugs, so they fall under neither nutrition labeling laws nor efficacy standards. Yes, plenty of money went into building this dodge.

We're used to being the smartest person in the room. When regulation looks like "protecting people from themselves" we like to think, "Get your nanny state away from me, I'm too smart for that."

And on a single instance of a single transaction, with enough time to go down the rabbit hole and build a point-by-point position, that might be true. The problem is we can't do that every time for every decision.

You're probably not going to know enough about cars to beat the professional car salesman. You're probably not going to know more than the epidemiologist about the latest in drug interactions. At some point you have to trust someone, or better yet, trust the system. That's why making a good system is so important, and attacking the system itself is worse than any single offense against the system.