property theory

God, who hath given the World to Men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of Life, and convenience” – John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1689)

“… Yet every Man has Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whateverso he then removes out of the State of Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property” – John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1689)

However, we must not: ‒Take so much so as to deprive others. ‒ ‒Take so much that we waste what we appropriate. ‒ ‒Claim that we are able to acquire property that has not been acquired by our labour.

“Right… is the child of law; from real laws come real rights; from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a ******* brood of monsters… Natural rights is simple nonsense; natural imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense- nonsense upon stilts”- Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies (1795)

“Property is the sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”- William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765)

“A belief that we hold land [as private property] raises expectations, none of which are fulfilled in contemporary societies, that our rights over land are almost unlimited, that we can do with it as we please. The problem here is the contingent but undeniable truth about existing Western societies that our rights of exclusion, control and alienation in relation to land are severely constrained. Talk about private property in land in these societies serves to obscure this point, blinding us to the actuality of land holding”- Lucy & Mitchell, Replacing Private Property