Property & Liberty

Who "owns" the earth?

1. John Locke – Labor and Land: Locke (17th c.) argued property begins when someone mixes labor with unowned resources (e.g. farming wild land). He held that owning property is a natural right, but within limits (enough left for others). A post here could explain Locke’s reasoning and how it justified private ownership in early liberal thought.
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The First Encloser: Rousseau (18th c.) famously mused that the first person who claimed land by fencing it off “found the state!” He criticized private property as leading to social inequality. This entry would discuss Rousseau’s view that collective agreement (the general will) should regulate property, challenging pure free-enterprise ideas.
3. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – “Property is Theft”: A 19th‑century French anarchist, Proudhon flip-flopped by calling personal property “theft” and collective property “theft.” He sought a balance: small possession for need vs abolishing exploitative ownership. The topic would survey his argument for workers’ associations and what “justice” means in property relations.
4. Karl Marx – From Each According to Ability: Marx asserted that in capitalist societies, the rich own the means of production and exploit workers. In Communist Manifesto he forecasts abolition of private property. This segment contrasts Marx’s collectivism (“to each as he needs”) against classical liberalism, asking if communal ownership can deliver true freedom.
5. The Enclosure Movement: In 18th‑19th century England, common lands were fenced off for private agriculture. This uprooted many rural poor, sparking debates: were enclosures efficient or unjust land grabs? This historical case exemplifies the “tragedy of the commons” paradox and shows how legal change in property rights provoked social conflict.
6. Soviet Collectivization: In early Soviet Russia (1920s–30s) and Mao’s China (1950s–60s), the state seized farms to create collective agriculture. The result was famine and revolt (e.g. Stalin’s Ukraine, China’s Great Leap). This controversial experiment asks: can forcing people to share property achieve justice, or does it destroy incentive and rights?
7. Robert Nozick – Entitlement Theory: In 1974 philosopher Nozick argued any distribution is just if acquired or transferred without force. Under his view, taxation beyond minimal (for night-watchman state) is “forced labor.” This topic would explore libertarian counterarguments to welfare: Is self-ownership and minimal state compatible with a moral society?
8. Ayn Rand – The Virtue of Selfishness: Novelist-philosopher Rand (mid-20th c.) championed laissez-faire capitalism. She proclaimed selfish rationality and property rights as moral imperatives. A post could portray her ideal man: a hard-working entrepreneur entitled to the fruits of his labor, and her critiques of any ideology that erodes individual ownership (e.g. communism).
9. John Rawls – Justice as Fairness: Rawls accepted that people earn property, but he insisted on inequality only if it benefits the least well-off (the “difference principle”). This entry would explain how Rawls uses a veiled hypothetical to balance liberty with redistribution, illustrating a middle ground between unfettered property and forced equality.
10. Garrett Hardin’s Commons: Ecologist Hardin (1968) illustrated with pastures: if everyone grazes as much as they want, the commons collapse (overgrazed land). This “Tragedy of the Commons” suggests either privatization or regulation. The essay could challenge socialists and libertarians alike: in unowned resources, how do we protect everyone’s future freedom?
11. Milton Friedman and the Fragile Link Between Property and Freedom: In 1962, amid Cold War fears and expanding welfare states, economist Milton Friedman made a deceptively simple claim: economic freedom is a necessary condition for political freedom. In Capitalism and Freedom, he argued that private property and competitive markets decentralize power, preventing the state from controlling both livelihoods and beliefs. When government owns the economy, dissent becomes dangerous—your job, housing, and survival depend on political approval. Friedman likened markets to a system of “permissionless coordination”: you don’t need anyone’s consent to transact. His advocacy for school choice, negative income tax, and floating exchange rates framed liberty not as the absence of government, but as the absence of monopolized authority. The question he leaves us with is uncomfortable and current: how much control over property can a society cede before freedom quietly erodes?
12. David D. Friedman and the Radical Market for Law: David D. Friedman, a 20th-century economist and legal theorist, asks a question most political philosophy treats as unthinkable: What if courts, police, and even law itself didn’t belong to the state? In The Machinery of Freedom, Friedman argues that property rights and legal order could emerge from voluntary contracts and competitive private institutions rather than government monopoly. His case isn’t utopian; it’s procedural. Just as markets coordinate food or housing through prices and incentives, Friedman claims they could coordinate justice by aligning enforcement with consumer demand. The unsettling implication is that state authority over property may not be a moral necessity, but a historical habit. His work reframes liberty as something maintained not by public law, but by decentralized negotiation—and asks whether coercion is truly required to protect what we own.
13. Colonial Land Rights: European powers often treated conquered land as free for the taking, disregarding indigenous concepts of communal land. For example, the Doctrine of Discovery gave colonizers property claims (as in early American policy). A post here would trace how incompatible views on “ownership” led to dispossession, highlighting power’s role in defining property.
14. Satoshi Nakamoto and the Invention of Trustless Property: On October 31, 2008—while banks were collapsing and governments rushed to rescue them—a nine-page paper appeared on a cryptography mailing list titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Its author, Satoshi Nakamoto, did not argue about morality or justice. Instead, he proposed an engineering solution to a political problem: who gets to own value when trust in institutions breaks down? Bitcoin replaced central authority with proof-of-work, turning property into something secured by computation rather than law. Ownership no longer depended on courts or banks, but on cryptographic keys and a public ledger. Like Locke’s labor theory, value emerged from work—but here the labor was mathematical. Nakamoto’s quiet revolution forces a radical question: if property can exist without the state, what happens to the state’s claim to legitimacy?