Is private property a good thing or bad thing?

• It allows for individual freedom
• Property is theft(?) Property is ownership, and the only thing you own is yourself.

Perhaps private property is good and necessary until a civilization evolves to the point where it is no longer need because everyone is enlightened and can freely share without lack/scarcity/ego.

The deeper truth is that we don’t own anything. Even if you make a guitar out of wood - you did not “own” the tree it was made out of. That wood was a gift of nature.

“By property, or private property, ever since Proudhon's book What is Property?, published in 1840, anarchists meant possession (or what other socialists, including Marxists and communists, distingushed as personal property) which he considered as liberty ("Property is liberty") versus productive property (such as land and infrastructure, or what Marxists terms the means of production and the means of labor) which he considered as theft ("Property is theft"), causing him to also say "Property is impossible”’

They make the following distinctions:

• Personal property, or possession, includes items intended for personal use (e.g. one's toothbrush, clothes, homes, vehicles and sometimes money).203 It must be gained in a socially fair manner and the owner has a distributive right to exclude others.
• Anarchists generally agree that private property is a social relationship between the owner and persons deprived (not a relationship between person and thing), e.g. artifacts, factories, mines, dams, infrastructure, natural vegetation, mountains, deserts and seas. In this context, private property and ownership means ownership of the means of production, not personal possessions.
• To anarchists and socialists alike, the term private property refers to capital or the means of production while personal property refers to consumer and non-capital goods and services.

Private Property - Ownership

'The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!"' - Rousseau

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist, noted that "property is theft."

Self-Ownership - Individual Sovereignty

Self-ownership sovereignty of the individual individual sovereignty

You own your body - this is self-evident

You own what you create, build. You own what you find, as long as it doesn’t belong to others

You own what you purchase from another fairly

“Deontological anarcho-capitalists believe that the only just and most economically beneficial way to acquire property is through voluntary trade, gift, or labor-based original appropriation, rather than through aggression or fraud.”

• From wiki

Ownership of Land & Nature…?

Can a person “own” land? Is it, whoever gets to it first can claim it as theirs?

Whoever builds a home on it and cares for the land, is then a caretaker of it?

• How many people on Earth?
• How many acres of livable land (not ocean/water, not too hot or too cold, etc.)
• = What is the amount of land that each person can have as their own and allow others to have their own too?

Can a person “own” natural resources? - food, natural materials, rivers….

Private Property

“Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.3 The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy, with socialist perspectives making a hard distinction between the two. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system.”

Self-Ownership

Rothbard's defense of the self-ownership principle stems from what he believed to be his falsification of all other alternatives, namely that either a group of people can own another group of people, or that no single person has full ownership over one's self. Rothbard dismisses these two cases on the basis that they cannot result in a universal ethic, i.e. a just natural law that can govern all people, independent of place and time. The only alternative that remains to Rothbard is self-ownership which he believes is both axiomatic and universal.

• Wikipedia

The basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a self-owner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with". From these twin axioms – self-ownership and "homesteading" – stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles.

• Murray Rothbard

Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrote:

“Everyone is the proper owner of his own physical body as well as of all places and nature-given goods that he occupies and puts to use by means of his body, provided only that no one else has already occupied or used the same places and goods before him. This ownership of "originally appropriated" places and goods by a person implies his right to use and transform these places and goods in any way he sees fit, provided only that he does not change thereby uninvitedly the physical integrity of places and goods originally appropriated by another person. In particular, once a place or good has been first appropriated by, in John Locke's phrase, 'mixing one's labor' with it, ownership in such places and goods can be acquired only by means of a voluntary – contractual – transfer of its property title from a previous to a later owner.”

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Original appropriation

“Original appropriation allows an individual to claim any never-before-used resources, including land and by improving or otherwise using it, own it with the same "absolute right" as their own body, and retaining those rights forever, regardless of whether the resource is still being used by them.”

• Wikipedia

According to Rothbard, property can only come about through labor, therefore original appropriation of land is not legitimate by merely claiming it or building a fence around it—it is only by using land and by mixing one's labor with it that original appropriation is legitimized: "Any attempt to claim a new resource that someone does not use would have to be considered invasive of the property right of whoever the first user will turn out to be". Rothbard argued that the resource need not continue to be used in order for it to be the person's property as "for once his labor is mixed with the natural resource, it remains his owned land. His labor has been irretrievably mixed with the land, and the land is therefore his or his assigns' in perpetuity"

Intellectual Property

“Some anarcho-capitalists strongly oppose intellectual property (i.e., trademarks, patents, copyrights). Stephan N. Kinsella argues that ownership only relates to tangible assets”

• wiki

Is it wrong for someone to pirate a digital file? - a movie, a song, etc.? Does it “harm” the creator?

Contracts

“The society envisioned by anarcho-capitalists has been labelled by them as a "contractual society" which Rothbard described as "a society based purely on voluntary action, entirely unhampered by violence or threats of violence"71: 84  The system relies on contracts between individuals as the legal framework which would be enforced by private police and security forces as well as private arbitrations.”

• Wiki

Original Appropriation

“Appropriation is a process by which previously unowned natural resources, particularly land, become the property of a person or group of persons. … Libertarian and other property-rights-oriented ideologies define appropriation as requiring the “mixing” of the would-be owner's labor with the land claimed.2 A prime example of such mixing is farming, although various extractive activities such as mining, and the grazing of herds are often recognized. Personal, physical residence is often recognized after some minimum documented continuous period of time, as is built structures on the land whose ownership has not previously been recognized by the authority whose recognition is sought.”