| | This is a thread deserving of rereading.... (Start with the article - which I agree with)
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I think that progress could be made with better understanding of what the word "property" refers to. For example, my saying that I own my car, that it is my property, would seem to be clear enough. But what is clear enough for common, everyday usage isn't clear enough for a discussion of the roots of the fundamental ideas. There are four entities involved in my statement: me, my car, property, and ownership. The car is an object to which ownership might apply, I am a being that might exercise rights. But the car isn't the property and the ownership isn't of the car - not if we are being precise.
Bastiat took the position that property was not the object, but rather a relationship between people with respect to an object. I like best the description of "property" as a bundle of rights. From that perspective, I and my car become related to one another in this context by a bundle of rights. The relationship will include other people by implication and because rights only arise in the context of society. I own particular rights relative to the car and ownership becomes the claim or identification of that relationship to a particular bundle of rights (i.e., to be the one to have moral/legal standing for taking specific actions) in regards to the object (or idea).
I own a bundle of rights that include the right to sell my car, the right to drive my car, the right to destroy my car, the right to modify my car, the right to rent out my car, the right to let a friend drive my car, etc. Each of those rights are part of the bundle that connect me to my car in a moral/legal context. And they can be discussed or seen as hierarchical - the right to drive my car is part of, or rests upon, the right to use my car - that ability to parse rights into finer strands is important.
This intellectual structure where we view property as a bundle of rights connecting an owner to an object is very useful. Look at the difference if I had leased my car instead of buying it. I would still have property rights, but it isn't the same bundle. I no longer have the right to sell the car or to destroy it and there are some modifications that I wouldn't have right to make. The leasing company would have retained some of the bundle of rights they held regarding this car, while transfering others to me. If the leasing company holds title to the car but used it as collateral in a loan, there are rights that will belong to the maker of the loan. There is an extraordinarly large universe of possible rights that could potentially arise out of what actions are possible for an object (given the techological context). This allows for enormous variations in the arrangements we can make in free trade without the danger of stepping out of a context where moral rights can be translated into legal rights as objective law and justice obtained in our courts. Contracts at their root are about this parsing of bundles of rights and making specific and concrete the terms there of.
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In post #44 Robert Bidinotto wrote, "ALL property rights are ultimately rooted in intellectual property rights, if you think about it. That's because no property rights can be claimed unless someone adds a creative element to some physical aspect of nature, transforming it into a human value.
It is that intellectual creativity that transforms nature to human use which we acknowledge when we honor property rights."
I suspect that Frederic Bastiat would have agreed. Take a look at this quote (keeping in mind that "property" for Bastiat was a bundle of rights), "Man is born a proprietor, because he is born with wants whose satisfaction is necessary to life, and with organs and faculties whose exercise is indispensable to the satisfaction of these wants. Faculties are only an extension of the person; and property is nothing but an extension of the faculties. To separate a man from his faculties is to cause him to die; to separate a man from the product of his faculties is likewise to cause him to die"
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