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Question About Private Property

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nimble

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55 people have viewed this and no one knows how to answer it? Please help, I need an answer. All I've gotten elsewhere are a bunch of utilitarian answers that say it only makes sense to keep property rights because it would mean you would have to continually do menial labor to keep the rights, which would be economically inefficient. I want a moral argument to defend this.

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There is a time limit to your right to a plot of land if you've left it abandoned. I don't know off the top my what this figure is, but I know the government takes ownership of land that has been unused/abandoned after X years. In fact, I think some state governments charge you for having to take over the land.

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Okay that takes care of property rights as they exist in our legal structures now. But I want to know how it works theoretically, like how it "ought" to be. I want to know why the Lockean theory of property rights, that you gain property by expending effort on it, why you continue owning it even when you are not expending effort on it. If that makes any more sense to you.

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Yes, the essential principle is that you have a right to property so long as you add value to it--this is the principle behind our settling of North America and the Jews settling of Israel.

Look at it this way, purchasing a plot of land is like buying an opportunity to build on, or derive value from, that land. If you default on that opportunity, then you lose out on the chance you purchased. Once you've siezed this opportunity and built a house or whatever on this land, you own the house resting on the plot of land. This is how it ought to be -- you own the value you built on, or extracted from, the plot of land.

I'm not too familiar with Lockean property rights theory, but if it is as I say above and yet he says people should own their plot of land regardless of their inactivity, then yes this would be a contradiction.

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