I was talking to a socialist whose argument against private property was that initially it ws gained through theft many thousands of years ago i.e barbarians just took land from others, thus private property is based on the act of theft.
I made the argument that alot of property was not cultivated to a great extent and thus was not owned - Locke’s argument. Also i argued two wrongs don’t make a right i.e if they stole thousands of years ago, it dosen’t make it right for us to steal others property now. He is still not convinced, what arguments would you use?
How can there be a theft if there were no property rights to begin with?
He argued that theft occured because common property is moral as opposed to private property. I got the impression he supported property just not private, rather collective ownership. Thus society and the people were the victims as theft occured as they were deprived of what they should be allowed i.e all land. He argues theft can still occur, private property isn’t neccessary rather collective property can exist.
If I understand the Objectivist position on property rights in land, it is that such rights arise as a result of an individual putting certain land to productive use. That is, the productive use of land is the condition that creates value with respect to that land. I assume that is the argument that you used.
If your friend did not explain to you how it is that a collective right to property arises in the first place, then I would ask him that question. That is, how is it that “the collective”, which has created no value in a piece of land, somehow has the right to property in that land.
What your friend is advocating is that persons who have created no value in the land are entitled to the value that others have created. Why? By virtue of the fact that they have not created that value. As a corollary, the individual who created the value in the land has no right to that value, by virtue of the fact that he created that value.
No offense to your friend, but it sounds like he has never taken a day of economics in his life. It blows my mind how some people make such arbitrary speculations without a shred of understanding or research.
Property first occured when agriculture developed, and much of the world either hunted or subsistent farmed. Making food was the basis of the ancient world. People domesticated wheat and choose a spot of land to raise the wheat on. Nothing of this sort involves theft, because it was an unused natural resource, which in economics is called “dead capita.” No where in this process did theft occur. Barbarism and tribalism was the earliest form of socialism; the idea that property rights aren’t recognized, therefor the barbarian is moral in taking the land from the greedy landowners.
interestingly enough, in my Money theory class, I learned how inflation and price control destroyed the Roman empire. The emperor was minting money in order to finance his numerous social and military programs, and when businessmen raised their prices to deal with the increased money supply, emperor Diocletian declared them greedy and evil businessmen and he set specific prices for all goods. Naturally massive shortages occured throughout the empire, the upperclass fled the cities, and the Legions disbanded because there was no incentive to fight in an army whose pay is useless. Interesting that socialism destroyed one of the mightiest civilizations ever.
furthermore, anyone with a lick of economics education knows that common property is the most useless and degraded property of the three major types (private, public, and common.) The reason common property is so rare today is because of it’s economic failure: everyone used the common property, no one took care of it. Hence the term “tragedy of the commons” which arose during the middle ages: because the commonlands were typically the worst lands in the kingdom.
… he supported property just not private, rather collective ownership. Thus society and the people were the victims as theft occured as they were deprived of what they should be allowed i.e all land.
Ah! Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s “All property is theft.”.
This is given by Nathaniel Branden as his first example of a stolen concept in “The Stolen Concept”, “The Objectivist Newsletter”, vol. 2, no. 1. You can read his argument against it there.
Let me give a different argument:
If collective property meant that no one could use the item, then it would clearly be counter-productive. If everyone is free to use the item, then I should be free to consume it right now. If I consume it now, then I am depriving others of its use. If I choose to defer my consumption and improve the property before I consume it, then I am also depriving others of its use. How is this worse?
If I decide not to consume it after-all and give or sell it to another person for him to consume, then how is this worse?
I was talking to a socialist whose argument against private property was that initially it ws gained through theft many thousands of years ago i.e barbarians just took land from others, thus private property is based on the act of theft.
I made the argument that alot of property was not cultivated to a great extent and thus was not owned - Locke’s argument. Also i argued two wrongs don’t make a right i.e if they stole thousands of years ago, it dosen’t make it right for us to steal others property now. He is still not convinced, what arguments would you use?
Walk into his house uninvited one day and just start sleeping in his bed. There are no real property rights, so you have just as much of a right to his house and his bed as he does.
Theft is theft of property. There is no other kind of theft. The socialist contents, then, that property arose by means of theft of property. The contradiction is plain.