Is private property a natural right?
Well, classically the western world has held that their are 4 natural rights reserved to every human regardless of conditions. These are liberty, property, security, and equality. Upon examination of the nature of these rights, one finds something peculiar, property is not like the others. That is, private property is the only “right” among the 4 that is both subject to modification and transaction, and is only a matter of potentiality. Furthermore, it is the only one that threatens itself and all others. What is meant by this is that private property alone has the ability to be given up, “lent out”, expanded and contracted ect., and private property alone is considered to be present when it’s obtainment is only a potentiality. And that private property alone, out of the 4 so called natural rights, creates war over and against itself. The poor want what the rich have, and the rich want to maintain against the poor what they have, the two sides collide.
Consider, for a moment, security, liberty, and equality. What these rights have in common is the fact that they are universal and seemingly absolute. One may not give up one’s liberty, equality, or security even if one wanted to. Contracts between individuals that negate any of these rights are not valid, nor do they hold any real meaning. One can conceivably draw up a contract that declares one the slave of another, or that declares that one is to be considered less than another based on some phenotypic characteristic, but such a contract would be considered ridiculous by all and be enforceable by none. Furthermore, if one were to find oneself in a position in which one’s right to liberty and equality had been forcibly removed, all would consider that condition an abomination. One would feel that one had not only the right but the obligation to fight against such circumstances, and that such conditions do not negate one’s right, but deprive one of the right. As soon as the conditions were overturned, or one escaped them and set foot on free soil, one would instantly be considered both equal and free. The rights do not exist merely as potentialities, one is not said to have liberty when one is repressed simply because at some future date liberty could be obtained. Quite the contrary is the case, one has the absolute right to liberty even when one is being oppressed. One is being harmed and infringed upon by the oppression, it is illegitimate and abhorrent to all.
All 3 of these rights are such that when they are realized by one in a society, that realization reinforces the same realization in others. The security of the rich and the poor against foreign nations reinforce each other and are indistinguisable. The same goes with liberty and equality. The equality of any depends on the equality of all; if one is unequal then all are unequal. Likewise, the right to liberty is not easily infringed on by a government or ruler that is barred from infringing on others. However, when that government is allowed to infringe on some, then it sets up the mechanisms and means to infringe on all.
Against this, let us elucidate the “right” of private property. It is such that one can contract or undermine this “right”. One may sell one’s property, or lease one’s property, or destroy one’s property, or abandon one’s property freely. Such actions are recognized by all governments and all societies. Furthermore, all societies and government allow that one can be forcibly removed from private property, and thus forcibly separated from one’s “right”, without infringing on this “right”. If one’s house is in disrepair and becomes dangerous the government has the right to condemn it. If one violates an obligation to pay a contract one can be forcibly removed from one’s property. If the society at large demands the land or property for the social good, one can be forcibly removed from it. In elucidating the “right” further we see that unlike the others, it is considered a mere potentiality. The man who owns nothing is said to have the right to property because he can hypothetically obtain property at a future time, even if this is an impossibility for that man. It is enough that the society itself allows from certain select individuals to own property. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense to talk of repression in terms of private property in the terms it is generally understood through. One final point, private property exists in opposition to itself. Unlike the 3 other natural rights it creates strife by its very existence, and it not only doesn’t reinforce itself, but the private property of one negates that of another. One owns at the deference of the other in western societies.
All this is to say that what makes something a natural right is precisely what private property lacks. It doesn’t possess a single quality that makes a natural right. Moreover it makes the other rights impossible. The strife between the rich and the poor prevents security, the property based stratification of society prevents equality, and the gobbling up of more property than one can use prevents liberty. The liberty to live. Yes, it is opposed to human life by its very nature. Insofar as we hold one’s right live as a right, then we cannot hold private property as a right in the terms of western society. To live one must eat, and to eat one must labor the land, and to labor the land one must possess land. Yet, private property allows for it to occur that a man may not possess land, thus it allows for a man to be unable to labor, thus it allows for a man to not be able to live by virtue of itself. Note, the fact that one doesn’t have to labor the land to live is not a refutation or objection to this argument, as it is the result of thinking that already assumes private property.
“One can work at mccdonalds without owning anything and still survive, you might say”. No, one is forced to work at mccdonalds to survive, one is stripped of liberty. One is repressed.
Not only is private property opposed to natural rights, it creates implicit contradictions. Consider, if you will, the basic economics of Capitalism. Capitalism by its very nature requires that there be a certain number of unemployed workers. Anyone that has bothered to study economics at any level will understand this…to keep the so called “unskilled” jobs at a low rate of wages, there has to be more workers trying to obtain them than their are jobs. If this does not happen then employers creating “unskilled” jobs will be forced to raise wages or be un-able to run. This has a domino effect on the economy as the wages of unskilled jobs approach the wages of skilled workers…Lets just say that Capitalism cannot survive without an army of unemployed. The question that any good Capitalist knows is at the heart of the issue, is how do we ensure that their is an army of unskilled workers? Well, that is easy, you tax people that have jobs in order to support those that don’t, in order to maintain the system. Which is to say, you extract the private property of people who have it and give it to people that don’t. Which is to say that you negate private property itself, and end up in an insufferable contradiction. Even if you don’t consider private property a natural right, it does not change the fact that the owner of private property is going to decry any attempt by anyone to take his “property” as theft. Yet, in maintaining this he contradicts himself. Because private property generates the need for unskilled workers. Thus, he must be stolen from or lose everything. The good hypocrite that he is, the Capitalist chooses to be stolen from to maintain the unskilled workers. What he doesn’t realize, is that once he does this he loses the ability to ever claim again that if someone takes his property it is theft. He has, once and for all, shown that his claim that taking his property is theft is a spurious argument.