Property as Power

Discussion

Blair Fix:

"We need an actual scientific theory of property rights — a theory that explains why property exists, not why it ‘ought’ to exist. The most convincing theory of private property, in my opinion, comes from the work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. To understand property, Nitzan and Bichler argue that we should turn Locke’s idea on its head. Property isn’t a ‘natural right’. It’s an act of power.

Property, Nitzan and Bichler observe, is an act of exclusion. If I own something, that means that I have the right to exclude others from using it. It’s this exclusionary power that defines private property.

Here are Nitzan and Bichler describing this act:

- The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone can get into someone else’s car and drive away, or give an order to sell all of Warren Buffet’s shares in Berkshire Hathaway. The sole purpose of private ownership is to prevent us from doing so. In this sense, private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power.

When we think like Nitzan and Bichler, we get a very different view of income. Recall that most political economists see property in terms of the ‘things’ that are owned. They then argue that income stems from these ‘things’. Nitzan and Bichler upend this logic. Property, they argue, is about the act of ownership — the institutional act of exclusion. Income stems from this exclusionary act. We earn income from the fence of property rights, not from what’s inside the fence. In other words, if you can’t restrict access to your property, you can’t earn income from it." (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-19/can-the-world-get-along-without-natural-resources/?)