Property

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It's the Law

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Property is anything that has an owner. Its two identifying characteristics are exclusivity and transferability.

If you're not a lawyer or looking for a home, you're probably interested in one of these eternal controversies:

• How does one define property?
• How is property distributed?
• How does one determine ownership?

Legal aspects

As previously mentioned, property is defined primarily by an exclusionary right that can be transferred to other people. The owner of property possesses legal title. One analogy for explaining property rights is that of a bundle of sticks. In this analogy, a "property right" is really a collection of several different rights: possession, use, sale, protection, etc. Each one of these is a right associated with a particular thing (as opposed to rights like freedom of religion or the right to a fair trial, which are not).

Types

Tangible

Tangible property falls into one of two categories: real property and chattel. Real property consists of land and structures on it (i.e., buildings, homes, etc.) whereas chattel (an etymological doublet of the word "cattle") is anything you have a right to possess (i.e., pencils, books, clothing, etc.). Slaves, wives, and children (born or unborn) may or may not count as chattels, depending on the time and space in which their owners or putative owners attempt to assert ownership rights.

Intangible

Intangible property is the kind of property you can't touch. The most obvious example of intangible property is copyright. Other instances include domain names, patents, trademarks, trade names, debts, and stocks.

To a business entity, the all-important customer goodwill is very intangible; indeed, some businesses may reflect on their financial statements more value in this intangible than in any buildings, equipment, or inventory.

Ideas, secrets, and know-how also can be considered intangible property; for example, an employee of a business is not free to steal an idea a business may be developing in secret to keep from competitors, and with the technical know-how learned from his employer, to quit and start his own business using the idea before the original owner could fully complete development.

The Coca-Cola formula or Colonel Sanders's secret recipe are examples of business secrets which are intangible property.

Forms of property in political philosophy

Private property

Private property is the form of property that's the basis of capitalism. Private property is owned by capitalist individuals, rather than by everyone else. Think of land, railroads, factories, banks, intellectual property, etc. These are all variants of private property because under capitalism, sole individuals may control them. A capitalist can own a railroad, and another capitalist who owns a pharmaceutical company may execute their privilege to intellectual property by making vaccine patents. Under this system, the railroad workers don't all concomitantly control the means of production, exchange, and trade; including the railroads themselves. Nor under capitalism is a vaccine available to all people as a right, and is able to be reproduced at will by other parts of pharmaceutical industry. Both the vaccine and railroads are privately owned, and thus are private property.

Property by use

Property by use is when something becomes the property of someone else when used regularly. The means of productions would be the property of workers if this form of property was recognized by laws. This type of property is a basis for some forms of anarchism, some forms of socialism, and has been implemented in Rojava with communalism.

Common ownership

Common ownership of property is the basis of communism. This is because communism advocates for the total abolition of private property, therefore, property under communism is owned by everyone, not individual capitalists. Recall that under communism, private property is separate from personal property; so personal possessions would not constitute private property. On the other hand, factories, land, banks, railroads, and the means of production in aggregate would constitute as private property, thus they would be owned and operated by the workers themselves.

Opinions

"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights." ― James Madison

"Property is theft." ― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” ― Frédéric Bastiat

See also

• Eminent domain
• Privatization
• Slavery
• Tax
• Squatters rights