property is not theft

more deep thoughts...

a rather contentious phrase i've heard on more than one occasion is "all property is theft"... the idea comes from an essay by Joseph Proudhon called "What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government" (which you can read about here) and is often linked to anarchism...

first lets get past the obvious - without ownership a thing can't be stolen... if i claim a thing as my own when it previously belonged to no one, i did not steal it... the only way for it to be theft is if it already belonged to someone else...

the basic premise seems to be that claiming something as property takes it out of the sphere of public access and therefore robs the community at large and causes people to suffer... but this ignores the fact that many things cannot be used by many people at once so the very act of using something takes it out of the sphere of public access (at least temporarily) and causes others who need or want to use it to suffer... we cannot reasonably expect to stamp out suffering by avoiding this because it cannot be avoided in a world where resources are finite...

so obviously property isn't really the problem... at best the problem is excess of property, people taking more than they need or can reasonably use... but even if they didn't there would still be suffering (the thing Proudhon credits with inspiring him to undertake his investigation and come to the conclusion that he did) because we can't get everything we want, it's just not feasible or reasonable...

on a side note, the clever reader will realize that this line of reasoning is actually socialist, not anarchist... questions of property or community are not within the purview of anarchism, rather they are more closely aligned with socialism... anarchism's concern is freedom from the rule of law and government... i get really annoyed when seemingly well read anarchists fail to recognize that the anarchistic societal models they've read about are (necessarily) composed of multiple ideological concepts... i guess that's what happens when you let other people do your thinking for you...