It is often presumed that it is force and force alone that assures against trespass of property. This may have been true to some degree in earliest times. But as properties multiplied, opportunity for theft far exceeded the ability of physical defenders, both in time and numbers. Non-trespass of private property became one of the earliest taboos, substituted for still earlier taboos against tribal trespass. Here is the early root of the Golden Rule, and even of the late development of the Decalogue.

The difficulty in discussing ownership as one of the major factors of human existence and experience is that little data exist. Most of those who have examined economics, whether they were concerned philosophically with man, or materialistically with property, have had many of their thoughts molded by written history. But written history does not encompass the experience of man. At best, it plunges into the past only briefly. The written record is confined to the last five or six thousand years of human experience.

If the idea of owning property privately began as I have conjectured, then the self-identification of the individual as a unique center of consciousness not only assisted in orienting him to his surroundings, but awakened in him the recognition that he owned himself.

The concept of property rights is a subject about which there is broad misunderstanding. The term right always relates to man as a property owner. We say that a man has a “right” to his life. What we mean is that he is the proper owner of his life, of his own person, of anything that is functionally related to him as a living being. In no way does this guarantee that a man will stay alive. A man may have an incurable disease, yet even at death’s door he has a right to life.

The act of ownership is the assumption of sovereign control over property, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. Total control is vested in the rightful owner.

While it is apparent that individual ownership occurring under moral conditions is correct or proper ownership, there is no reason why joint or corporate ownership cannot be equally correct, at least within limits.

Land has been owned both collectively and privately. The evidence reveals that in earliest times, before men learned to establish cities, they laid claim to hunting and foraging territories, establishing a kind of collective control over the area. This is collective ownership, for it excludes the private owner and presumes that all items of value found in the claimed territory are to be used for the good of the group. Primitive tribes forbade private exclusiveness in land.

Chiefs of tribes, kings, potentates, and rulers of the earth were among the first to claim land as property. At that exciting period in our remote past when men were changing their way of life from a foraging, hunting society, dependent upon the wild things they could find in forest, stream, or prairie, to an agrarian economy depending upon what the soil could produce, a major development occurred in the societal organizations of men.

The difficulty experienced in establishing the abstract concept of ownership when the owner is absent, is merely the forerunner of additional difficulties which are glimpsed as consideration is given to the ownership of intangibles.

Intangible properties are characterized by boundaries that are invisible to sight or not subject to discovery by touch. In this category we find contracts of all kinds, both real and implied; odors, sounds, and ideas.

Rightful authority is that which a person exercises over himself and what he owns. There is no other rightful authority. All authority which exceeds this limit is a usurpation. Thus, authority by one man over another, unless it arises through a voluntarily assumed contractual arrangement, is an imposition of force that runs counter to the will of the person so placed under authority. A rightful authority falls within the boundaries of property. Each man is the authority, the full sovereign, over himself and whatever he owns.