WEBVTT NOTE Public Property? 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.400 I bring you greetings from lovers of freedom who live behind the maple leaf curtain. 2 00:00:07.400 --> 00:00:14.680 Canada is a nation in which recently in British Columbia a judge voided the will of a man 3 00:00:14.680 --> 00:00:18.840 who left all of his money to his two grown sons and none of his money to his two grown 4 00:00:18.840 --> 00:00:26.000 daughters on the grounds that the daughters were entitled to a portion of the family wealth. 5 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:32.000 It is a country where, recently in Toronto, a grocer who had been robbed ten times by 6 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:38.760 an habitual criminal, on the eleventh occasion chased him down as he robbed him, grabbed 7 00:00:38.760 --> 00:00:42.740 him, brought him back to the store, tied him up until the police came. 8 00:00:42.740 --> 00:00:48.240 Police arrested him and when the public prosecutor got hold of the case, he offered the thief 9 00:00:48.240 --> 00:00:53.280 immunity if he would testify against the grocer on a charge of forcible confinement, a lawful 10 00:00:53.280 --> 00:00:56.040 and Confinement. 11 00:00:56.040 --> 00:00:59.800 Well, I've not come to brag about the judicial system. 12 00:00:59.800 --> 00:01:02.880 I haven't even come to brag about the medical system, 13 00:01:02.880 --> 00:01:05.960 although I can't resist one true story. 14 00:01:05.960 --> 00:01:07.540 Two years ago, working out in the gym 15 00:01:07.540 --> 00:01:10.080 at the University of Toronto, I hurt my knee. 16 00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:12.760 I went to the sports clinic, and the doctor there said, 17 00:01:12.760 --> 00:01:14.280 I think you've torn something. 18 00:01:14.280 --> 00:01:15.400 You'll need an MRI. 19 00:01:15.400 --> 00:01:16.880 I said, OK, where do I go? 20 00:01:16.880 --> 00:01:18.920 He said, oh, no, not so fast. 21 00:01:18.920 --> 00:01:20.920 I have to refer you to a specialist, 22 00:01:20.920 --> 00:01:26.120 and Orthopedic Surgeon, who will send you for an MRI. So two weeks later, when I got 23 00:01:26.120 --> 00:01:31.400 the appointment, the doctor said, in fact, the surgeon, yeah, you need an MRI. Fine. 24 00:01:31.400 --> 00:01:34.840 Where do I go? Well, you can't just do that. You have to wait a week. So we had to wait 25 00:01:34.840 --> 00:01:39.000 a week for the MRI and then a week for the results to come back. And when I came to the 26 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:46.000 doctor, the surgeon, third time, he said, yep, you have torn your meniscus and you need surgery. 27 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:51.440 Surgery. By this time I was in a great deal of pain. I said, fine, let's do the surgery. 28 00:01:51.440 --> 00:01:56.480 He said, well, I'll have my nurse schedule it for you. Six months later when I came for 29 00:01:56.480 --> 00:02:03.480 the surgery, the scheduled surgery, the nurse looking at my file said, wow, this is fast. 30 00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:10.620 This must be a professional courtesy because you're a professor at the U of T and the doctor 31 00:02:10.620 --> 00:02:30.100 So, lovers of liberty are, unsurprisingly, passionate about private property. Even such 32 00:02:30.100 --> 00:02:34.300 stalwarts are, however, often inclined to speak about public property as if it were a 33 00:02:34.300 --> 00:02:40.080 necessary evil. Occasionally, a resolute defender of liberty will actually argue on behalf of 34 00:02:40.080 --> 00:02:45.480 of some sort of public property. The assumption that public property is necessary or even 35 00:02:45.480 --> 00:02:51.240 good runs up against the fairly obvious point made by Anthony de Jasse to the effect that 36 00:02:51.240 --> 00:02:58.200 all property is private because it implies exclusion. This salutary remark, however, 37 00:02:58.200 --> 00:03:02.320 begs the question of whether there ought to be nonexclusive, that is, public property 38 00:03:02.320 --> 00:03:07.700 at all. I'm not going to reply directly to the arguments for, of proponents of public 39 00:03:07.700 --> 00:03:12.900 Property, I am going to take a different approach, arguing that property is an irreducibly 40 00:03:12.900 --> 00:03:20.140 normative term, that, accordingly, ownership of property can only be ascribed coherently 41 00:03:20.140 --> 00:03:26.060 to what I shall term moral agents, that the public is not a moral agent, and so it is 42 00:03:26.060 --> 00:03:31.720 a sort of oxymoron, what philosophers call a category mistake, to suppose that there 43 00:03:31.720 --> 00:03:35.780 can even be such a thing as public property. 44 00:03:35.780 --> 00:03:40.340 This last claim will perhaps appear quite bizarre, because one might assume that even 45 00:03:40.340 --> 00:03:45.820 if public property ought to be abolished or just severely limited, it is nevertheless 46 00:03:45.820 --> 00:03:52.580 something that most certainly exists. Indeed, the very call for its abolition seems to imply 47 00:03:52.580 --> 00:03:58.340 its existence. In order to see why this is not necessarily the case, we need to concentrate 48 00:03:58.340 --> 00:04:05.460 first on what a normative term is. Property is like murder in that it is irreducibly normative. 49 00:04:05.460 --> 00:04:11.700 If A kills B and we are not yet ready to judge A to have committed a wrong, we refrain from 50 00:04:11.700 --> 00:04:18.460 calling it murder. To call it that is to make a normative judgment. Similarly, if A possesses 51 00:04:18.460 --> 00:04:24.000 some item and we are not yet ready to judge that he owns it, we refrain from calling it 52 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:29.820 his property. Those who kill in self-defense are not murderers. Those who possess what 53 00:04:29.820 --> 00:04:34.940 What is owned by someone else are not themselves owners of property. 54 00:04:34.940 --> 00:04:39.580 Perhaps another illuminating example of a normative term with a non-normative counterpart 55 00:04:39.580 --> 00:04:41.380 is that of a person. 56 00:04:41.380 --> 00:04:46.860 In the abortion debate, all sides can agree that the product of conception, the fetus, 57 00:04:46.860 --> 00:04:52.000 is a member of the species Homo sapiens, which is a purely descriptive term. 58 00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:57.300 The real debate is among those who do and those who do not go on to ascribe personhood 59 00:04:57.300 --> 00:05:03.560 to the Fetus, where personhood is almost always being used normatively. 60 00:05:03.560 --> 00:05:07.400 Birds don't own their nests because they are not moral agents. 61 00:05:07.400 --> 00:05:13.240 By contrast, when moral agents take possession of unowned things, they immediately become 62 00:05:13.240 --> 00:05:15.340 owners. 63 00:05:15.340 --> 00:05:20.360 Sometimes enemies of property begin their assault by insisting that property is always 64 00:05:20.360 --> 00:05:26.640 a social construct, by which they mean that the concept of property makes no sense outside 65 00:05:26.640 --> 00:05:32.640 of an agreed upon social arrangement of some sort or another. This claim is roughly true, 66 00:05:32.640 --> 00:05:38.440 though the inference that is typically drawn from it is not. For the anti-property advocate 67 00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:44.000 will go on to argue that since there is no property outside of a social context, society 68 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:51.000 is free to decide who owns what in that society. It is but a short, albeit fallacious step 69 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:55.760 from the claim that there is no property outside of a social arrangement to the claim that 70 00:05:55.760 --> 00:06:01.520 Society or the government or the public are justified in taking from any person as much 71 00:06:01.520 --> 00:06:07.320 as they think it appropriate to take. In order to show that this inference is false, indeed, 72 00:06:07.320 --> 00:06:12.040 that it comes very close to being the root of all social evil, I need to turn to the 73 00:06:12.040 --> 00:06:18.120 concept of moral agency and why groups of any sort cannot be moral agents. An agent 74 00:06:18.120 --> 00:06:23.320 is a source of change in another or in itself as other. By source of change, I mean that 75 00:06:23.320 --> 00:06:28.040 which will serve as an explanation of a given change. Both living things like plants and 76 00:06:28.040 --> 00:06:34.800 animals and non-living things like machines and hurricanes are all examples of agents. 77 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:38.960 Animals for the most part differ from the rest because they not only can cause changes 78 00:06:38.960 --> 00:06:45.640 in other things but, owing to their self locomotive power, they can change themselves. The distinction 79 00:06:45.640 --> 00:06:50.500 between agents that can only cause change in others and agents that can cause changes 80 00:06:50.500 --> 00:06:53.620 is not crucial for my purpose. 81 00:06:53.620 --> 00:06:58.720 One might want to claim that even relatively simple feedback mechanisms such as a thermostat 82 00:06:58.720 --> 00:07:02.340 is causing changes in itself when it operates. 83 00:07:02.340 --> 00:07:07.660 As defined, there is no objection to the use of the term agent for groups. 84 00:07:07.660 --> 00:07:10.100 Italy can be Germany in soccer. 85 00:07:10.100 --> 00:07:13.940 A corporation can make a profit or incur a loss. 86 00:07:13.940 --> 00:07:16.440 Group agents can have interests. 87 00:07:16.440 --> 00:07:22.000 It may be that terms like the national interest or the interest of society are pernicious, 88 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:27.520 but if this is so, it is not because it is nonsense to suppose that there be such things 89 00:07:27.520 --> 00:07:34.600 as its interests. By contrast, moral agents or persons are the sort of thing we suppose 90 00:07:34.600 --> 00:07:39.760 could understand the nature and consequences of their actions and have that understanding 91 00:07:39.760 --> 00:07:45.160 inform their actions as well. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has shown with characteristic 92 00:07:45.160 --> 00:07:51.000 Clarity that the description of goal-directed behavior that is a facet of this understanding 93 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:57.520 is not sufficient in itself for personhood or moral agency. He argues that any object 94 00:07:57.520 --> 00:08:03.480 whose behavior can be predicted by assuming what he calls the intentional stance in regard 95 00:08:03.480 --> 00:08:09.800 to it can be considered an intentional system. Adopting the intentional stance consists of 96 00:08:09.800 --> 00:08:14.400 treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs 97 00:08:14.400 --> 00:08:21.800 and Desires and Other Mental States, exhibiting what philosophers call intentionality or aboutness. 98 00:08:21.800 --> 00:08:27.680 I'm thinking about this. I'm intending to do something apart from myself. As Dennett 99 00:08:27.680 --> 00:08:32.980 proceeds to show, adopting the stance can work perfectly well even for plants or natural 100 00:08:32.980 --> 00:08:38.660 phenomena like lightning. Thus, assuming that the plant wants to blossom or that the lightning 101 00:08:38.660 --> 00:08:43.280 is trying to find the best way to the ground or the fastest way enables us to take steps 102 00:08:43.280 --> 00:08:48.960 in response to this in order to achieve our goals in these cases to get flowers in our garden 103 00:08:49.840 --> 00:08:55.840 to grow or to avoid being struck down by lightning. If the possession of intentional states by plants 104 00:08:55.840 --> 00:09:01.440 and lightning just means that it makes sense for us to adopt the intentional stance in regard to 105 00:09:01.440 --> 00:09:06.880 them, we should be wary of supposing that the possession of intentional states is sufficient 106 00:09:06.880 --> 00:09:12.880 to constitute personhood or moral agency. What the proponent of the view that groups are moral agent 107 00:09:12.880 --> 00:09:18.840 Needs is a sense of intentionality such that the putative moral agent with the intentional 108 00:09:18.840 --> 00:09:24.240 states, the nation or state or society at large, can be intelligibly classified with 109 00:09:24.240 --> 00:09:28.800 unquestioned moral agents and not with plants and natural phenomena. 110 00:09:28.800 --> 00:09:30.620 What is the sense? 111 00:09:30.620 --> 00:09:37.480 Moral agency requires internal complexity of a particular sort, what I shall call self-reflexivity. 112 00:09:37.480 --> 00:09:41.460 It requires that agents have mental states and also that they have cognitive access at 113 00:09:41.460 --> 00:09:44.240 at least some of the time to those mental states. 114 00:09:44.240 --> 00:09:48.820 It is not enough for moral agency that one possess a desire, one must be able to recognize 115 00:09:48.820 --> 00:09:50.780 and somehow respond to it. 116 00:09:50.780 --> 00:09:56.020 Having a desire or ascribing a desire is sufficient grounds for adopting than its intentional 117 00:09:56.020 --> 00:09:57.020 stance. 118 00:09:57.020 --> 00:10:01.940 But having a cognitive relation to one's own desire is necessary for moral agency. 119 00:10:01.940 --> 00:10:06.100 The reason why this fact in itself leaves open the question of whether non-humans are 120 00:10:06.100 --> 00:10:10.900 moral agents is that we have no means of going beyond the intentional stance in our encounters 121 00:10:10.900 --> 00:10:17.900 Individual moral agents can, of course, band together into groups and act accordingly. 122 00:10:18.820 --> 00:10:23.140 Corporations are the paradigm of this. But the existence of the group and its agency 123 00:10:23.140 --> 00:10:28.300 neither negate the moral agency of its individual members, nor turn the group agent into another 124 00:10:28.300 --> 00:10:33.240 moral agent over and above the individual moral agents. The fact that a moral agent 125 00:10:33.240 --> 00:10:37.980 can enter into a contract with a corporation does not turn the corporation into a moral 126 00:10:37.980 --> 00:10:38.980 Agent. 127 00:10:38.980 --> 00:10:43.540 Neither does the fact that the corporation is not a moral agent alter the additional 128 00:10:43.540 --> 00:10:49.120 and basic fact that the individual members of the corporation continue to be moral agents. 129 00:10:49.120 --> 00:10:54.940 In law, this difference is recognized by distinguishing the strict or tortuous liability of a corporation 130 00:10:54.940 --> 00:10:58.740 from the potential criminal liability of its individual members. 131 00:10:58.740 --> 00:11:03.300 The assumption that groups as such cannot be criminals constitutes a recognition that 132 00:11:03.300 --> 00:11:16.300 All the normative language appropriate to the ascription of moral responsibility does not apply to groups. Groups are neither persons, nor do they commit murder, nor are they ever murdered. Similarly, groups do not own property. 133 00:11:16.300 --> 00:11:29.300 Having given a rough sketch of a moral agent and having tried to show why groups cannot be moral agents, I move to the necessary connectedness between the ascription of moral agency and the uniqueness of a moral agent as an owner of property. 134 00:11:29.300 --> 00:11:35.940 Moral agents are first and foremost self-owners, of their bodies and of their desires and thoughts. 135 00:11:35.940 --> 00:11:38.180 Self-ownership is a central libertarian theme. 136 00:11:38.180 --> 00:11:43.000 But not everyone is aware that Karl Marx held that in order to make sense of the idea that 137 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:48.660 human beings own the fruits of their own labor, one must also suppose that they own themselves. 138 00:11:48.660 --> 00:11:54.160 Some contemporary Marxists, claiming that Marx himself did not fully recognize the disastrous 139 00:11:54.160 --> 00:11:59.160 The various consequences of this view have actually argued that we are not self-owners. 140 00:11:59.160 --> 00:12:08.160 Thus, for example, society might determine it just to remove one eye of a normally sighted person in order to give it to someone who is blind. 141 00:12:08.160 --> 00:12:16.160 The mutual recognition of self-ownership is the absolute foundation for any communal or political arrangement. 142 00:12:16.160 --> 00:12:23.160 Animals are not self-owners, and a relationship with animals can therefore never constitute a community or a political society. 143 00:12:23.160 --> 00:12:29.500 Society. To recognize the self-ownership of someone is to make a normative claim. 144 00:12:29.500 --> 00:12:34.920 Jan Narvesen has made a useful distinction between self-possession and self-ownership, 145 00:12:34.920 --> 00:12:40.160 thereby acknowledging the point that ownership or property of any kind only makes sense within 146 00:12:40.160 --> 00:12:46.460 a social arrangement, for the proverbial Robinson Crusoe is only a self-possessor until Friday 147 00:12:46.460 --> 00:12:52.600 arrives and acknowledges his moral agency, at which point both of them can be self-owners. 148 00:12:52.600 --> 00:12:57.700 I won't here go into the well-known arguments, at least well-known in this venue, why self-ownership 149 00:12:57.700 --> 00:13:03.280 without property ownership is a practical impossibility for any ongoing community project, 150 00:13:03.280 --> 00:13:07.960 though it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the contemporary Marxist I mentioned above, 151 00:13:07.960 --> 00:13:13.240 who advocates the forced sharing of eyes, does so precisely because he recognizes that 152 00:13:13.240 --> 00:13:18.520 if there is self-ownership, then there are no non-abortory grounds whatsoever for excluding 153 00:13:18.520 --> 00:13:20.600 the private ownership of property. 154 00:13:20.600 --> 00:13:25.660 I cannot emphasize too strongly that merely to admit that you own your organs and other 155 00:13:25.660 --> 00:13:31.880 body parts is to announce the death knell of any consistent Marxist philosophy. Here 156 00:13:31.880 --> 00:13:36.580 is an interesting example that I present to philosophical audiences, often to the befuddlement 157 00:13:36.580 --> 00:13:44.340 of those who are so eager to champion a capacious notion of public property. Marine geologists 158 00:13:44.340 --> 00:13:49.400 tell us that today at the bottom of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is an abundance of nickel 159 00:13:49.400 --> 00:13:56.160 and Other Base Metals. My simple question is, who today owns that nickel? The common 160 00:13:56.160 --> 00:14:01.080 sensical answer is that no one owns it. There are only two other possible answers. Either 161 00:14:01.080 --> 00:14:05.620 everyone owns a share of the nickel, or some number of persons greater than zero and less 162 00:14:05.620 --> 00:14:11.480 than everyone owns the metal. I've never actually heard someone defend the third alternative 163 00:14:11.480 --> 00:14:16.800 because it's so clearly, obviously arbitrary. Are we going to say that, for example, the 164 00:14:16.800 --> 00:14:23.200 The nickel is owned by all and only people living in countries beginning with the letter N. 165 00:14:23.200 --> 00:14:28.280 I have, though, heard philosophers who want to defend the second alternative, namely that 166 00:14:28.280 --> 00:14:33.160 all human beings living today own a proportionate share of the nickel and every other metal 167 00:14:33.160 --> 00:14:35.360 under the ocean for that matter. 168 00:14:35.360 --> 00:14:39.560 Never mind that the number of persons living right now is changing, even as I speak. 169 00:14:39.560 --> 00:14:44.200 The main point is surely that the reason why attributing ownership to some arbitrary number 170 00:14:44.200 --> 00:14:49.680 of Persons is absurd, is exactly the same reason why attributing ownership to everyone 171 00:14:49.680 --> 00:14:54.680 is equally absurd. That is, to claim that everyone owns a share is to make property 172 00:14:54.680 --> 00:14:59.600 ownership meaningless as a normative concept. Recall that ownership must be distinguished 173 00:14:59.600 --> 00:15:04.120 from mere possession, that is, possession of property. There is a difference, though, 174 00:15:04.120 --> 00:15:09.960 between my being said to own a portion of that nickel and my merely possessing it, even 175 00:15:09.960 --> 00:15:15.360 Even assuming that the portion magically appeared as a credit to me in a fictitious commodities 176 00:15:15.360 --> 00:15:16.360 account. 177 00:15:16.360 --> 00:15:20.480 Putative public property is not exactly like the nickel supposed to be property of all 178 00:15:20.480 --> 00:15:21.680 human beings. 179 00:15:21.680 --> 00:15:25.680 The nickel example is a bogus version of the property ownership that really would ensue 180 00:15:25.680 --> 00:15:29.300 if a mining company were to recover all or part of the nickel. 181 00:15:29.300 --> 00:15:34.360 But some types of property, like land, are held to be actually or possibly public just 182 00:15:34.360 --> 00:15:38.040 because the land is not divisible in the way that commodities are. 183 00:15:38.040 --> 00:15:45.340 Roderick Long favors the example of a pathway leading to a river from a village, a pathway 184 00:15:45.340 --> 00:15:50.440 produced gradually out of uncleared bush by the villagers trotting on it. Long thinks 185 00:15:50.440 --> 00:15:55.760 this is a good example of something that was once unowned now being public property. But 186 00:15:55.760 --> 00:16:00.040 on Long's account, if the property really is public and not the private property of 187 00:16:00.040 --> 00:16:04.100 the village collective, it is difficult to see how the villagers might ever put a stop 188 00:16:04.100 --> 00:16:13.500 What long has done, I think, is use the term public property for what is or what ought 189 00:16:13.500 --> 00:16:17.620 to be a type of collective property privately owned. 190 00:16:17.620 --> 00:16:22.100 Why object even to what is a relatively benign claim about public property? 191 00:16:22.100 --> 00:16:26.060 The answer to this question takes us back to the normativity of the concept of property 192 00:16:26.060 --> 00:16:29.660 and its inseparability from the concept of a moral agent. 193 00:16:29.660 --> 00:16:34.940 If the public is not a moral agent, then the public cannot own anything. This claim is 194 00:16:34.940 --> 00:16:40.100 actually confirmed by those who reverse the reasoning and try to argue that because the 195 00:16:40.100 --> 00:16:46.060 public can and does own many things, then the public must be some sort of moral agent. 196 00:16:46.060 --> 00:16:51.460 And once this deadly inversion of a simple logical inference is made, the supposed moral 197 00:16:51.460 --> 00:16:57.800 agent that the public is becomes apt for having attributed to it all sorts of normative properties 198 00:16:57.800 --> 00:17:03.380 such as rights and duties. Why, after all, would it not be arbitrary to grant one moral 199 00:17:03.380 --> 00:17:09.380 predicate to the public and deny the cogency of the attribution of any other? Grant me 200 00:17:09.380 --> 00:17:16.180 the legitimacy of the idea of public rights and public duties, and even public choices, 201 00:17:16.180 --> 00:17:23.540 and I can create a socialist paradise before you can say Barack Hussein Obama. As Hans-Hermann 202 00:17:23.540 --> 00:17:28.740 Hans-Hoppe once noted, the distinction between public and private goods is spurious. Anything 203 00:17:28.740 --> 00:17:33.460 that is good for any one individual can be characterized as a public good. But what turns 204 00:17:33.460 --> 00:17:39.220 an otherwise completely anodyne use of the term public good into a completely pernicious 205 00:17:39.220 --> 00:17:44.180 one is the thought that the public is not just the sum of all the individuals in a given 206 00:17:44.180 --> 00:17:50.700 group, but somehow something more, namely a distinct moral agent. So the public now, 207 00:17:50.700 --> 00:17:55.960 Going under the name of society or the state has a duty, say, to help the unfortunate. 208 00:17:55.960 --> 00:18:00.700 When the preacher exhorts his audience to sell all that they have and give it to the 209 00:18:00.700 --> 00:18:06.660 poor, his exhortation is perforce, being made to each individual in the audience. 210 00:18:06.660 --> 00:18:13.700 When the politician attempts to translate the essence of this exhortation into legislation, 211 00:18:13.700 --> 00:18:20.300 the only shred of apparent plausibility sustaining this exercise is to be found in the assumption 212 00:18:20.300 --> 00:18:26.500 that it is society that is being addressed, society conceived of as a moral agent. 213 00:18:26.500 --> 00:18:31.140 Somewhat similarly, the now almost ubiquitous collapse of the distinction between justice 214 00:18:31.140 --> 00:18:37.220 and charity amounts to eliciting the charitable impulses of individuals and convincing them 215 00:18:37.220 --> 00:18:42.700 that this is the same thing as the recognition of existing social injustices. 216 00:18:42.700 --> 00:18:46.960 It is obvious, I would think, even to the statist, that groups as such do not have 217 00:18:46.960 --> 00:18:51.560 have feelings or impulses, so charity must be confused with justice. 218 00:18:51.560 --> 00:18:57.040 But since it is manifestly absurd to suppose that property taken from me by force and given 219 00:18:57.040 --> 00:19:02.040 to someone else is intended to correct an injustice that I have committed against the 220 00:19:02.040 --> 00:19:07.720 other person, the injustice must be one that society or the public has committed and therefore 221 00:19:07.720 --> 00:19:10.120 has a duty to rectify. 222 00:19:10.120 --> 00:19:15.000 But if groups can no more commit injustices than they can own property or have public 223 00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:20.360 or Rights or Duties, then the reason for occluding the difference between justice and charity 224 00:19:20.360 --> 00:19:26.120 is gone. I propose that we just stop talking about public property, even in relatively 225 00:19:26.120 --> 00:19:32.360 trivial matters. Property is property. All of it belongs only to moral agents. Without 226 00:19:32.360 --> 00:19:37.240 it, the existence of any sort of political community is impossible. What goes by the 227 00:19:37.240 --> 00:19:42.520 name of public property today is a fiction, one that is neither necessary nor in any way 228 00:19:42.520 --> 00:19:44.520 in a way desirable. Thank you.