How We Become Owners
How do human beings get themselves in a position where they can control and make decisions over property?
The process today is one that is almost totally involved with exchange.
We deal with other owners.
Virtually all the property that is desirable and that we want to own in this world is already
owned by someone else. And so we have no rights over that property, and whoever is the owner
has the rights. If we want to own any part of it, what we must do is approach the owner
and try to win a privilege from him. Since he has the rights, then we can obtain a privilege.
And if we want to get a privilege from him, we try to work out an arrangement so that
he will grant us the property that he already has. To do this, usually we have to give him
a property that we have, because he wouldn't just want to be without property. And so we
exchange money for goods, goods for money, services for goods, services for money, or
or services for goods. We just exchange things, each one of us trying to get hold of a property
that we don't have, that somebody else does have. And that's the way today we basically
try to get hold of property.
Now of course you can get hold of property another way. You can become the owner of a
property through theft. You don't approach the owner. You just approach the property
and you appropriate it to yourself. Now, that's a way of acquiring property. I don't recommend it.
Obviously, this is a way to create basic conflict. It does not enhance the position of anyone.
It is not a constructive procedure. As a matter of fact, if we were to have any kind of a constructive
procedure, we would have to have a kind of procedure that we could recommend for everyone.
If we were to try to recommend theft as a basic procedure for people,
So, we would have to recommend it for everyone. Then everybody should get to steal. Well,
if everybody got to steal, who would produce? There really wouldn't be much incentive
to produce because anything that you produce could be stolen. So, the chances are that
we would more and more devote ourselves to theft. But because man is basically a consumer,
we would very quickly consume everything that had been produced up to this time. And now
Now what would we do?
No one would be willing to produce because the minute it was produced somebody would
steal it.
And where would we be?
Well, we'd be right back at about as primitive a level as it would be possible to imagine.
Actually, there are only three ways that you can deal with property.
There's only three possible systems that we could have.
One system would be, everybody gets to steal from everybody.
The second way we could operate would be that some people can steal from other people.
But the other people don't get to steal.
In other words, you have a system where theft is granted to a limited number, but the others
must not.
In a sense, that's what we have now.
All of us don't steal, but some do.
Often, the most serious theft occurs with a license.
The government grants a license to certain people to steal, and those who don't have
a license and steal can get themselves into jail very quickly.
But if you are a member of the government taxing team, for instance, why, you have a
license, and that's the difference between legal and illegal predation.
Now the only other possible system would be one in which nobody steals.
Those are all there are.
That's all the possibilities you've got.
Either everybody steals from everybody, or some people steal from other people, or nobody
steals from anybody.
Now which is best?
If we are going to work toward the idea of a moral world, a world that will tend to bring
major satisfactions, we are going to minimize conflict, we are going to maximize human well-being,
clearly, there is only one desirable system, and that's a system where nobody steals
from anybody.
So the idea that everybody gets to steal, we've got to throw that out, and we've
We've even got to throw out the idea that some people somehow get to steal from everybody
else.
That's going to be the tough one to work with.
But that's what we're going to have to do if we want to get to a world where nobody
steals.
Now, the only moral position possible is the one I've just enunciated.
That is, no one steals from anyone.
Back in the early days, before property was owned, and before we began exchanging it with
each other, which is the basic way that we acquire property today, we had to first acquire
property from nature. Remember, our basic property is our self. We own our own persons.
But that's not enough. If all you could control was yourself, you would very quickly
The only way you can stay alive is by dominating your environment to some degree so that you
can obtain from your environment the substances, the goods, the comforts that will make it
possible for you to stay alive. So you have to be able to control your environment in
your own favor, at least to some degree, or you can't make it.
So then we had to have a way of learning how to take over and become the owner of the properties
of nature, to which the land, the growing things, the animals, the plants, the minerals,
the metals, the water, air and other substances and so on.
So this whole process of moving things from a state of nature into a state of ownership
is a very interesting one and a number of people have theorized as to how it was done. Possibly
one of the most influential statements in this area was written some time ago by a man named John
Locke, who wrote several very influential treatises, one of them being called the Second
Treatise on Civil Government.
And in this treatise by Locke, the idea is expressed that the manner in which we actually
acquire property from nature is one that involves our labor.
Let me, I'll paraphrase what Locke says.
I don't have his quote immediately before me here, but here is the idea that he was
getting at.
Locke begins by saying that, at first, everything is in a state of nature. To wit, no one owns
anything except himself. Now, Locke acknowledges that. He recognizes that ownership begins
with the ownership by the person of himself. So he says that. He says, of course, to begin
with, each man owns himself and we may rightfully say that his energy, his skills, his brains,
And his ideas are rightfully his, and therefore he owns that much.
But now everything else is unowned, it's in a state of nature.
And what happens, says Locke, is that this man desiring, let us say, to own a field will
go out and clear the field, taking out the things that would prevent a crop, that is,
he cuts down the trees and removes the rocks and the other impediments, and then he plants
points it into a crop of some sort, and having done so, says Locke, the man has been mixing
his energy with the natural resource. Now since he owned his energy, and that's already
been acknowledged, then a property of his to which his energy has been mixed with the
land and by this process, says Locke, the land becomes his. Now that provided us with
with a very early idea in this area, and it could be called the labor theory of ownership.
It suggests that the ownership of the natural things, the order of nature, comes into our
ownership by virtue of an act of labor wherein a person works, releases his energy, mixes
This theory, although it does appear to have a great deal of validity, would probably only
hold in an agricultural or an agrarian culture that had not begun thinking yet in areas of
manufacture and mass production and mass distribution. Although it seems viable, in actual fact,
that really isn't what we did. And that's not the way it works. The labor theory of
of Property Ownership, although it has some merit, will not stand the ultimate test. It
leads into contradictions.
To illustrate this, let me show you what might happen. Let's suppose that you are a much
younger man than I, and I am presuming that you are a male. So you are much younger than
I, I am an old man, and I have, let's suppose, six grown sons of my own. So that puts us
in different age groups.
Now let me suppose that you have decided that you would like to be a farmer.
This is back in the agricultural days and this would be the prime job for you to undertake.
So you'd like to be a farmer and you know how, you were raised on a farm and you're
really looking forward to this and you live in an area where there's a lot of land that
is unowned.
This is virgin territory.
Nobody is there.
And I mean this.
Nobody.
Primitives that may inhabit the area. There aren't any primitives here. Nobody. The land is clean. It's clear. No owners. It's virgin.
Okay, so now you decide you want to be a farmer and you go into the area and you take a look around and you say,
boy, this piece right here would be ideal for me. Let me suppose that we're talking about a plot of land that contains 640 acres.
and whatever else you want, pigs and geese and chickens and so on, and you want to have a poultry yard and you want to have a wood lot where you can, you know, get wood for the fire and this sort of thing, and you'd like to have a cash crop and then a basic crop, and well, you've got lots of ambition, and you're young, and you're going to be a prosperous farmer, and that's going to be your life. So now, here you are in an area where there is no other owner, and so you decide that this particular piece is going to be yours.
First thing you've done here, you've valued.
You see something that you value.
And you've checked, and there isn't any owner.
So it's obviously something that you could take without molesting anyone.
There isn't anybody there.
You can't molest a non-existent person.
So your position is perfectly moral up to this point.
So you go out, and now you mark out.
You bound, don't you?
You create a boundary.
So you go out and you mark out the territory you're going to have. We'll assume that
this land slopes gently, it has good soil, and there's a stream that comes down out
of the mountains and flows part way alongside of your property, and you use the stream as
part of the boundary at one point. And then you figure a line over to another point where
there's a big bunch of rocks, and that'll be another boundary to your property. And
And then you run down another way and there's a little grove of trees there and you put
blazes on the trees through there and one of those trees becomes the corner tree that
marks the corner of your property in that area.
And then you go out to find the fourth corner and that's just open field.
You can't find any kind of a marker there at all, so you cut a stake and you drive it
into the corner to mark that corner.
So now you've marked out a territory roughly 640 acres and this is the one that you believe
you'd have.
Now before you go and ask the girl to marry you, you want to do a few things first.
You want to get in a garden crop and start things up and then you'll head back for the
city and your proposal of marriage.
So you get a plow and you start plowing in one place and let's suppose that you've plowed
up about an acre of ground, and I appear on the scene. And I say, Hi, young fellow, what
are you doing? Well, your response obviously is going to be, Well, what's it look like
I'm doing? I'm plowing. And I say, Well, yes, I see that. But why? Here you are out
in a wilderness area. What are you plowing for? Well, you say, Because I'm putting in
a farm. You can't put in a farm without plowing. I say, Right you are. But the interesting
And the same thing is, I came out here to do the same thing.
And so you say, well, fine, it would be nice to have a neighbor out here that is kind of
a lonely area, and here's the land I'm planning.
And then you explain to me where the rocks are and where the stream is and how you put
the blazes on the trees and where you drove the stake.
And I say to you, well, now that's all very nice.
But you know, we believe in Locke's labor theory of ownership.
And I respect your labor, but I don't respect your dreams.
And Buster, you're dreaming.
I don't know that you'll ever even get to marry the girl.
I don't know that you'll have six kids.
I don't know that you need a piece of land as big as this.
You could be struck by lightning tomorrow.
Why should I respect your dreams?
Now I do respect your labor.
You've mixed your energy with an acre of this soil, and I wouldn't trespass that.
That would be a trespass because that's your property. You've mixed your energy with it.
And I even respect that stake you drove down in the far corner. Because your energy is
there too, and I respect that. But all is territory in between. What have you done to
claim that? You haven't done a thing except dream about it. And I don't consider that
valid because I got dreams too. And I'll tell you what I've got. I've also got six boys
is out here in my wagon, and they've all got plows. And this is the land we want. So we're
going to give you plenty of respect, and we're not going to trespass at all on the parts
you've plowed. And we won't even trespass your stake. We're just going to cut across
lots because we want not 640 acres, we want about 5,000 acres, and we need this piece.
So I'm going to reserve the part where your labor is involved, because that's what Locke
Now, what would you think of me if I pulled that?
We actually have special names for fellows that do things like that.
Well, we have a whole series of names for them, in fact.
But the name I'm thinking of here is we call such a man a claim jumper.
You see, that's what a claim jumper is.
He jumps a claim.
He doesn't jump labor.
And a man who is a claim jumper is a thief. Even though he isn't interfering with the
labor of the other party that was there, he is interfering with the plan that the other
fellow had, and the other fellow, in this case you, wouldn't have put your plow in
the ground unless you thought you could have that much land. Because if you were only going
You see, that's the point.
If we're going to avoid molesting one another, we have to learn that molestation begins with
the violation of the will of the other party's property claim, not just his labor, his claim.
And so I would be guilty of theft if I came in and impose my will over you in such a way
even to interfere with your dreams when your dreams are founded upon claim and when they
don't involve molestation of anyone.
Remember when you came into the area, there was no one there.
Your position is moral.
You couldn't have been immoral because the moral theater is the theater of interhuman
relationships and there was no human that you could interrelate with. And consequently
your position had to be moral. No way for it to be otherwise. But now I come into the
area and there is another person there. Now the only way I can retain my moral position
is to recognize the rights of the other person. But in this case I wasn't willing to. And
And so at this point, I would have become a thief. A claim jumper. That's a special
type of thief that this particular type of action would be called. Now the interesting
thing is, and this is a fascinating thing to me, in more cases than not, we recognized
this way back even when we were thinking that Locke had spelled it out correctly. And when
When this type of behavior occurred, the second arrival on the scene, in this case me, would
take a look at the other fellow who got there first and say, dog on it, you beat me here.
And I would just love to have that piece of property that you've claimed. But I'm going
to respect your claim because what's very important to me is that you respect mine.
So we're going to end up having contiguous boundaries.
Your boundary and my boundary will be the same on the east side or the west side or
the north side or wherever of your land or maybe on two sides because I've got six grown
men and they're grown and they've got wives and so on and we're going to build a kind
of a community and I can make you a part of the community and you can make me a part of
So, even though you've got the best land, mine's going to be awful good.
And what's very important to me is that I have you respecting me.
Because now we become stronger.
New people coming out will see that we respect each other.
And so then they begin to respect us.
This is how we did it.
This is how human beings began, at a very early process, taking over land and becoming
the owners of it. As a matter of fact, in certain parts of the world, we did it in very
unique ways. For instance, if you examine the old Roman custom in Italy, and even some
of the Etruscans predating the Romans, developed what were called the Freytrees and the Gems.
Those words correspond roughly to the tribes and the clans, and they relate to the descent
of property through the family.
This is the gems.
And what would happen in those days when a man would go out and lay claim to a field,
and it would become his, he would mark it out, of course.
He would put piles of stone to delineate the major boundaries.
But you know, they didn't know how to build fences in those days.
They knew how to build walls or to dig ditches, but they didn't have barbed wire, and they
didn't know anything about putting up picket fences or inexpensive fences. And the idea
of putting up a wall, that's a very costly thing. When everything is done by hand, you'd
have to have hundreds of laborers if you have any size property at all, and you just couldn't
afford that. So do you know how they used to do it? How they used to make their property safe?
They had what are called the lares, or the Roman household gods.
And every family had its own gods.
And so the man who had claimed this land would now take and set up little images at intervals
along the boundary line.
These are the lares, and that made the boundary sacred, and nobody was to trespass it.
And so as a stranger came along and he recognized the Lares, it became a religious taboo for
him even to walk across the boundaries.
And these taboos of these early boundaries were so strong that when another man came
into the area, they would not dream of having contiguous boundaries.
That is, man A, who establishes the first claim of land, would have, let's say, a rectangle
of property—he's got that—and another man comes in and likes the general area, but
he will run absolutely another complete rectangle, but there will be a space between his boundary
and his neighbor's boundary that would vary anywhere from 8 to maybe 30 feet in width,
and those areas became the first public roads because his boundaries were sacred to his
gods and the other man's boundaries were sacred to his and you just didn't trespass the gods.
So the space in between was public and anybody could go there but you just didn't trespass
anybody's private land. That's how that got started over in that part of the country.
So we've been engaged in this process of claiming resources from nature for a very long time.
And what we actually do, we don't do it on the basis of labor, although Locke thought
we did.
We do it on the basis of establishing a claim.
And here is the process.
We first value it, then we ascribe the boundary, and then we take control.
That is, we serve notice on everybody that we can reach through any known method of communication,
and hopefully through all known methods of communication, that that property is ours.
And having served that notice, then we begin making the ultimate decision over the property.
Now how do we serve notice?
Well, in the old days, with the gens and the fray trees, you put up your lorries, and that
That's serve notice. This is yours. Today, or for many years, actually hundreds of years,
we've built fences, or we have put cairns of rock at places where corners appeared,
or we have blazed trees, or we have built a cairn of rock and then buried inside the
cairn a drawing describing the boundaries of the property. Then we make copies of that
and we leave it at important trading junctions like at a general store or any place else
where people tend to congregate to let everybody know, well that's ours.
Sometimes we post a notice on a tree, this is ours, no trespassing, keep off, this means
you, and so on.
These are communication devices.
Actually we went on beyond that.
We finally got to the place where we drew up a document called a deed.
And then the owner of the deed was in a position where he had a piece of paper that established
that he owned that property.
And then, you know, we got into trouble because, of course, in this juncture we turned to the
government to provide the deed.
And the king granted the deed.
This is a grant deed.
It comes from the king.
Many kings can grant this because to begin with, you see, the king owned all the land
in the realm.
So when you had a deed, it was a grant deed, and His Majesty has granted it to you.
Now the interesting thing was that if you lost the deed, you lost the land.
If a thief could pick up that piece of paper and get away with it, he had stolen your property
right out from under your nose.
And that meant that the protection of that deed was a very, very important thing.
And people lost their property on occasion when their deeds were lost.
As a matter of fact, during some of the days in early England and France and other parts
of Europe when this practice was invoked, many lordlings and princes went around deliberately
stealing deeds in order to get property that they wanted.
They simply would attack a man who owned a deed and take it away from him.
And when they had the deed, they had the property, and he lost his claim to it.
So this wasn't a—we didn't like this.
And we began, shortly after this country was founded, we came up with the idea of having
title insurance.
Now that's a marketplace development so we could protect ourselves from the tendency
of somebody to steal our deeds.
You see, they're not going to steal the land, that's not portable, that's going to be there.
But if they could steal the property by getting the paper, you see, well then they've accomplished
it.
So now we have a marketplace method of taking the deed into a place and we have the title
searched when we buy to be sure that we really are the buyer and we're dealing with the owner
of the Property and this will be ascertained and it can be ascertained in the market and
then we have the title transferred to us and we get a piece of insurance that guarantees
our title so that if anybody comes around and steals the deed we can go and get another
copy.
Of course the government maintains the same records.
Government duplicates many of the things that we do in the market so usually in most county
Court Houses have a court of record and they record these things too, but that's just
a duplication and we have them in both places, but you can do it either way.
Actually the best way is in the market where you get title insurance, that's one way.
We also have a way of getting an abstract where you get a complete record of the history
of that property from the time it was first privately owned and this is a way that we
do it.
Well, the owning of property, the first acquisition of property came through the process of claim.
We establish claim and then we become the owner.
And then later on when we have a great many owners and we want another piece of property,
we deal not with the property directly but with the owner.
And that way we operate within a moral framework of reference.
We respect the boundaries of the people who are the owners and they respect our boundaries.
And when we operate that way, we have the best kind of arrangement that we know anything
about. Now maybe there's a better way coming, I don't know what it is, but anyway, that's
the way we do it, and when we do it, we avoid conflict. So I'd like to recommend it. Thanks
very much.