Right to property?

Maybe TJ knew something when he changed up Locke's phrasing when writing the Declaration of Independence. Locke's social contract demanded that a government protect people's property, but what is property? How can a person come to "own" something? Even Locke questioned this and asked by what right an individual can claim to own one part of the world, when, according to the Bible, God gave the world to all humanity in common. Obviously I disagree with the source, but I think his reasoning good. He answered himself that persons own themselves and therefore their own labor. When a person works, that labor enters into the object. Thus, the object becomes the property of that person.

Here's where I disagree. How does doing work constitute ownership? If I dig a hole in someone's land, will they understand if I put up a fence around it? I can paint a car in a parking lot, but that doesn't give me a right to it. So how do we claim things as ours?

If I'm going to argue the right to property, then I probably need to talk about what property is. For now I'm just talking about tangible items, which is really just a clump of matter. Can you really own a certain set of atoms? Obviously people do make this claim, but what does this claim really do? Claiming you own something alone does nothing. You have to have something to back up this claim, and that's where I redefine ownership. Where most people claim that ownership is a right and the claim over an object is valid to the highest authority, I argue that ownership only exists when a man has the means in place to protect his possessions. In my mind you don't own something, you just protect it. If you can keep something to yourself, no matter the means, that's owning it to me.

In most places this is accomplished through taxes. We pay our government to maintain a system of protecting our "property". They do a pretty good job of it, too, so for the most part legal ownership in the US meets my requirements for natural ownership. The difference is stealing. Most people think this is a moral issue and is automatically wrong, but to me there's nothing philosophically wrong with stealing. Since my definition of ownership is being able to protect something, obviously if it gets stolen I would say you didn't own it to begin with. I'm not saying I'd go out and steal stuff, there are still the legal consequences from the US's system to protect property, but I don't think there's anything immoral about trying to protect something that someone else is already trying to protect (stealing).

Sometimes the idea of morality can be a means of protecting property on its own. If a society believes that simply claiming something means it's off limits to others, then that is a way of protecting property and constitutes ownership by my definition.

It's easiest to give examples on a large scale. What right did Robert de LaSalle have to claim all the land drained by the Mississippi River for France? Well none really, except for the French army. In reality actually planting a flag at the mouth of the Mississippi did nothing, it was only the French government's military that gave the claim any validity. The French King really could have claimed it from France and would have had as much right to own the interior of America as planting a flag at the mouth of a river. What gives a country the right to claim land? Take Little Inagua for example. This is a decent sized island in the Caribbean that the Bahamas claim as theirs. No one lives on this island, however. The only protection the Bahamas offers over this island is their military, which currently consists of 2 ships and an airplane, but unfortunately there are no qualified pilots to fly it. So my plan is to protect this island myself, and thus take over it. And how were settlers able to claim vast tracks of land on the frontier? They didn't buy it from anyone, they just had the means in place to protect their property.

The stupidest thing I've ever heard of is intellectual property. Now if claiming a certain set of atoms seems a little ridiculous, imagine claiming not the atoms, but the arrangement of those atoms. People think they can claim a pattern as their own. How is that even remotely possible? Whereas with property ownership I can see how you can protect it and this gives way to claims of ownership, but how can you protect an idea? It seems to me the only way of protecting a thought is to not act on it, and then that thought is worthless. To me any claim at owning something that isn't tangible is just retarded.