There are those who with bold stridency declare that "property is theft!"
Let's drill into this idea to see whether it holds any merit. To that end, let us narrow the channel a mite and focus on a single question, assuming the assertion as a given:
Is your life your property? That is, do you own your life?
If yes, then let us revert to a syllogistic form to see where this leads:
Property is theft. [assumption]
Your life is your property. [assumption]
If your life is your property, your life is theft [modus ponens]
Theft is by definition, a crime. [definition]
If your life is theft, it is a crime. [modus ponens]
Criminality subsumes theft, meaning all theft is criminal, though not all crimes are theft. [logical consequence of definitions]Criminality requires the existence of victims. [by definition]The simple act of existing as a living being creates no victim perforce. [self-evident]Therefore, one's life as one's property cannot be a crime.If one's life cannot be a crime, it cannot be theft, nor can it imply theft. [modus tollens]Proof by contradiction, extensible to any property one may care to name.QED.
One might ask the somewhat naive, or perhaps disingenuous question, "what about stolen property?" The answer there is, of course, very simple: if the property is stolen, it never becomes the property of the thief. This is, of course, the normative truth, but the truth nonetheless. It does not mean that the thief does not wield proprietary control over the stolen goods. It does, however, mean that every act he commits with the stolen property is by its nature one of inherent criminality. This may not help the victim much, but in the case where the property is discovered as having been stolen, at least the victim may be restored in some measure, and hopefully justice served upon the thief.
We could stop here, as the matter merits no further consideration, but let us continue for the sake of putting the final nails in the coffin of this most absurd notion.
If your life is not your property, then a universe of absurdity opens before us, where quite literally anything goes because all consistency of logic and reason will have winged away into the mists of oblivion. The simple fact of the assertion as true makes every human being who has ever lived a criminal by mere virtue of his birth; a felon with no possible avenue of redemption , save to go home to mom's basement, also a product of theft, retrieve dad's revolver, also a product of theft, and blow his own brains out. But are they even his brains? How can they be, if to have brains, possessing them as "property", is in itself the crime of theft? The absurdity of rapidly growing Gordian Knot of wild insanity is, I pray, self-evident to all. But just in case it isn't...
Food becomes property when one takes it up to eat. One eats to continue his life, but if eating involves the assumption of property, which is theft and by that virtue a crime, then the act of continuing one's life becomes a crime by virtue of that assumption. Are we to accept that the very acts of continuing our existences are then crimes?
One's life is his property. Were it not, one would hold no right to it and, therefore, no valid claim. It would be up for grabs... or would it? It would seem that nobody would have valid claims to anything, including their lives. The world descends instantly into the depths of dementia with the acceptance of three simple words. You would have no right to defend your life against, ironically, "theft" by another, whether it were to enslave, or maim, or murder you.
One's life is what I have come to label as his "First Property". All creatures are enjoined by their fundamental nature to preserve their First Property by any and all means at their disposal; to fight to preserve themselves at any and all cost. If someone attempts to deprive me of my First Property, I will take whatever means I deem necessary to prevent that from happening, up to and including depriving the thieves of their First Property. This is called "self defense" and nobody but the most insanely corrupt individuals deny such acts as those of a fundamental nature common to all human beings and, by logical extension, all living creatures. Poke a paramecium, a single-celled eukaryotic organism, and it shoots trichocysts at you, small pointy darts, in defense of its First Property.
To believe that property is theft is to believe in the validity of chaos, the deeper implication being that all human action is criminally invalid. After all, even if our lives are theft, how can anything we do be non-criminal, save perhaps to relinquish that which we have stolen, including our lives? To accept the notion is to accept that we are irredeemable creatures, that all acts are criminal in their fabric, and that there is nothing good that issues from humanity, whether a kind word or the saving of the lives of one's fellows in distress. This is the reductio ad absurdum of the idea that property is theft.
If all property is the product of theft, which is a felony, then by direct implication there can be no valid human action. To interact with another human being in any endeavor, including sexual congress which may lead to new life, which is property and therefore theft, is to engage in the possession, manipulation, transfer, and/or destruction of stolen... erm... "property". And here we see the notion itself, that property is theft, gives rise to a fundamental, self-reinforcing, and inescapable contradiction, some of the branches of which can loop into infinity. The absurdity is self-evident the moment one stops to think on the idea in even the most cursory manner.
Example of such a loop: Those who subscribe to the property-is-theft notion also, and paradoxically, tend also to subscribe to the idea of removing the property of others by force, that which one has stolen. But how can this be valid when one is stealing stolen property? So now someone else steals the stolen property that you then stole from the thief. But now he who stole it from you is the thief, so someone steals it from him. And so on it goes because the mutually antagonistic ideas of property is theft, and we must take by force the products of theft, work in self-reinforcing battle between fundamentally incompatible notions. Logically speaking, once you enter that loop, you cannot get out, save perhaps by more criminal action through the violation of the moral duties that those mutually reinforcing ideas place upon the individual by direct implication.
If you don't accept the idea of confiscating such property, then you are by direct implication accepting theft as valid, or at the very least, tolerable. That being the case, the sky becomes the limit of human prerogative. Johnny then becomes entitled to rape Janey because the theft of Janey's bodily integrity is no longer an issue.
Confused yet? Horrified? Disgusted? Eyeballs rolling from your sockets? You should be and they should be, because this is the sort of raving lunacy to which "property is theft" gives direct and rapid rise.
Furthermore, you as a human being, if you endeavor to continue your life while believing that property is theft, are then a criminal hypocrite whose only obligation is to immediately end your own life because even to feed yourself is theft and the continued support of the product of theft. This is wildly and insanely idiotic on its face and we have soundly demonstrated why it is so.
Under the presumption of this notion, one cannot even get to the question of whether that which one creates, whether for oneself or for another, is at any time his property or that of another. Creation of anything material becomes an act of theft. And what of ideas? If I create a new notion, is that theft? If I share it with the world, have I now implicated every human being in a criminal act? The can of worms that opens before one's eyes with the acceptance of this falderal idea that property is perforce theft, has no discernible end. The litany of questions to which the idea leads, stretches on well beyond the horizon, outward to the sides, and upwards and downwards until we drown in them, not a single one having a sufficient and reasonably acceptable answer.
Once again, and to be a broken record, the absurdity of this idea that property is theft nudges past the limits of infinity.
Conclusion: property is not theft, it is not perforce the product of theft, and that anyone who subscribes to this notion is mentally unsound, morally so, or both.
If you have heretofore bought into the notion that property is theft, you may now confidently and comfortably disabuse yourself of this folly, for you no longer have the excuse of ignorance.
Live long, prosper, and as always please accept my best wishes.
