Do you want to see it?

This is fun, so indulge me, please, for another thought or two about property. I told you I loved words: they're plentiful, bountiful, exotic, surprising, sometimes sweet, sometimes sour to the palette, but they can, when treated properly, also be an inexhaustible source of (mental) nourishment.

Here's another quote I read recently that really caught my eye. It is from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a 19th century, French social critic:

Property is theft!

Isn't that wild? I particularly love the exclamation point, even though I'm more than hesitant to use them myself. Talk about to-the-point, in-your-face, get-your-attention. So what are we to make of that? Well, before you just tune out and turn away, we should play a game ... one of my favorites, in fact ... one that I like to call "Think It Through". In other words, instead of just rejecting an assertion out of hand, let's think it through just to see how far we can get. Here's my try:

I (almost) own a house (see my posting from two days ago) which is sitting on a corner lot on a given street. I "bought" the house, but the property was "thrown in". Who owned it? Well, the people who sold it to me. And where did they get it? From the people before them. But at some point, wasn't it the city that "owned" it and said houses could be built there? Where did they get it? (And now I'm going to take bigger steps back in time:) From the State, which got it from the colony that it was before the State, because the King said it was his. But where did he get it? Well, he beat up another country that said it was theirs (why we don't know ... but war isn't theft, is it?), but we can ask where they got it. They of course, "came into possession of it because some guy in a boat or after a long walk stuck a flag in it and said "This is mine (actually, the king's because I'm acting in his name), but wasn't someone there before? I think you get the picture.

What this little exercise shows us, though, is that at some point, someone who never saw it before decided that since he didn't know who it might in fact belong to simply "claimed" it, it was now his (or his boss', depending on how you look at it). In other words, even though it really wasn't his, he took it and said it was. Isn't that theft? I mean, if you were asked to say in 25 words or less what "theft" is, you'd probably come up with something very similar.

Maybe M. Proudhon was onto something. Maybe ...