Joe Jarvis mountains

EDITORIAL
Everyone Alive Believes in Private Property
By Joe Jarvis - April 06, 2017

Everyone alive on earth drank water within the last 72 hours (or at least within the last week if they are a special case of survival).

That means at the time of consumption, every person on earth considered that water their property, otherwise they would not have monopolized its use.

This demonstrates that private property must exist in order to fulfill what humans literally need to live.

Life, existence, is the most basic human right, and it would be impossible without property. That is why property rights form the basis for individual rights.

First and foremost, we are each our own property.

All true rights stem from self-ownership. True rights are negative rights, meaning the absence of coercion (not having something provided for you as some like to think).

We should have exclusive and monopolistic control over how others get to interact with our body. Consent is required for all just actions involving an individual. When consent is not gained, and force is used on an individual, that is a violation of natural rights, a form of rape.

In nature, an individual is at peace until acted upon by an outside force. Whoever wields that force is naturally in the wrong.

Government’s promote a culture of rape by failing to gain the consent of individuals before forcing them to do any number of things with their body, like forcing someone to labor for the state, or when the state arrests/ kidnaps someone for a victimless crime.

Mob rule is not consent, others cannot justly decide for you what is done to your body. Remaining where you were born is likewise not consent since compelling you to move or face violations of your rights is itself a violation of the natural right to self-ownership.

Government monopolizes final control over all property within their jurisdiction, thus inherently violating the rights of citizens.

Private property stems from self-ownership, because anything you originally appropriate, plus add labor to, becomes your property.

A river is not my property. But If I bend down, cup my hands, and draw a mouthful of water from the river, that water becomes my property. This is because no one else is using the water cupped in my hands at the time, nor have they improved it (as would be the case if the water came from a fish pond they created). The act of getting the water from the river added my labor to the water, which is now my property.

Same goes for food, it belongs to whoever performed the labor to grow it. If found in nature, food belongs to whoever picks it.

Shelter is an obvious one, building on uninhabited land makes it your own–naturally at least, not always in practice. And that is because we live in a world where rights are violated wholesale by governments.

But just because they are able to violate rights does not mean the rights themselves don’t exist.

Rights are a concept; they are a philosophical way of understanding existence, and what is natural, and just. Rights are a way to categorize naturally wrong actions–anything that violates that basic right of self-ownership.

Humans should be able to exercise exclusive control over what they do with and what happens to their body, the only limitation being when those actions violate another person’s self-ownership.

And just by going on existing, which requires food, water, and shelter, you must believe, in practice, in property rights.

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