Commodore said:
Well that's an easy one. You shouldn't be allowed to profit from something I took the time to claim and develop. For example: If I find a piece of unsettled land and establish am orchard on it, I should be the only one allowed to reap the benefits of that orchard, or make any decisions about who else gets to reap the benefits. That should be my right since I'm the one who put the time, effort, and money into developing the orchard. Even if I use other workers to build the orchard, ownership still lies with me since without my capital and management, that orchard and their employment wouldn't exist. Now let's say you come along and decide you should be allowed to pick fruit from the trees in my orchard and sell them: How is that right? Why should you be allowed to reap any kind of benefit from land you had no hand in developing without my express permission or without compensating me?
See, like I said you have this idealized notion about how private property actually came about historically. It is almost never the owner doing the productive work, instead it's typically his (throughout history, almost always a he) slaves or other dependents.
Now I don't think you need to be John Rawls to realize that when private property allows one person to live off the fruits of the labor of others, that is unfair. The type of idyllic 'homesteading' to which you refer here is the historical exception rather than the rule.
And by the way, I do think my right to food supersedes your property rights in the orchard regardless of what you've done to improve or work the land, though as I said if we're being historically accurate it's near-certain that it's not you but your slaves who actually did the work.
Also, I completely disagree with the bit where you say that without the owner nothing would happen. The mere existence of alternative forms of enterprise (coops or ESOPs democratically run by the workers for example) disproves that, as does the existence of stateless societies in which there was no private property and yet productive work still got done.
Commodore said:
That's what the personal property system does. It prevents people from just ripping each other off constantly and gives everyone legal recourse to address property disputes. Unless, of course, you'd prefer a return to the days where your claim on anything is determined by whether or not you are able to kill anyone who tries to challenge your claim or take what you perceive to be yours?
Now, what this tells me is that you simply lack the imagination to imagine any alternatives other than a private property system or the law of the jungle. I think if you read some anthropological studies of stateless societies you will find there are many, many other options. Humans lived without private property, and yet also without this kind of violent anarchy you envision, for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
Also, while I find the distinction between private and personal property to be overblown, it's worth drawing since you said "personal property system" rather than "private property system."
I'll defer to Ben Franklin on this question, since his quote basically sums up my view of this whole thing:
All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
It's interesting here because Franklin is prefiguring the Marxian distinction between the part of society's output that goes into reproducing society and the extra part, the surplus. The surplus is socially created and society should get a say in deciding what's done with it; those decisions should not all be taken by unaccountable private bodies or individuals.
Commodore said:
Is that a result of the actual law, or is it more a result of corrupt people exploiting loopholes in the law? I'm still waiting for specific property laws to be cited that you (or anyone else who thinks along the same lines as you) feel are unjust. So far, your responses have still been more on the philosophical side (not saying there's anything wrong with that though), which doesn't really help me understand what it is about the current laws that are so unjust. Now that's not to say I see no downside at all to the way we do things, I just feel the positives of property laws far outweigh the negatives.
One example of unjustness in property laws is when Nestle gets the rights to a community's source of water through some kind of sweetheart deal with the government, and then steals the community's water and sells it back to them in plastic bottles for profit.
Another example is eternal intellectual property laws. There is no reason whatsoever that someone's descendants should be able to realize income from stuff a person did while they were alive, for example.
Commodore said:
What do you mean by "limit it's scope"? I think that would go a long way to helping me understand exactly what it is you are advocating, since I get a feeling we are probably more in agreement on this issue than either of us realize.
The most significant limitation on the scope of private property was the abolition of slavery. Other limitations include minimum wages and other laws which restrict the types of contracts people can enter into. It could be something as simple as a zoning ordinance which dictates what you can and can't use your property for, or a pollution law that does the same thing.