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The Right to Ownership of Labor Products

The term "property rights" refers to one of the most fundamental human rights - the right of human beings to own property.

The right to own property can be readily inferred from the right to freedom of expression. Labor is a form of self-expression: what a man produces is, so to speak, his labor crystallized, and therefore an extension of himself, !t is the expenditure of the person in terms of time and effort - the self poured out with varying intensity into so many hours. Therefore, to usurp property legitimately acquired is logically the same as cutting off so many hours from its producer's life, the only difference from murder being that the hours are past instead of future.

The Right to Freedom in the Use of Nature

This right, which Hocking discusses under a similar heading, was never more cogently elucidated than in the original edition of Herbert Spencer's Social Statics:

"Given a race of beings having like claims to pursue the objects of their desires…, and it unavoidably follows that they have equal rights to the use of this world. For if each of them 'has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other,' then each of them is free to use the earth for the satisfaction of his wants, provided he allows all others the same liberty. And conversely, it is manifest that no one, or part of them, may use the earth in such a way as to prevent the rest from similarly using it; seeing that to do this is to assume greater freedom than the rest, and consequently to break the law."[1]

If one accepts the labor theory of ownership (and I do not know of any other fundamental argument for private property), one is bound to conclude not only that absolute private property in land and natural resources cannot be justified thereby, but that it violates the only kind of property which can. "As labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce."[2]

He who would defend the private monopolization of the globe is no more a champion of the true right of property than is he who would defend a robber's title to his booty. The real champion of private ownership must also be the nemesis of spurious ownership. And regardless of how innocently bought and sold, how toilsomely acquired, or how ancient its pedigree, every existing land title will be found to be spurious if traced to its origin. For no king ever had a moral right to legalize the spoil of conquest; no legislature a right to alienate the patrimony of a nation; and no court a right to vest perpetually in any family that which the Creator made for all.


1. "Henry George, A Perplexed Philosopher, 1892
2. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1962) p. 334.