(Click here to continue on the main path)

I tend to agree with John's criticisms. But there are even more reasons to limit property rights when we are talking about land and other natural resources.

First of all, good agricultural land is not the product of human labor. As John Stuart Mill, the great utilitarian philosopher, said over a century ago, "The essential principle of property being to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labour and accumulated by their abstinence, this principle cannot apply to what is not the produce of labour, the raw material of the earth." Exclusive, permanent property rights in raw materials must be limited because of this obvious fact.

Second, we need to consider the fact that good land and many other natural resources are available in limited supply. Again, to quote Mill, "No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to any one, to be excluded from what others have produced: they were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed at all. But it is some hardship to be born into the world and to find all nature's gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer. To reconcile people to this, after they have once admitted into their minds the idea that any moral rights belong to them as human beings, it will always be necessary to convince them that the exclusive appropriation is good for mankind on the whole, themselves included."

For both of these reasons the exclusive, permanent property rights that Dee advocates are unfounded. Instead, I think we can define a more qualified right to own natural resources. I would add qualifications based on the consequences for human welfare. But there are others who would argue on a different basis.