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I want to bring in a philosopher who has written extensively on rights in general and property rights in particular. Her name is Judith Jarvis Thomson.

Thomson rejects the Lockean idea that the world was originally given by God to humankind in common. Originally, things were unowned and we need some way to explain and justify ownership. Ownership here is to be taken in a strong sense including a cluster of rights, privileges, and powers -- the right to use, the right to consume, the right to sell, the right to rent, the right to destroy, the right to give away, the right to bequeath, and so forth.

She asks how anyone could acquire this cluster of rights in an unowned thing? In other words, she asks how initial acquisition is possible. Perhaps because they did something to an object. Person A acquires ownership of X because A did Z to X. But what might Z be? Mixing one's labor with X? Occupying X? Building a fence around X?

How are we to imagine this working? Is it because A mixes her labor with X that A deserves to own X? Why would that be? Why doesn't that simply leave X a bit different, perhaps a bit more valuable, but still unowned? Is it because awarding X ownership is efficient in the production of some goal? That might be true in some cases, but not in all. And even if A deserves some reward for finding and developing a valuable resource, even if it is efficient to reward people for doing that sort of thing, why should that reward be the full cluster of rights we associate with property? Why not some other reward? Perhaps some more limited cluster of rights would work as well. Perhaps a 15 year patent would be an appropriate reward. We do that today with drugs.

In the end, Thomson rejects all of the arguments offered to support the claim that Person A acquires ownership of an unowned X because A did Z to X. She concludes that strong natural rights to property do not exist. Instead, property is the creation of legitimate government.

I think her analysis is the most thorough and realistic one that I have read. I conclude that we have limited use rights in the state of nature, but that full property rights are the product of legitimate government.

What should those rights be? That's where we get back to the idea I mentioned before -- we can offer good reasons for people to have this or that right. Some rights protect people from harm. Some rights encourage economic development. Some rights have other desirable consequences. We should offer those reasons as reasons for government to legislate one way or another on the subject of property.

By the way, Thomson's main book is called The Realm of Rights. I recommend it.