BASEDic Economics 2, Who Owns What?

By TaxedBrass · 2026-08-20 21:05:00

In Part 1, we established that you own yourself. Your body, your mind, your choices: these are all yours. From that, we derived the Non-Aggression Principle, the basic principle that, essentially, peaceful people shouldn't be attacked.

That's all well and good conceptually, and it certainly works in a vacuum. However, you do not exist as a floating consciousness in a void. You live in a world full of things. Trees, land, water, minerals, tools, food, houses, and just about everything else are scarce resources that can't be used by everyone at once. So we need to answer a simple but very important question: who owns what?

One might ask why this even matters. Can't we all just share everything? We could have no such thing as property at all, as the Marxists would like. Unfortunately for the Marxists, this is operatively impossible. Scarcity creates conflict. If I'm using a piece of land to grow food, you cannot use that exact same land to build a house on at the same time. If I am eating an apple, you cannot also eat it. These uses are mutually exclusive, and so without a way to determine who gets to control what, every single resource becomes a potential battleground. We'd find ourselves in a state of constant conflict, fighting over everything.

Such a state of affairs wouldn't just be inefficient or inconvenient, but would be a fundamental problem for civilization itself, and it is ultimately the root cause of the failure of all socialist experiments. Remember: we already established that initiating force against peaceful people is unjustifiable, so we need a way to determine ownership that doesn't require endless violence. We need clear, objective boundaries that everyone can recognize without having to fight about it and go off to a war over every disagreement.

So how do we establish that? How can we assign ownership in a way that avoids conflict and doesn't rely on aggression? There are really only a few logical possibilities here.

The first is that nobody owns anything. This sounds peaceful, and is more or less in line with the fantasies of the noble savage and our nomadic ancestors, but in reality, if nobody owns anything, then nobody has the exclusive right to use anything. This means that if I start using something (say, some land to farm on) you can then come along and say "Actually, I'm going to use this for something else" and displace me. Then someone else can displace you, and so on, forever. This state of affairs doesn't eliminate conflict so much as it guarantees it. Every single resource is up for grabs at every single moment. Essentially a guaranteed state of total constant war.

So then, that option didn't work. What if we say, instead, that society (or the collective, or the community, pick an adjective at your pleasure) owns everything together? This establishes a different problem. Who decides how things get used? If everyone owns a piece of land, then everyone has to agree on what happens with it. What happens when we disagree? Do we all vote? Now the majority is forcing the minority to accept their decision, which clearly violates self-ownership. Do we require unanimous consent? Then literally nothing can ever happen, because one person can veto everything. Either way, this system either collapses into war yet again or grinds to a halt.

So if nobody owning anything fails, and if everyone owning everything fails, we are left with some people owning some things. This is the only option that actually works, obviously. For scarce resources, there has to be someone to decide how those resources are utilized. The question is: which people own which things, and why?

This is where we get to the answer that resolves the problem: original appropriation. Or, as it's sometimes called, the Homesteading Principle.

The general idea is that the first person to mix their labor with a previously unowned resource becomes its rightful owner. Why is this valid? Because of the same logic we utilized in Part 1. You own yourself, which means you own your labor, your actions, your time, and your energy. So, then, when you take an unowned resource, like a piece of wilderness or pile of wood or unclaimed land, whatever it is, and you transform it through your labor, you are mixing something you own (your labor) with something nobody owned. And the result is something you own.

Let's say, as an example, you're walking through an untouched forest. Nobody has ever been here. You find a clearing, and you chop down some trees, and you clear the brush, and you till the soil, and you plant a garden. You have taken unowned natural resources and, through your effort, your time, and your energy, all of which of course belong to you and you alone, you've transformed those natural resources into something new, into a farm. Who owns that farm? Any sane person would recognize that you do, because you created it. Nobody else can claim it without claiming ownership over your labor, which means claiming ownership over you, and we already established that you own yourself.

Of course, this doesn't just apply to land. It applies to anything! If you take unowned materials and create a tool, you own that tool. If you gather unowned fruit and bring it back to your home, you own that fruit. The act of mixing your labor with unowned resources is what establishes the ownership claim. Importantly, this standard is objective. We can observe who was first and who mixed their labor with what. There is no subjective guessing or arbitrary declaration within this standard. The boundaries are very clear.

Now, one might ask, what about resources that are already owned? What if I didn't homestead some land myself, but someone else did generations ago? Can I still come to own it? The answer is that you actually can, through the process of voluntary transfer. If the rightful owner of something, whether they are the original appropriator or someone who got it through voluntary transfer themselves, chooses to give it to you, then it becomes yours. This can happen through trade, through gift, through inheritance, whatever. The key component is simply consent. The owner has to choose to transfer the thing. If they do, then legitimate ownership transfers with it.

We have now established a full picture of legitimate ownership. You legitimately own something if you either originally appropriated it by mixing your labor with unowned resources, or the rightful owner of it voluntarily transferred it to you. These are the only two ways ownership can be established without aggression. The alternative to this standard is a standard of using force to take control of something that belongs to someone else, which is theft (and, if you recall, we already established that aggression, such as theft, against peaceful people is unjustifiable).

This is very important stuff. Property rights are how we make self-ownership real in the physical world. Again, you own your body, but your body exists in space. It needs land to stand on and food to sustain itself, and so without the ability to own external resources, self ownership is sort of meaningless. You'd just be a mind trapped in a body with no ability to actually act in the world. You'd be reduced to a sentient mind trapped in a body, unable to act, only able to slowly die.

So, property rights extend your self-ownership outward into the world. They create the boundaries that allow you to live without being in constant conflict with everyone else. This is what makes cooperation possible. If you own your things and I own mine, we can choose to trade. Both of us will benefit, and nobody had to force anybody to do anything. But if ownership is unclear, if there is a standard wherein everything is up for grabs, then trade is impossible. Why would I give you anything if you might just take it anyway? Why would I invest time building something if someone can just claim it the moment I'm done?

So, to review: the original appropriator, the person who first mixed their labor with an unowned resource, is the rightful owner. And anyone that person voluntarily transfers that resource to then becomes the rightful owner. Those are the only two legitimate paths to the ownership of scarce resources that aren't already owned by you as part of your body. Anything else requires aggression, and aggression is unjustifiable, as we established in Part 1.

(Note: this was originally the script for a second BASEDic Economics video. It'll still come out eventually, I've just been focusing on other stuff recently. I wanted to put this out as an available resource in the meantime.)