(October 29, 2012 at 8:45 am)Rhythm Wrote: I think a more pressing example of what the OP is asking would be the ownership of land. Clearly none of us are forces of nature (at least not individually,,hehehe) so the comparison of "what we worked on" wouldn't seem to apply to the object we call real estate, at least not for the first in the tree of ownership.
Why not?
Let's see. We can take a piece of land and clear it of preexisting vegetation. We can make it more fertile. We can make it barren. We can raise its level by putting soil on top and we can decrease it by removing it. It sounds an awful lot familiar to what we do with otherwise naturally occurring material.
There is one good argument I've heard against the concept of ownership - the fact that we don't own the starting raw material which we then put our work into. Thus we have no right to use it in the first place. By that logic, we don't have the starting right to put our work into anything - not the land we may cultivate or build upon, not the minerals we mine and not the animals and plants we kill for food. By that logic, no one - not the government and not the society - can claim ownership of anything. Though I don't know of any argument against this, but if that's the case then life simply wouldn't be possible.
