Corporeality, not Scarcity, as a Precondition for Property

This very short essay is written largely in response to an essay by N. Stephan Kinsella, in which he argues that authors cannot retain exclusive ownership of their ideas since there is no scarcity of ideas. Following the tradition of Murray Rothbard, Kinsella claims that the reason we can have ownership in land and physical products is that they are scarce. A function of property rights, he claims, is to moderate the use of scarce resources. According to him, ownership of non-scarce resources is logically impossible – it makes no point to call an infinitely-abundant thing your own, since if someone steals it from you you can just grab another. Though I do agree with Kinsella that physical objects have a particular quality which renders them “own-able”, and that ideas lack this quality, I do not believe that this quality is scarcity. Or rather, I should say that “scarcity” is not the word he should use. Instead, he should use the word “corporeality”.

In his essay, Kinsella writes: “Were we in a Garden of Eden where land and other goods were infinitely abundant, there would be no scarcity and, therefore, no need for property rules; property concepts would be meaningless.” But property concepts would have meaning in an Eden where there is no scarcity at all. Let’s imagine a world where the ground is a plane – where flat land extends infinitely everywhere. There are forests all over this land, with trees that give as many fruit as you would need, and in every kind. You walk through acre after acre of this land holding a basket, picking fruit and gathering vegetables, and storing them in your house. Once you run out of fruit, or once they become too ripe for your taste, you can get your basket and go out again, gathering as much food as you would need. Though the amount of food is infinite, a traveller who visits your house decides that he wants your fruit, and decides to take all of it without your permission. You could simply go out and get some more, just as he could have. But his acquisition of your food without your permission is still theft, even though all the food you want is just a short walk away. The infinitude of food does not remove the fact that this visitor stole from you. He stole the product of your labor. He made you work for him without your consent, and in this regard he made a slave out of you. Scarcity, then, is irrelevant in deciding whether something can be owned by you and whether taking it from you without your permission is the same thing as stealing it from you.

To say that something’s abundance excuses taking it from you is to say that mixing your labor with an un-owned thing does not necessarily make it yours. It amounts to saying “well, you have plenty, so you shouldn’t mind me taking a little”.

The right criterion is not scarcity, but corporeality. The fact that an object is material makes its use by another impossible as long as you use it. This is why your use of a physical object necessarily implies excluding its use by others. And this is why you have an exclusive right to own objects that you make yours by mixing your labor with them. It is the necessity to exclude another’s use of an object in facilitating your use of it that makes that object ownable by you. Since only corporeal objects have this necessity, only corporeal objects can be owned as property.

It is true that something cannot be scarce unless it is also corporeal. And it might be safe to say that in this world, everything that is corporeal is also scarce. But the meaning I believe Kinsella is trying to convey is much better expressed by the word “corporeality” than by “scarcity”.