The Right to Private Property: Does It Exist? Where Does It Come From? Is Absolutism Defensible?

Property rights are treated in inconsistent ways, and whether one receives compensation for one's losses often turns on distinctions that are impossible for the ordinary citizen to comprehend. Natural rights theory exerted its greatest influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and informed the thinking of the fomenters of the American Revolution and the founders of our nation. A property system grounded on a natural rights moral foundation can aspire to demonstrate to the Marxist that the owners of resources, the capitalists, in no way exploit laborers. Individuals do not have rights to property independent of the state, as Locke had thought. The economists of private property might argue that the polluters ought to be compensated for a change in the law that redefined away their existing property right that had permitted them to disgorge a "diseconomy". The only relevant considerations, from a rights viewpoint, are who has a right to what, and who aggresses against that rightfully owned thing.