1. Most ordinary people today are used to property and are threatened even by well intentioned efforts to replace it with less familiar paradigms.

2. Property isn’t just part of an economic theory, it is deeply embedded in law throughout the world. This creates a very high barrier for alternatives.

3. Slavery was a serious misapplication of property law, but the fix is a relatively simple declaration: People shall not be property.

4. Some argue that things like certain natural resources should not be property. But it can also be argued that public property is a designation of property rights that helps civic society define resources as part of its common wealth and to protect them from private enclosure or abuse.

5. The concept of property has a lot of utility. It may be broken or misapplied in certain ways, but I think it can be more easily fixed than replaced with something new. The main fix is to emphasize conditionality. Ownership is actually a bundle of severable rights. Some rights are held by the nominal owner, but some are held by others with various equitable or social interests. This divisible bundle of rights is well established in Western common law (I’m not familiar with oriental law) but it is not well established in the public mind. We need to educate people about their own legal “roots” before we decide to replace thousands of years of common law with something new and untested.

Poor Richard