Property

In plain terms

Owning something looks like a relation between you and the thing. It is not. The thing is indifferent.

What ownership actually consists in is a set of relations to other people: they may not use it without your permission, they must not remove it, you may sell it to them, and a court will act if they ignore this. Take those away and the object is unchanged while the property has gone.

Which means property is always a social arrangement, maintained at considerable public expense, and always a bundle rather than a single thing. You can own land and not the minerals under it, a house and not the right to demolish it, a book and not the right to copy it. Asking who owns something is rarely a single question.

As a philosopher would put it

Locke's account has a person's labour, mixed with unowned material, generating a right - subject to the proviso that enough and as good is left for others, and to a spoilage limit that money is then argued to circumvent. It has been the reference point ever since, including for its critics.

Hohfeld's analysis replaces the thing-relation picture with a bundle of claim-rights, liberties, powers and immunities held against specific people, which explains why ownership can be divided in so many ways and why the question of what owning consists in has no single answer.

Hume and Bentham ground property in convention and legal recognition rather than in nature: it exists because a system of rules makes it exist. Marx's account makes ownership of the means of production the determining social relation, and Proudhon's slogan that property is theft is aimed at rent and unearned appropriation rather than at possession as such. Nozick's entitlement theory is the strongest modern defence: just acquisition and just transfer make any resulting distribution just, whatever its shape.

What is actually disputed

Whether property rights are natural or conventional.

Natural-rights accounts hold that ownership can be established prior to any legal system - by labour, by first occupancy - and that the state's role is to recognise and protect what already exists. Conventional accounts hold that there is nothing to recognise until a system of rules creates it, so property is a legal artefact and every question about its extent is a policy question.

The difference is not academic: it determines whether taxation and regulation interfere with something pre-existing or merely adjust the terms of an arrangement the state constituted.

Locke's proviso is the internal pressure point. If appropriation is legitimate only where enough and as good remains, then in a finite world almost no current holding satisfies it - which either voids the account or requires the reinterpretation that Nozick supplies and his critics regard as evacuating the condition.