In fact, the ownership of property is a necessary implication of self-ownership because all human action takes place over property. How else could happiness be pursued? If nothing else, we need a place to stand. We need the right to use land and other property to produce new goods and services. We shall see that all rights can be understood as property rights. But this is a contentious point, not always easily understood. Many people wonder why we couldn't voluntarily share our goods and property.
Property is a necessity. "Property" doesn't mean simply land, or any other physical good. Property is anything that people can use, control, or dispose of. A property right means the freedom to use, control, or dispose of an object or entity. Is this a bad, exploitative necessity? Not at all.
If our world were not characterized by scarcity, we wouldn't need property rights. That is, if we had infinite amounts of everything people wanted, we would need no theory of how to allocate such things. But of course scarcity is a basic characteristic of our world. Note that scarcity doesn't imply poverty or a lack of basic subsistence. Scarcity simply means that human wants are essentially unlimited, so we never have enough productive resources to supply all of them. Even an ascetic who had transcended the desire for material goods beyond bare subsistence would face the most basic scarcity of all: the scarcity of one's own body and life and time. Whatever time he devoted to prayer would not be available for manual labor, for reading the sacred texts, or for performing good works. No matter how rich our society gets--nor how indifferent to material goods we become--we will always have to make choices, which means that we need a system for deciding who gets to use productive resources.
We can never abolish property rights, as socialist visionaries promise to do. As long as things exist, someone will have the power to use them. In a civilized society, we don't want that power to be exercised simply by the strongest or most violent person; we want a theory of justice in property titles. When socialist governments "abolish" property, what they promise is that the entire community will now own all property. But since--visionary theory or no--only one person can eat a particular apple, or sleep in a particular bed, or stand on a particular spot, someone will have to decide who. That someone--the party official, or the bureaucrat, or the czar--is the real possessor of the property right.
Libertarians believe that the right to self-ownership means that individuals must have the right to acquire and exchange property in order to fulfill their needs and desires. To feed ourselves, or provide shelter for our families, or open a business, we must make use of property. And we need to be confident that our property right is legally secure, that someone else can't come and confiscate the wealth we've created, whether that means the crop we've planted, the house we've built, the car we've bought, or the complex corporation we've created through a network of contracts with many other people.
