I'm all for experimenting on babies, but I can't understand what point you are trying to make with this.

Do you mean they naturally understand property, or do you mean they naturally understand theft, or what?

The person who coined the "Property is theft" quote (Proudhon if I recall) clearly made a distinction between capital-p Property and personal possession. And I think most regular people do, too.

I don't necessarily think of my stocks and bonds in my retirement funds in the same category as my toothbrush, suit jacket, or even my house or garden or whatever.

Classical liberalism and its descendants want to blur the distinction between the two. And you're welcome to adopt that view. But you shouldn't assume there aren't legitimate challenges to that point of view.

Proudhon himself wasn't terrible coherent. Marx I think clarified the distinction between dominance and control of capital and production vs personal private property better.

From a certain perspective, capitalism has been the process of enclosing things that were once common, or could be common, into "private" property. And despite the rhetoric of free exchange and liberty, it has mainly done this by force and coercion since the acts of enclosure and the age of colonialism until now.

My 6 acres of "private property" that my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago. What does that do its status -- and to me -- now?

> my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago.

This argument can be used for practically any piece of earth, it's nonsensical to fixate on it.

The issue has always been that capital (and it's quiet sibling power) can compound itself endlessly absent any checks against it. Societal unification against power and wealth consolidation should be the same as it would be against a plague or cancer in a body.

If you're trying to argue "Group X should own it instead of Group Y" then you're right - there is no good argument to fix any particular Group X - there's only special pleading. Why should it be the group who controlled it in 1600 AD, not the group who controlled it in 1600 BC or the group who controls it right now?

But there are other philosophies that don't have this problem. Philosophies where there's no notion of ownership at all, or ownership is by the entirety of humanity/the world (which makes it meaningless), and one person can only borrow something for an extended period of time. This is how a lot of native peoples viewed land, which makes sense since it cannot be created or destroyed. Or philosophies where, for example, all humans collectively own all land and houses, but it's very practical to uniquely assign one human to each house, but there's nothing special about that connection, and it doesn't give the rights to, say, hold that object hostage for money. (This is how socialists view toothbrushes, I'm told.)

I'm not fixating on it really. My point is just that classical liberal arguments about free exchange and the market and property don't hold up to historical scrutiny.

My point is you can't form an ethical framework around property as intrinsic right because really property is less "theft" than it is power, so you end up at the end of the argument having to actually defend might makes right as your world view. (Which is why I see the logical end point of radical libertarianism as being a kind of fascism.)

Capitalism is an incredibly efficient machine. All that is solid melts, etc. etc. It is beautiful in its own way. I agree about the compounding. I suspect we mostly agree generally.

> My point is you can't form an ethical framework around property as intrinsic right because really property is less "theft" than it is power, so you end up at the end of the argument having to actually defend might makes right as your world view.

Personally, I'm thinking the whole point of libertarianism is to obscure a genuine belief that might makes right on behalf of some people who have a lot of might, and sell it to a bunch of rubes.

> (Which is why I see the logical end point of radical libertarianism as being a kind of fascism.)

That's especially clear with things like "anarcho-capitalism," where it's obvious that the kind of social relationships its proponents go on and on about at book-length are impossibly unstable and wouldn't last a nonosecond before decaying into something like feudalism.