Rick Kelo - Property from the Ground Up

Have you ever considered how you come to own something?  How do we decide who owns what?  Property is such an integral part of who we are.  Even a little kid playing with another in a woods full of sticks will reply, "Hey, that's mine!" if the other child takes the stick he's using.

All of the choices we make about what we're going to do rest ultimately on who owns something.  When we say you have freedom of speech, for example, that really means freedom to speak at a place you own.  You can't go to the front of a movie theater and start giving a speech during a movie, but if you rent a conference room at a hotel you can do so.  Why?  Because you first acquired an ownership right (through a contract, a form of property) to use the hotel conference room, but not the movie theater.

Rick Kelo

Rick Kelo is a well-educated, hard-working businessman, but also a noted Classic Liberal thinker.  He describes the system of laws that would constitutes a property right in a free market economy by considering first that all private property rests upon a legal pattern of ownership follows:

Labor: self-owned
Land: owned by homesteading
Goods: owned by producing
Labor, land, goods: owned by contract (as in the case of employment)
Gift: owned by unilateral transfer
Exchange: owned by bilateral transfer