The Ownership of Labor and Property

It all starts with life. Life acquires from Nature what it needs to make itself survive. You can think of life as having its own will. It accumulates matter and energy from its surroundings borrowing from it to lower entropy, and thus higher order. So our bodies are composed of borrowed matter, and energy, in higher order of organization. The organization and the will are key. Our physical makeup is borrowed. Labor is not mere energy. It is directed energy by the will, our free will. This willful transfer of energy is a decision of the will to go from a lower entropic state to a higher entropic state. An exertion of work is a sacrifice of your internal body order to perform that work. This sacrifice to perform that work is why you own that work.

To get the lower entropy, life acquires energy from its surroundings as Nature provides. Here on Earth, the energy comes from the Sun, to photosynthesis, and to other life forms. Borrowing is the most precise term when describing your relationship to your physical makeup. Just as while you are borrowing anything, it is a tacit agreement among everyone that it is yours to use for the time being, it is also a tacit agreement in a just society that your body’s physical makeup is yours. You are borrowing atoms and energy from nature. Furthermore, you are taking and releasing matter and energy as you live. And after death you give it all back.

The necessity for matter and energy to be seen as borrowed from Nature rather than absolutely owned arises from the consideration of liberty: all human lives individually are of equal importance and of equal dignity. We cannot start from anywhere else. To decide otherwise leads to tyranny, which is exactly the opposite of liberty. Because all human life draws from Nature to survive, it follows that all human life has as much right to Nature as any other. To strengthen this argument, consider the opposite scenario where one life can absolutely own Nature. It can be seen by induction that if a part of nature can be absolutely owned by one, then all of nature can be owned. When all of nature is owned, human life is born in a world where all nature that is within proximate distance is already owned by others, but who themselves can access nature freely. It would be a situation where there’s haves vs. have-nots as far as Nature is concerned. If one considers that no one made Nature, then there’s clearly an injustice: the haves tyrannizing the have-nots.

For all useful purposes, the body is owned because life has mixed its processes (labor) with the atoms and have bound them together with energies in high organization and structural order. This provides a key to how we come to an equitable way to find ownership of Nature outside our bodies, it is by labor. Labor itself is owned, and one mixes labor with Nature to have an owned item. This is in fact merely a restating of Locke. But what about the injustice and tyranny mentioned in the previous paragraph? And don’t we just have the same thing? No, because if we treat Nature as only borrowed, we can measure how much infringement we have on each other. Thus, if we can measure how much infringement happens, then we can employ restitutions.