You and I apparently disagree on property because I see it as a most natural Right. Indeed, I thnk that your argument above is a bit self-contradictory concerning property in that there can be no more profound property Right than the Right to ownership by one of one's person, which would be the rational basis for an individual being able to invoke habeas corpus in the first place.
I do make a distinction between private property (up to and including structures) vs land. I mentioned this to you in a thread a while back but I do not know if you saw it.
It is also my conviction that there is no more reality-based school of economic thought than that of the Austrian School. Indeed, I know of no other school of economic thought that is so closely tied to the actual and intimate day to day life of people, or as capable of providing an understanding into what von Mises called "human action" while lending it self robustly to the concept of individual liberty.
Yours,
Issodhos
A natural right is preeminent to the state, but it is the state that confers complex property rights upon a owner. Complex property rights include absentee ownership, legacy, copyrights, patents. There is no natural right to own these, they are gifts of the state. The property that a person directly exercises control over at work or home are natural rights of possession. No one has a natural right to possess their thoughts after placing them in the stream of public discourse. Without the state's force, property possession on the opposite end of the continent would not exist, without the use of third party contracted force, which infringed upon others' liberty.
What the state has been empowered to grant, it can also take away.
There is another reason why property rights are not elevated to primacy. It is the barricades of habeas corpus and due process of law, which restrains the State from seizing private property without cause through conviction, finding of fact for civil wrong, or just compensation if taken for public use. Without due process of law and habeas corpus, there is not one liberty that remains secure, not one. Do not attempt a flight of fantasy into the opiated dreams of rifles and sidearms in this modern world.
Without habeas corpus, the state can render humans unto itself, acting quickly and silently in the dead of night with overwhelming force, equipt with full body armor, wielding non-lethal ordnance, and subsequently, using a justification of national security, never admit to the deed. It can come on classified executive order as a flying predator selectively choosing its individual prey; a dragon belching hellfire, controlled remotely by former Nintendo Whiz kids secreted away in an underground bunker somewhere in the midst of the Nevada desert; then publish an investigative finding of unknown causes for the good of Mother, God and Country.
One at a time as relatives, friends and neighbors shake off the dissonance at the dark periphery, and return to their delusive sense of security by property. An unmuzzled leviathan will devour us all.
