Unjustifiable Law

This chapter forms the corollary to Chapter 4 —if private property is ego, then the consequences of choices made possible by that concept render the institution unjustifiable. This is shown by what the exercises of raw power—ego—allow. And that allows us to do horrible things: using property as our tool, we colonise and enslave others through the global economy, reject access to needed territory and resources through racist immigration laws, and, worst of all, damage the environment. In other words, while the law undoubtedly imposes some limitations, private property nonetheless remains a front for doing whatever you like, of gratifying ego. And if private property is unequal power of the few over the many, allowing those few to exert their preference to satisfy their own selfish needs and desires over everything that we find in the world around us, we have revealed a problem faced by every scholar of property. It concerns the second of the two main pillars of property theory: justification. If a community, a society, decides on the property model as the means of ordering its social life, it becomes necessary to justify the use of that model, that tool, as the means by which we divide the world amongst us. But re-casting and re-working the content of property only repeats the failure, the flaw, of private property: it cannot be justified for it achieves nothing but inequality. If private property is ego, then theorising about its content and the justifications for it really amount to a defence of the indefensible.