Ownership
Sometimes I feel like I own too much. My small place is pretty crammed with stuff. I like it all, but now a lot of it is obsolete. I have an old reel-to-reel taperecorder that was once state of the art. But it's mine now. It's socially unacceptable to just dump it in the garbage even if I could bring myself to do it.
That's one aspect of ownership.
Another aspect of ownership is that you can make money by renting your property. One friend was able to finance the purchase of a house with 2 suites. The rent from the second suite paid all the finance charges so my friends got their house for free. Well not quite for free. They were on the hook when the furnace went out during a cold snap and the pipes froze.
Another aspect of ownership is that you need to pay the ongoing expenses of your property or you lose it or worse it becomes a liability. That is, it's easier to own stuff if you have lots of money. I once saw pictures of the interior of Bill Gates' house. It was spotless. The servants stayed out of camera range.
Ownership can get complicated. It seems easy - if I make something then I own it and can sell it under whatever terms I want. That spins off into all sorts of weird directions when you think of intellectual property.
Who owns the bounty of nature? In some ways that bounty is just there for the taking. When I was a kid we'd head out into the woods with a saw looking for a christmas tree. And when we found one and cut it down, nobody questioned our ownership.
These days I've heard you need to buy a licence to do that - like you need a licence to hunt deer. If you pay the fee then you own what you harvest otherwise it's theft. That seems innocuous with christmas trees but what if the licence is for all the coal in a mountain? A claim is that by doing the work of extracting the coal a company owns the coal.
When I first got my taperecorder I used to go with it to visit friends who had good record collections.We'd socialize as they played the music and I recorded it. None of us thought I was stealing music any more than when I was a kid in a family searching for the perfect tree. We own what we work for.
The thing with stuff like coal mines is that the people who own the coal are not the ones who mine it. Rich people don't claim to earn their wealth - they claim to be entitled to it because of ownership.
It wasn't long ago that rich people resisted the workers forming unions. It still goes on. They object that unions are usurping rich people's rights to do whatever they want with their property.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.