What is property? It is some valued item that belongs to someone. Its existence in society may be collective or individual, although even if collective, it usually emerges from instances of (pooled or expropriated) individual ownership. And that presupposes the right to private property.

Property Is Private

The institution of the right to private property is the single most important condition for a society in which freedom in the classical liberal tradition—which means negative liberty, including free trade, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion—is to flourish. Under communism, in contrast, no such right is recognized. Privacy has a negligible role in a system which holds, as Karl Marx (1818–1883) proclaimed, that "the human essence is the true collectivity of man" (1970, p. 126). Even within noncommunist, nonsocialist systems the exact status of property is in dispute—some hold it is a convention established by implicit...