Recently I've seen some libertarian rhetoric on Facebook that has made me think. The thing about libertarian rhetoric is that it's centered on a limited number of pretty steadfast concepts, unlike the tangled web of shifting D/R positions. Liberty or freedom is obviously one. Property is another. Property is taken as a fundamental right to be protected, along with life and the ever-cherished liberty - to the point where systems that do not acknowledge property are characterized as taking away property and infringing on that right. I think the way libertarians see it, protection of property is necessary so that each person can be a free individual. But that's not the only way to see it.
All individual rights constitute a limitation on the freedoms of others. This is expressed in the trope "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." But who is swinging fists and who is protecting their nose when it comes to property? Property is the right to exclude others from use of resources. It's the right to say "this is mine, you're not allowed to use it even if it's sitting idle, and if you try I'll call the fucking cops on you." If you think this is a fundamental right, then trespassers, squatters, P2P hosts, etc. are swinging fists and hitting the noses of property owners. But there is a reciprocal right: the right to use available resources to meet one's needs. These two are mutually exclusive. If you believe right-to-use is more fundamental than right-to-exclude-from-use, then property owners and enforcers are the ones who are swinging fists. (Thieves are in the wrong either way, as they seek to sequester property for themselves without consent.)
Where do we get the idea that property is so fundamental? Locke argued, and others have followed after him in accepting, that the right of property derives from bodies. That is to say, every person has property rights to their own body, and by mixing the labor of the body with other resources you acquire property rights to things outside yourself. It is hard to argue that one doesn't have the right to exclude others from one's body. To do so would be to turn an indifferent eye to rape, among other things, and undermine the basis for rights to life and liberty. But does a property-like right in the body necessitate property rights to other things?
Setting aside the whole "mixing" aspect of the argument, is it possible that you can have the same kind of rights with respect to other objects as you have for your body? I think not, and Rousseau makes an argument that illustrates why:
"Pufendorf says that just as one transfers his property to another by agreements and contracts, he can also divest himself of his liberty in someone else's favor. This, it seems to me, is a very bad argument, for in the first place, the property I alienate becomes something entirely foreign to me, and its abuse is unimportant to me, but it does matter to me that my liberty should not be abused, and without making myself guilty of the evil I shall be forced to do, I cannot leave myself open to becoming the instrument of crime." - Discourse on Inequality, second part, emphasis mine
In other words, since life, liberty, and any other right we might suppose to inhere in the body cannot be transferred away from us, cannot be treated such that we no longer have a vital interest in it - and as my own observation, is of a fundamentally different type of utility to whomever we might contract it to - these rights are meaningfully different than rights to control over transferable items. If you believe that property rights in objects are analogous to property rights in your body, then you ought to also believe that you can legitimately sell yourself into slavery - and while I'm sure there are some who do believe that, I suspect most libertarians would consider them the wacko wing.
So I think the traditional body-as-property argument is a red herring. The kind of rights you have over your body can't be the same as the rights you have over legal property, for the reasons discussed above. For similar reasons, they can't be the same as use rights over resources in a non-property system: one person's use of a resource has no bearing on anyone else unless they spoil or use up the resource, or use it for a harmful activity - but use of a person's body is ALWAYS relevant to that person, regardless of physical impact or intended consequence, and cannot be made otherwise. Bodies are a special case and thus irrelevant to the decision between use-rights and property-rights as the basis for individual liberty.
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