Most property, if you trace out the actual chain of transactions, originates in theft or fraud. Either a monarch or other military force took it from another group by force and parceled out pieces of it (theft) or literally just claimed it from afar (without occupation) and decided who to grant it to (fraud). Just because you are some steps removed from the beginning of the transaction chain, does not mean that you have 'earned something', or as you put it, 'gotten it legitimately'.
- What about the software I wrote in the past year and a half for the schools I work for?
- What about the designs my co-worker painstakingly worked on over the same period?
- What about the reams of reports my wife wrote at her company, which makes heart valves? She gets up at 4:30 in the morning, comes home at around 5 at night, works after dinner. When there's an important deadline coming up (which is almost all the time), she works weekends.
All of these things are property. Each of us poured ourselves into these things. We could have done other things, but we chose to do these things. In a way, we're not special - we're just three people, out of billions.
None of us are thieves. You can casually toss around your equivocations and guilt-tripping for being born, but that doesn't change the fact that many people are honest and have earned what they have.
I believe the person you were replying to was referring to land when he said property (which is a normal term to use, if someone asked me "are you interested in looking at a property?" it would pretty unambiguously mean land / physical building).
Not that it means his stance was correct, but your argument isn't addressing his point.
Property is more than just land. People have titles cars, boats, copyright over books they've written, stocks, bonds, savings accounts, furniture, clothing, timeshares, patents on things they've invented, etc.
At any rate, in all three of my examples, money changed hands for work creating property. That money could be used to buy property, physical or otherwise.
I don't think you understood my point. The word "property" just has two separate definitions in common English, one is the one you are using and the other is verbatim "land" (which happens to be a subset of the first definition).
At least in my dialect of English "a property" would always always refer to land (e.g. "steal a property" is nonsense).
None of that is real property. Attaching the word 'property' to those things is a legal fiction and completely different from what we were talking about.
