1. The owner of factory insists on his
freedom to use his property as he wishes.
2. He does not want to share his property with those who have none, with those, for example, who work for him, and so must choose to sell themselves for wages
if they are not to die.
3. He is not responsible, he says, for the conditions of the world he was born into.
4. Freedom, unlike justice, for him is not universal. Justice is for all.
5. The reason for this:
6. Property is the exclusive use of some
thing,
7. And freedom has been defined as exclusive use of property.
8. Freedom is then, by definition, to maintain exclusive use of things.
9. Another definition of freedom: to live without threat of violence.
10. This kind of freedom is held as universally applicable to all.
11. The factory owner insists that his definition of freedom, non universal, based on violence,
be placed ahead of the universal principle of non-violence.
12. Simply because that is the world he was born into.
13. Freedom to use property, to the benefit only a few, is a principle applicable only by force, or by a
habit of obedience established by repeated use of force.
14. No one without property, capable of choice, would prefer the non-universal principle based on violence, to the universal principle of freedom from violence.
15. Moral principles are the product
of thought about life, of better and worse ways of living.
16. The right to property is not a moral principle.
see Property Is Silence
