I’ve been thinking about this for many months and I’ve finally worked it out. You may have read this somewhat alarming post, saying that if someone steals our property and disposes of it in some way, we have no right to be compensated for it. Yeah, that sounds pretty bad. However, here’s what I posted to the end of that article that makes it not exactly satisfying, but tolerable:

This post bugged me, maybe for obvious reasons. It just didn’t seem right that a thief wouldn’t owe you something after stealing your property and disposing of it. Even if he doesn’t have it anymore, he took value from you, and isn’t that what we’re really concerned with?

If you have a rusted out car in your yard and you hate it and would be willing to pay someone to take it away, is it really property? In this case you not only don’t value it, you negatively value it. It has less than zero value to you. So much so, that might be willing to pay someone to take it. But, if your sworn enemy wants the car and you would hate to see him benefit from it more than you hate it being in your yard, you’d clearly have the right to disallow his taking. The definition of property, mentioned previously, “those material objects to which no one else has an equal or greater claim, nor for which others can be assigned responsibility”, holds and doesn’t seem to be affected by the value that one may find in his property.

I was thinking that there may be some inextricable link between property and value that might make them part of the same phenomenon. Turns out, it’s less exciting than that.

On a long road trip, I decided to buckle down and really think through this. The conclusion was that the original logic of this post is correct and that value isn’t directly connected to property at all. As previously mentioned, value is highly subjective. In fact, the value of your own property changes slightly from moment to moment in degrees that you yourself probably can’t quantify.

So far, nothing new.

The insight is that the laws of property are universal and that if someone destroys your property, they owe you nothing, but you also owe them nothing if you destroy theirs. Destroying your property opens up the violator to your destruction of his property. The retaliation is likely to be asymmetrical, meaning that the violator knows exactly how much value he got from destroying your property, but he has no idea how much value might be taken from him in your retaliation. Maybe he steals your apple and eats it and then maybe you burn his house down, or worse. Maybe he’ll just get away with it, but that’s always a risk. Maybe he finds that the entire community is on your side, since no one likes a thief.

The key for value is that it can be used as a legal proxy for lost property. Knowing that in destroying your property the thief has set himself up for possibly dire retribution, he may agree to compensation through legal arbitration using value as a representation of property. It would be up to the victim to state the value of the compensation and to the arbitrator how much is awarded.

Even though it still a little disturbing that someone owes you nothing for destroying your property, it is poetic that all of the incentives and human nature itself, line up against such behavior. Humans are genetic propertarians and there’s no escaping that!