Adam Smith praised private property and also warned about it
Adam Smith argued that the hope of profit from improving your capital rests on secure private property, an idea central to capitalism. Yet the same thinker observed that great property brings great inequality, and that government built to protect property in effect defends those who own something against those who own nothing at all.
Property is less a thing than a set of rights over a thing. Depending on what it is, an owner may use, alter, rent, sell, give away or destroy it, and above all may keep others from doing so. Anthropologists describe it as a relationship among people concerning an object, in which someone holds a bundle of rights, and different people can hold different strands of that bundle at once. Economists sort ownership into four broad kinds: private, public, collective and common.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his 1881 book The Common Law, split the idea into two parts. Possession is practical control that others cannot easily contradict. Title is the expectation that others will respect your right to control something even when you are not holding it. He also traced how such rights came to attach to individuals rather than families or institutions like the church.
Where property rights come from is contested. Some philosophers see them as social convention, others ground them in morality or natural law. John Locke wrote in 1689 that every person holds a property in their own self, and classical liberals built on this, reasoning that people own the fruits of their labour and may trade them freely. Conservatives tie widespread ownership to freedom and stability. Socialists counter that private property benefits its holders but not necessarily society, and communists aim to abolish private ownership of capital, such as factories and land, while accepting personal possessions earned by one's own work.
The categories keep multiplying. Law distinguishes real property, meaning land and whatever is built on it, from movable personal property, and divides personal property into tangible items like cars and intangible ones like shares, patents and internet domain names. Intangible property can expire. When a patent or copyright runs out, the idea enters the public domain, usable by anyone and owned by none, since many people can use an idea at once without using it up.
Source: Property
