Property

Property is not a set of things but a set of rights and interests. Standard interpretations see property as consisting of rights to possess, use, manage, dispose of, and keep others away from things. Property is also a set of interests, for if the things we own become worthless we no longer have property. All property has always been, in a sense, government largesse. It is LAW that allows a given physical object to be legally acquired or owned by one person and not another.

Property is power compelling service and obedience, as is political sovereignty. We must distinguish between rights to have or do something and rights to merely try to have or do something.

What are the grounds for moral rights to property? One answer is that we are morally entitled to the products of our labor. An important proviso is that if a resource is scarce we should take only as much as would leave "enough and as good for others". To take more of a limited natural resource than one needs and can put to good use is contrary to the requirements of morality.

I have to say this is not plausible in the contemporary world. The unowned wilderness waiting to be appropriated no longer exists. Nearly always we mix our labor with an economic system, an industrial economy, and it makes little sense to think of the result as the outcome of our labor. A person's labor cannot be distinguished from the other labor it is mixed with in producing a product or contributing to production.

Interests, in contrast to rights, need not necessarily be respected for their own sake but are usually to be judged in terms of the further consequences of pursuing them. They are needs or desires or claims for some state of affairs to be effected. Justifiable interests are what we should be good for us in the long run if we were fully enlightened. They are what we would want if we were fully informed and wanted what would be good for us.

Rights are entitlements to something we can either do or have or not do or not have done to us. Interests are matters of more and less. 

When interests conflict, we tend to find a moral solution to maximize the a particular criteria. But rights are not subject to maximizing.