Property system and what Marx missed

The lifeblood of capitalism is capital.

Today, to a great extent, the difference between advanced nations and the rest of the world is that between countries where formal property is widespread and countries where classes are divided into those who can fix property rights and produce capital and those who cannot.

Marx didn't grasp that formal property was not simply an instrument for appropriation but also the means to motivate people to create real additional usable value. He didn't see that it is the mechanisms contained in the property system itself that give assets the labor invested in them the form required to create capital. Nor was he able to foresee to what degree legal property systems would become crucial vehicles for the enhancement of exchange value.

Marx lived in a time when it was probably too soon to see how formal property could, through representation, make those same resources serve additional functions and produce surplus value. (Though he saw that capital is more a transcendent concept than a physical good) Thus he could not see how it would be in everyone's interest to increase the range of the beneficiaries of property. Property titles were only the visible tip of a growing formal property iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is now an enormous man-made facility for drawing out the economic potential of assets. Potential capital is no longer the privilege of the few. The world is not filled with true proletarians but with extralegal entrepreneurs.

But property systems can also be used for theft. But it is not the reason to ban, just like we would ban automobiles or computers just because some people may use them to commit crimes.

Formal property is more than just ownership. It has to be viewed as an indispensable process that provides people with the tools to focus their thinking on those aspects of their resources from which they can extract capital.

Formal property is more than a system for titling, recording, and mapping assets---it is an instrument of thought, representing assets in such a way that people's minds can work on them to generate surplus value.

The reason why formal property must be universally accessible: to bring everyone into one social contract where they can cooperate to raise society's productivity. 

A good property system puts assets into a form that lets us distinguish their similarities, differences, and connecting points with other assets. It collects dispersed information and makes capitals fungible.

The value of things can be increased by reducing the costs of knowing them and transacting with them. (Ronald Coase)

In Plato's famous analogy, we are likened to prisoners chained in a cave with our backs to the entrance so that all we can know of the world are the shadows cast on the wall in front of us. This means that many things that guide our destiny are not self-evident. (Hayek) That is why civilization has worked hard to fashion representational systems to access and grasp the part of our reality that is virtual and to represent it in terms we can understand. (Margaret Boden)

Representational systems such as math and integrated property help us manipulate and order the complexities of the world in a manner that we can all understand and that allows us to communicate regarding issues that we could not otherwise handle. prosthetic extensions of the mind.