Den dygtige jurist og økonom Ludwig von Mises skrev i sin afdækkende bog Socialism: An economic and sociological analysis (køb den her eller læs den gratis) om hvad det vil sige, at have ejerskab til noget. Her i udpluk om den økonomisk-sociologiske forstand og den juridiske:
Regarded as a sociological category ownership appears as the power to use economic goods. An owner is he who disposes of an economic good.
Thus the sociological and juristic concepts of ownership are different. This, of course, is natural, and one can only be surprised that the fact is still sometimes overlooked. From the sociological and economic point of view, ownership is the having of the goods which the economic aims of men require. This having may be called the natural or original ownership, as it is purely a physical relationship of man to the goods, independent of social relations between men or of a legal order. The significance of the legal concept of property lies just in this—that it differentiates between the physical has and the legal should have. The Law recognizes owners and possessors who lack this natural having, owners who do not have, but ought to have. In the eyes of the Law ’he from whom has been stolen’ remains owner, while the thief can never acquire ownership. Economically, however, the natural having alone is relevant, and the economic significance of the legal should have lies only in the support it lends to the acquisition, the maintenance, and the regaining of the natural having.
To the Law ownership is a uniform institution. It makes no difference whether goods of the first order or goods of higher order form its subject, or whether it deals with durable consumption goods or non-durable consumption goods. The formalism of the Law, divorced as it is from any economic basis, is clearly expressed in this fact. Of course, the Law cannot isolate itself completely from economic differences which may be relevant. The peculiarity of land as a means of production is, partly, what gives the ownership of real property its special position in the Law. Such economic differences are expressed, more clearly than in the law of property itself, in relationships which are sociologically equivalent to ownership but juristically allied to it only, e.g., in servitudes and, especially, in usufruct. But on the whole, in Law formal equality covers up material differences.
Kapitlet kan i sin helhed anbefales og der kan i øvrigt henvises til Murray Rothbards The Ethics of Liberty, som giver en samfundsbeskrivelse udfra et rent kontrakts- og rettighedssynspunkt.
