Do people own property just for kicks or is their a reason for it? Imagine back to when there was no property. You only had a right to whatever you could hold in your hands. As soon as you drop something, it was free for the taking. Somebody eventually noticed how this ancient tradition often lead to fighting and devised property as the solution for establishing who has the right to what. Property has been essential to human existence ever since. To own something meant that you possessed the exclusive right to use it, and you were free to profit from selling whatever you produced with it. It was fair because everyone was free to produce whatever they wanted, and competition was only limited by the natural inclination of producers to satisfy scarcity. But that wasn't enough for some greedy bastards. They over-extended and perverted the notion of property by including ideas, technology and artistic content, i.e. the means of production. By taking ownership, and therefore control, over technology and artistic content, people were able to limit what physical property owners were legally allowed to produce. It wasn't a problem at first, when there wasn't much technology or artistic content. But today, with millions of patents and copyrights 'protecting' every commercially viable piece of tech and art, physical property rights are nearly null. Artists, authors, and inventors certainly deserve recognition for their respective contributions but nobody deserves a monopoly. Poverty, the disparity of wealth, the lack of competition, and the lack of opportunity for individuals to employ themselves, it all traces back to the exclusive rights of intellectual property trumping our physical property rights. As long as nobody without IP or a license from an IP owner is free to produce anything, nobody is free to employ themselves. And as long as our only practical means of earning a living is to work for the monopolies who would have any of us who tries to reproduce their products thrown in prison, taking a job is not a choice, it's slavery.
