or An Essay on the Right of Authors and Inventors to a Perpetual Property in their IdeasSECTION III. What is Property? Property is simply wealth, that is possessed—that has an owner; in contradistinction to wealth, that has no owner, but lies exposed, unpossessed, and ready to be converted into property, by whomsoever chooses to make it his own. All property is wealth; but all wealth is not property. A very small portion of the wealth in the world has any owner. It is mostly unpossessed. Of the wealth in the ocean, for example, only an infinitesimal part ever becomes property. Man occasionally takes possession of a fish, or a shell, leaving all the rest of the ocean's wealth without an owner. A somewhat larger proportion, but still a small proportion, of the wealth that lies in and upon the land, is property. Of the forests, the mines, the fruits, the animals, the atmosphere, a small part only has ever became property. Of intellectual wealth, too, doubtl...
The most complicated pieces of mechanism are often not the latest but the earliest results of the inventor's skill in a particular direction. Improvements in machinery very frequently take the form of a reduction in the number of wheels and principles of motion, necessary to obtain the desired result, and a machine is considered to be more nearly perfect in proportion as its action becomes more direct. It is safe to conclude, too, that this law of human progression from the complicated to the direct, is by no means confined to mechanics. In philosophy and in sociology similar phenomena may be observed. Thus the Social Democratic scheme for reorganizing society--based as it is upon an insufficient knowledge of the principles which govern the... (From : AnarchyArchives.)