If a gentleman has a pacemaker in his body, it has to be considered his own private material possession.

Otherwise, “society” could say, “It’s unfair that you monopolize this pacemaker. Because it belongs to the rest of us as much as it does you, we have the moral authority to vote against it being surgically implanted into your chest.”

As for motorized wheelchairs, if they weren’t considered the exclusive possessions of their users, then any bully could rightfully go up to a person in a wheelchair, throw him out of it and ride around in it.

The bully could say, “You shouldn’t selfishly hog this wheelchair for yourself. Because it belongs to everyone as much as it does you, and because I am among ‘everyone,’ I and everyone else should get a turn to ‘cruise around’ in it.”

If you find that scenario appalling, so do I.

It’s offensive because, at least implicitly, people understand that digesting food, pacemakers and motorized wheelchairs are all private, individual material property, and a moral society wouldn’t consider them to be anything else.

Without at least a de-facto recognition that material possessions are necessary in order for people to live, no one could selfishly eat any bite of nourishment that wouldn’t be digested by the rest of the community. Even if a culture has no word for “private property,” it needs to behave as if it does if it wishes to prevent mass starvation.

So does the right to life come from the right to property? Or does the right to property come from one’s right to peacefully sustain one’s own life?

Actually, the rights to life and property are corollaries of one another that emerged simultaneously. They are inextricably connected, as neither can exist without the other.

As novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand summarized it, “The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”

It makes sense that the word “property” is derived from “proper,” which the institution of property certainly is.

The song “Imagine” also says that, in a perfect society, there’d be “nothing to kill or die for.” In the real world, there is something to kill and die for -- freedom.

If someone like Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden wants to establish a dictatorship and commit mass murder, you have every right to kill him in self-defense. The right to life is worth killing for, when those being killed are only the ones trying to initiate the murder in the first place.

And freedom is worth dying for. Volunteer soldiers willingly go to war and die to help preserve the freedom of their loved ones.

Further, since one’s own life is one’s own property, the right to life is a right to property. So, when American soldiers go to fight for the lives of those in our nation, they are even fighting for property rights.

A perfect society would have freedom in it. And our freedom to have the private material possessions that are our lives, is worth killing and dying for, so a perfect world would have something “to kill or die for.”

And “the people” will never be “living in harmony” until they can adhere to one another’s life, liberty and property (again, all of which are forms of individual property).

John Lennon and “Imagine” deserve reverence for their magnificent artistry. But Mr. Lennon was a better musician than he was a philosopher. Contrary to some of his heartfelt words, the perfect world is one with possessions and with the freedom that is worth killing and dying for.

In order for the real world to start “living in harmony,” it must first believe in individual rights, including the right to private material possessions.

Imagine that.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Mr. Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

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