Ownership is a concept that we are born with and that has been with us humans since before the emergence of self-awareness. Our predecessors on the evolutionary ladder had the same instincts about possession and right of use that all mammals and other animals have. These instincts are related to shelter, the area where they get their food and their sexual partner.
In general, it is the right of first possession, represented by the right to exploit a resource by the first to find it, be it a hibernation cave or a hunting area. These will be defended against those who subsequently raise similar claims. (Maynard Smith & Parker 1976; Sugden 1986; Yee 2003).
Moreover, the mere act of touching something elicits a sense of ownership, a fact revealed even in insects. Studies of woodpecker butterflies (Davies 1978; Epstein 1980) show that a butterfly that lands on a feeding area will fight with another butterfly that later arrives at that area. Generally these fights, in all types of animals, are won by those who claim the right of first possession.
The above and other examples show that man is programmed with a certain instinct of ownership which later, in his evolution, has been recognised and developed at the social level, through norms of conduct, rules and later protected by laws.1
Another concept, evolved from the property instinct, is that of duty. If a person helps you when you are in an adverse situation by giving you a resource you need, whether an object or a service, you will feel the need to return this favour. This natural inclination, beneficial to the group’s survival strategy, was built into the set of rules and norms of primitive human communities. The debt is extinguished by a gesture of reciprocity, in a form agreed upon by the parties to the transaction. In order to measure this debt, a system of counting emerged, which later metamorphosed into the institution of money.2
Thus, money came to perform three of the major functions it has today:
- as a unit for measuring and extinguishing debt
- as a means of mediating the exchange of property (giving money in exchange for property rights)
- unit of measurement of property/possessions/assets
In all cases, ownership is present and intrinsically linked to money. You will see that this manifests itself both ways: property is a source of money, in two different ways.
Disposal of property as a source of money
The simplest way to make money is to sell something in your possession. It is money that mediates this transfer of ownership of an object. This is most natural because matter, in the form of objects, was the first entity over which the instinct of ownership manifested itself in human evolution. From fruit picked for consumption, to the animal killed for food, to the stick which he transformed by sharpening it with fire into a primitive spear, man appropriated into property everything he touched.
Next on the list was space. Objectified in the form of the gathering or hunting ground, space is a resource on which survival depends. The physical occupation of an initially free territory and its use for procuring food led to a sense of ownership, temporary or permanent, depending on the lifestyle: nomadic or sedentary. Any other people who subsequently came to that territory were considered intruders and treated as such. This conflict of interests led to human confrontation, verbal and later physical, materialised in battle or war.
Ownership of the space resulted in its redefinition by another word: land ownership. It is one of the pillars of the accumulation and maintenance of wealth over time, and refers to land, plus what is built on it and cannot be moved (hence the term real estate, which comes from the word “immovable”).
Fast forward to the present era, where information was the next element over which man extended his property rights. Copyright law and the patent system were introduced to protect ownership of written works, inventions and trademarks. This right is usually temporary and lasts for decades. At present, the gains from intellectual property rights can exceed the gains from tangible property rights by many orders of magnitude, as evidenced by the fact that information processing companies are the largest companies today in terms of turnover and capitalisation.
Energy and time can only be sold if you are in possession of them. It is personal energy or work capacity and personal time. Employees sell their energy and time, along with their skills, to their employer in exchange for money, a salary.
As for energy and time as concepts in general, for the time being they are not covered by the current body of laws, from a property point of view, but I estimate that it is only a matter of time before someone will imagine lucrative ways to produce money at their expense, through the claim of property rights. This sounds like dystopia, and it really is.
We’ve left the human behind. The sale of human beings has been a continuous presence throughout history and has sporadic manifestations to this day, but being illegal, I won’t dwell on it. I will also not address the consensual sale of one’s own body parts, such as blood, hair or organs, although this is a reality for people who desperately need money and are willing to do so, legal or not.
In conclusion, the sale of matter (objects), space (real estate) or information is an important source of money. But man, in his ingenuity, has invented another way to make money from property without losing ownership. This is renting.
Renting as a source of money
Renting is present in the oldest known forms of writing. The earliest inscribed clay tablets, dating back more than 6,000 years, contained commercial lists of goods sold or rented.3 Renting appears everywhere in ancient writings, and so does the reward for renting. It arose as a natural consequence of the act of renting, for example a herd of cattle, which after a period of use was returned to the owner together with the calves born during the period of the loan. Later, the act of leasing inanimate objects was also rewarded with products or money.
Leasing has three major benefits:
- it brings a cash flow (money from the rental)
- it maintains ownership of the object
- perhaps most importantly, it requires no active involvement on the part of the owner, so it is passive income
- the object owned becomes, through rental, a money-making machine.
What can be rented? Space, matter and money.
The rental of space can be determined by the need for survival. This has arisen as a result of the fact that the entire area of land is in private ownership or in state ownership. As the number of people grows, there are always people who have to borrow space to live, or buy space. This is precisely why real estate ownership of habitable land is the safest way to conserve wealth, because the number of people is increasing, but the habitable land area remains constant, or even decreases, due to rising sea and ocean levels caused by global warming.
Renting matter is much less common than renting space, precisely because it is not a necessity for survival. Expensive items, such as machines and machinery needed for production processes, are usually rented. A special type of rental is leasing, used mostly by companies.
The last category is money. This, like any other commodity, can be rented, and more than any other commodity, it is highly sought after for rental. The banking system uses money lending to firms and individuals as an important source of income.
Moreover, in the current financial-banking system, money arises (is born) through the act of lending, carried out by commercial banks, based on the fractional reserve system. This produces inflation and economic growth, concentrating financial power in the banking area. Making money out of nothing is the most ingenious of human inventions and at the same time the most unfair, given the current paradigm in which everything we need in modern society is obtained with money.
But this is another discussion.
New forms of renting are likely to emerge in the future, with technological development and the emergence of new human activities that may require it.
