Is property theft?  Pierre Proudhon, the nineteenth French anarchist, thought so.  While most of us who live in the acquisitive and affluent West might recoil at such a suggestion, we might wish to think again.  We of course all like our own possessions and our own space; we all like to think that some things belong to us and no one else.  And woe to the person who tries to take them away from us, be they home, food, family, job, or gun.
     We all must acknowledge, however, that in a planet of limited resources, what one person holds often means that another person does not.  Although in terms of a car or item of clothing this does not seem significant, if we view such things through a more refined sense  it surely is.  In a planet of limited resources, consumption matters.


     Not that I am suggesting that property is, categorically, theft.  Just that unless we are willing to look at what we have as a gift that perhaps one day we will be asked to give up for a greater good, we undercut the a far deeper purpose of existence:  a flourishing life for all.
     Neither capitalism nor Marxism have room for this type of altruism.  No economic system does.  This type of posture comes only through the heart.  We may quibble with Proudhon's position, but he came to it out of a worldview absent of God.  If there is no God, then, yes, property is theft.  It is Darwinian survival at its worse.
     But if there is a God, property becomes a greater good, not for its owner, but for the world in which its owner lives.