Property rights

Property rights are the right to acquire, use, and dispose of material values. In Objectivism property is not a separate right alongside the right to life but the form in which that right is exercised, since a right to act is empty unless it includes a right to keep what the action produces.

“The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights", The Virtue of Selfishness

Rand never wrote a treatise on property as such, which is a complaint members of this forum make regularly and which is accurate. The position has to be assembled from "Man's Rights", "The Nature of Government", "What Is Capitalism?" and the short essay "The Property Status of Airwaves", which is the closest thing to a focused treatment she published.

A right to act, not a right to a thing

The phrase "right to property" names a relation between people rather than between a person and an object. It does not mean that the universe owes anyone a house. It means that others may not take by force what a person has produced or been given, and that he may use and dispose of it on his own judgment.

This is why property rights are negative in the same way every other right is. They impose on others only the obligation to abstain. A right to be given property would oblige somebody to produce it, which is the form of claim Objectivism denies can be a right at all. See Rights.

It is also why the right cannot be separated from the right to life without destroying both. A man who may think but may not keep what his thinking produces has been left the form of a right without its substance, and a man whose property may be taken at the discretion of others must act on their judgment rather than his own. See Initiation of force.

What makes something yours

Objectivism grounds ownership in production rather than in occupation, decree, or need. Value is not found lying about; a thing becomes a value through somebody's thought and effort, and the person who supplied them owns the result.

“Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property — by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.”
~ Ayn Rand, "The Property Status of Airwaves", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

That principle does the work in the cases the forum finds hard. It answers the question of the airwaves, of unclaimed land, and of resources nobody has yet made useful: what is owned is the claim established by the effort of making the thing usable, and what is not yet owned by anyone is open to the first person who does so. Property is then transferred by trade or gift, not by seniority of arrival.

The Georgist objection, which the forum raises directly, is that land is different because nobody produced it and everyone is born with an equal claim on nature. The Objectivist reply is that "land" as a raw location is not a value at all. What is owned is not a patch of the planet considered as an abstraction but a specific improved, surveyed, cleared, drained, or developed holding, and the claim on it is the claim of whoever did that. An equal birthright to unimproved nature would be an equal claim to nothing in particular.

Boundaries

Most of the genuinely difficult questions here are not about whether property should exist but about what the boundaries of a given piece of it are, and Objectivism treats those as questions of objective law rather than of philosophy.

The principle is that a property right covers what its owner has actually established a claim to by use. It does not extend indefinitely in every direction merely because it exists. Buying a building does not buy the view from it, because nobody established a claim to the light crossing a neighbour's land. Permitting people onto your land does not by itself transfer a right they can then sell, unless what was granted was an easement rather than a permission. A radio station's claim is to the frequency it actually broadcasts on.

The general shape of the answer is that new kinds of property, from airwaves to the internet, are not exceptions requiring new principles. They require the existing principle to be applied to a new set of facts, which is legislative and judicial work. See Government.

Public property

Objectivism regards government ownership of land, roads, airwaves, and facilities as a source of insoluble conflict rather than as a neutral background, because a resource with no owner has no one entitled to set its terms. The result is that every question about its use becomes a political question, and the answer is decided by whichever faction prevails.

This is why a striking number of apparently unrelated disputes on this forum, about protests, speech, access, and land use, turn out on inspection to be disputes about public property. See Free speech. The Objectivist position is not that these conflicts are irresolvable in principle but that they are artefacts of the absence of an owner.

Eminent domain is the sharper case, since it is the state taking property it acknowledges belongs to someone. Objectivism rejects the doctrine, including the compensated form: a right that may be overridden on payment of a price set by the party doing the overriding is not a right but a licence.

Common misunderstandings

That property rights are about material things and are therefore lower than "human rights". The distinction is spurious. Property rights are rights of human beings to material things; there are no rights of things.
That the right to property means a right to be given property. It is the right to earn, keep, use, and dispose of, and its whole content is that others may not take.
That owning something entitles you to do anything at all with it. It entitles you to any use that does not violate another person's rights, which is why pollution that demonstrably invades a neighbour's property is a rights violation rather than an exercise of ownership.
That Objectivism therefore endorses whatever the current law of property happens to be. Existing law contains a great deal that the principle condemns, including eminent domain and much regulatory taking.
That because a child is not yet a full rights-bearing adult he owns nothing. A child's property is his; parental authority is a matter of guardianship over a person not yet capable of full responsibility, and it is not a title to his possessions.
That a nation owns its territory the way a person owns a farm. A country is not an entity with rights of its own. Its territory is the sum of the holdings of the individuals in it, plus whatever its government holds in trust for the limited functions it properly performs. See Collectivism.

Discussion

The Nature of Property and Property Rights
Private property rights in natural resources (the Georgist objection)
A Misapplication of Property Rights (on "The Property Status of Airwaves")
Property Rights To "air-space"
Roads and private property
Do children have property rights independent of parents?

References

Rand, Ayn. "Man's Rights" and "The Nature of Government". The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964. Both essays also appear in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
Rand, Ayn. "The Property Status of Airwaves". Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966. First published in The Objectivist Newsletter, April 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "What Is Capitalism?". Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

External links

Property Rights at the Ayn Rand Lexicon