A case that may be made against the impossibility thesis is that a group of people may communally mix their labour with some object in nature, granting them all with ownership of the result.1
Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms — not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day.
The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual’s labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.2
Footnotes
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Roderick T. Long (1996), “The Ethical Argument,” in idem. In Defense of Public Space. ↩