On Bentham’s picture, then, secure ownership encourages a psychological state of optimism in which an economy thrives and capitalism flourishes. On the other side of the coin, so to speak, insecurity of property takes a psychological toll: insecurity creates worries for owners about the possibility of their own potential losses and rouses their anxious sympathy for their neighbours’ losses. What is worse, widespread and repeated incursions on property, according to Bentham, cause people to become mistrustful and lethargic. This pattern causes ‘the deadening of industry’, with terrible consequences for the overall economic well-being of a society.25 Many years after Bentham wrote, Harvard Law School professor Frank Michelman famously used Bentham’s analysis to create a formula for calculating the damage caused by governmental takings of property, notably weighing Benthamite ‘demoralization costs’ against the transaction costs of compensation.26

1.7 An admonitory postscript

Having noted all these positive emotions flowing from property, one should observe that there are some other less attractive psychological states that have been attributed to property ownership. One pithy example was written by British novelist E. M. Forster, in a brief satiric essay entitled ‘My Wood’.27 In the essay, Forster described his state of mind when he bought a forested lot out in the country. His first reaction was that the purchase made him feel vain and, more interestingly, physically fat: he was now a freeholder, a person of substance. He also found that he had become anxious and rather stingy, jealous of the boundaries of his property and dismayed at the hikers who strolled through on country paths. Moreover, he felt falsely proud. A bird landed on a shrub in his wood. ‘My bird’, thought Forster to himself. But then he was irked when ‘his’ bird flew off to sample other territories. To put it in a nutshell, Forster found that property ownership made him feel possessive and self-centred—or perhaps had simply awakened these unattractive character traits that he would have preferred to leave dormant.

Views like Forster’s no doubt have played a role with religious institutions that require their most serious members to renounce individual property. Monks and nuns have had to give up their individual possessions, for example. Why? because property induces people to think and behave in ways that may detract from a spiritual mission. Owning and the associated getting and spending—and simply thinking about owning, getting, and spending—are distractions from the major pursuits of religious orders.28 In a pattern that presents, roughly speaking, the flip side of Radin’s famous article on property as a foundation for self-definition, a religious order might consider it undesirable that the members think at all about themselves and their personal projects. There is a trace of this view—that is, of individual property’s effect on the mind—in the requirement that soldiers wear standard military uniforms rather than their own chosen clothing, and even in the effort to require children to wear school uniforms. To be sure, school uniforms can