Propertarianism is the advocacy of the private individual or corporate ownership of legal, transferable, private property titles within a free market. The term was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in her novel, The Dispossessed (1974), as the term by which the anarchist and non-propertarian society of Anarres described their neighbors; in this original sense, it applies to all societies which acknowledge any form of property, including the collective property of a state.
Some libertarian socialists use the term to refer to libertarians who support property rights in order to distinguish them from their own non-propertarian form of libertarianism. Capitalist libertarians sometimes use this label for themselves, as seen, for instance, in the novel The Probability Broach (1980), by L. Neil Smith, where the fictionalized version of the Libertarian Party is called the Propertarian Party.
Specifically, propertarianism recognizes all economically scarce goods as legitimate property. This includes "natural capital" such as land, but does not necessarily include non-scarce goods such as intellectual property (patents and copyrights.) This view is criticized by those that base property on production or use, such as libertarian socialists and geolibertarians.
Propertarianism can be "soft," asserting that private property is morally permissible, or it can be 'hard,' asserting that private property is the only valid form of property.
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