The private citizen cannot be credited as morally praiseworthy for relinquishing wealth that is coercively seized from him. Freedom is the necessary condition of moral responsibility, and private property is the necessary condition of freedom. The third way in which private property guarantees moral freedom is by providing the individual with the material media for the full development of his person. Much of the distinctively human work we do, we do with property. Man could neither write nor sculpt nor perform nor build without the opportunity to own the tools and media that make these activities possible.
Private property becomes the material manifestation of realized individual potentials.
The necessary connection between private property and freedom in the realm of self-development may perhaps most clearly be seen by examining what happens to individual identity when private property is sacrificed to equality. John Rawls regards private property as subordinate to the desires of the least advantaged, and he concludes that both physical property and the individual traits that created the property should be regarded as the common property of the community. Individuality is easily destroyed when the material expression of that individuality through property ceases to be respected. In such a socialist, egalitarian society, the individual is denied the freedom to develop his personhood, because nothing he does can be viewed as truly and exclusively his own. Private property gives man the prerogative to define himself in the material world.