Autonomy as Property: The Right to One's Own Time

Sor Juana's primary complaint was not deprivation but the theft of her time: obligations to household, religious duties, social expectations that left her few hours for intellectual work. Libertarian justice recognizes that your time is your most fundamental property. You cannot be truly free if others control your hours, your attention, or your labor without consent and compensation. This concept precedes and frames all property discussions: before we discuss ownership of land or goods, we must establish ownership of self and time. Slavery violates this principle absolutely; wage labor respects it conditionally through contract; feudalism denies it entirely; and modern institutional life often erodes it through soft coercion (social expectation, economic necessity, cultural obligation). Sor Juana's tragedy was that even her intellectual property—her books, her thoughts—meant nothing if she couldn't control the hours needed to develop and express them. Property rights divorced from temporal autonomy are hollow. True freedom requires both.