Why Should We Care About Property Rights?

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > Why Should We Care About Property Rights?

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Hey Jrode, if I emmigrate to a different country and agree to abide by their laws and pay all taxes as a resident of that country and in return benefit from public services, have I entered into a voluntary contract with the state?

No, you've just bought stolen goods. Furthermore *fart*

# ? Oct 12, 2015 01:12

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# ? May 6, 2024 23:58

DarklyDreaming: Apr 4, 2009; Fun scary

QuarkJets posted:

Conservatism is nothing if not hypocritical. I wonder if we could get a bunch of would-be conservatives on-board with a bunch of liberal policies and taxation if we just had people sign something before graduating high school or somesuch. "If I choose to join society then I agree to be bound by its rules, otherwise I'm free to leave and go live somewhere else" or something like that

But if I don't sign the contract :siren:

MEN WITH GUNS :siren:

will force me out of the country. No don't ask how this would be the same if it was a DRO

# ? Oct 12, 2015 01:48

WhiskeyWhiskers: Oct 14, 2013; "هذا ليس عادلاً."
"هذا ليس عادلاً على الإطلاق."
"كان هناك وقت الآن."
(السياق الخفي: للقراءة)

DarklyDreaming posted:

But if I don't sign the contract MEN WITH GUNS will force me out of the country. No don't ask how this would be the same if it was a DRO

And it's only not technically the same as a property owner forcing you off their property, because the land was taken by force. Which I suppose brings up the problem of property owners having purchased crown land, as that is clearly stolen land whether prior ownership can be established or not due to the illegitimate nature of the state.

# ? Oct 12, 2015 03:26

woke wedding drone: Jun 1, 2003; by exmarx; Fun Shoe

DarklyDreaming posted:

But if I don't sign the contract MEN WITH GUNS will force me out of the country. No don't ask how this would be the same if it was a DRO

because nobody will remember how to make bullets

# ? Oct 12, 2015 03:27

Caros: May 14, 2008

Cemetry Gator posted:

Yeah, some cities have ordinances. It's not "Oh, hey, your lawn is looking a little shaggy today," it's more like "the grass is over 12" high, maybe you should mow the lawn."

Sadly, doing further research on this matter takes you into a really dark and racist corner of the internet. The far right really has a problem with mowing their lawn, for some reason.

They're just taking after Ayn Rand.

Oh... wait. Are we talking real lawns or lawns?

team overhead smash posted:

Okay, you don't seem to have realised the problem I was drawing up that the premise and conclusions to your argument are simplistic strawmen that do not represent either reality or the views of 'left-progressives'.

The problem I pointed out with your Africa example was that it was a simple binary choice between letting someone in starvation keep their loaf of bread or taking some of it to share was that neither option is what the "left-progressives" would be suggesting in that instance and the idea would be to get the starving person MORE commodities so they weren't in such dire needs, not to leave them the same amount or take from them. Although you've taken this on board a little in your response, we're now offered a ternary choice where the third option still doesn't represent the views of socialists, social democrats, etc.

I could have gone into it more on my end (although I did think that if you were going to criticise other people's positions you'd be aware of what they are first) so I'll hold up my hands here say "my bad" and elaborate for you on what the actual positions being put forth as a counter to your own are.

There are a variety of different left-wing views about how different developing economies should work. Although there are differing opinions, they all fit within a certain framework that rules out the possibility of a free-market approach being beneficial. They aren't based on simply "Let's redistribute because it's right" they're focused on "let's have a more regulated and redistributive economy because it's fairer and helps develop countries"

Let's look at a few. Ha Joon Chang, a popular introductory figure to left-wing economics, who is a Professor of Political Economy of Development at Cambridge University has looked at the economic set-up of modern developed countries while they were developing and concluded

His view is basically an expansion of the one I out forward in my post here. The crux of it is that your claimed are an economic urban myth that you have bought into without looking at the evidence, that rather than countries being built up by relying on laissez-faire policies they were actually heavily protectionist. In the post I've linked to I've given examples of the USA throughout the 19th and early 20th century but the same applies to other countries like France and the UK and if you're interested or dispute this then I'm happy to elaborate on this.

In turn, this gives us a good indication that these policies are the kind of ones that countries should be using to develop now - even though the larger countries are trying to push free trade on them. From historical precedent, which you attempt to cite with no evidence, the government has a big role to play in ensuring the industrialisation and development of a country and claims of it being based on laissez-faire policies are simply false.

This ties into the position of academics like Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and Nobel Prize Winner, who in books like Making Globalisation Work and Globalization and Its Discontents who has pushed similar ideas:

Tariffs and dumping duties and other protectionist measures are vital tools that have been used by the now developed countries to get where they are. Disallowing these powerful strategies from the countries today is simply harmful to their ability to develop.

This isn't to say that free trade can be harmful in every instance, but it is specifically trying to develop and industrialise a country and the areas where it is useful rarely see free trade happening. Agriculture is a key example of where free trade would be helpful for global development but free trade in agriculture is not in or itself going to industrialise a country and the areas needed for development require protectionism.For the developing countries the current system of free trade in some areas and protectionism in others is set up to be the exact reverse of what is needed. Stiglitz points out a good example where in 2005 the US opened itself up to 97% types of goods when produced in the least developed countries. The 3% which was kept protected was things like Bangladeshi textiles and apparel which they do produce at low cost and would want to sell in a fair market to undercut the US and other developed nations, while the 97% that was opened up was things like jet engines and all manner of other things what are beyond the capacity of the developing nations to produce. Simply put it was a free trade agreement which did the complete opposite of what the developing countries wanted, giving free trade in the areas it didn't matter and where they specifically didn't want it and keeping protectionism in places where they needed free trade.

Free trade can be helpful, but only in some situations and understanding why involves needing a good knowledge of the processes involved. The fact that you try and take the example of Hong Kong (which actually isn't that free trade seeing as the government owns ALL the land and the companies are merely renters) and assume that the system which applies to a small city-state trading post with unique geographical and historical advantages will apply to all nations everywhere without any critical analysis just shows your comparisons are fairly superficial..

Economists are typically split into three camps in terms of the contributors to national capital accumulation. There are those who believe geography is the primary factor, those who believe market integration is the primary factor and those who believe institutions are the primary factor. I think Rodrik, Subramanian and Trebbi's fairly well known 2004 study gives a good overview of these positions in the introduction. You'll also note that the findings of the study give primacy to institutions as the key driver of growth, with some support from geography and with free trade policies actually having a negative effect on growth.

And as we're talking about development and inequality, I would also suggest you have a look at Branko Milanovic's work and especially his conception of the most relevant type of inequality (simultaneously looking at the inequality internal to a state and in comparison to other states) and how the current neo-liberal more free trade orthodoxy has resulted in record highest of equality that may be decreasing soon - but only because of the effect of the non-free trade economies of India and, even more so, China.

Basically your idea that the third alternative is simply "Redistribute all the money" is wrong. Frankly redistribution is needed as Piketty made such a big splash about in Capital in the 21st Century but equality is not the sole concern. A non-laissez faire approach is being pushed by other specifically because there is historical evidence and modern academic studies and logic which show it is more effective and allows countries to develop effectively in a manner that free market policies do not.

The co-operative aspect of your response I'm going to spend less time on as I'm not really willing to give you the benefit of the doubt there about how you've missed the point.

Your position was "A problem with "democracy" and all forms of collective ownership either of the factory or of public spaces is that use for such resources is heavily constrained by the need for consensus to act. If all workers owned factories together, endless meetings and deliberations would be required to make any decisions about the use of capital and production. Furthermore, conflict is enhanced rather than reduced. Who would REALLY have the final say on the use of collectively owned property?"

Now you don't agree with by rebuttal because it is anecdotal, but the problem is you agree with the basis of my anecdote (and in having to do so have had to specify that you're only talking about if the entire economy was run on a co-operative basis) and in support of your view you have nothing, not even an anecdote or any other scrap of evidence.

I don't usually use anecdotes, but the reason I did here is because it was just one of any number of examples which showed your point of view is wrong. We know Co-operatives are not doomed to failure because they exist now and the circumstances you describe don't happen.

You now apparently believe that in a fully co-operative economy everything we know about how co-operatives work would suddenly changed for no given reason and all co-operatives would suddenly change to work in an inefficient and obviously stupid manner? Why would anyone possibly think this would occur? You've offered no rationale and it seems to be based on everyone suddenly getting very very stupid and changing the basis of how these companies are run for absolutely no reason. Hence why I say you're holding onto unsupported ideological narratives; you make these wild sweeping statements that at face value seem absurd and do nothing to back them up.

Democratising the workplace does not mean democratising every single decision. Having a once yearly meeting to elect directors of the company, decide on a way forward and cast votes on important workplace matters democratises the workplace. Staying half an hour late once a month to have monthly meetings of each office/factory to discuss and deal with local issues democratises the work place. It does not involve democratic unity of every single mundane decision and trying to frame it as that just shows how irrelevant your comparison is. The nature of a co-operative is not that you have "to achieve democratic consensus for every single business decision" so your point is irrelevant.

Hell, a lot of good business will spend this kind of time with employees anyway. The Human Relations school of business management thought (used to good effect in Japan) specifically focuses on working with and engaging with employees in the nature of running the business and many non-co-operative business will spend similar amounts of time discussing workplace issues even if automatic primacy isn't given to majority opinions of the workforce. Not to mention the issues which come with a lack of democracy in the workplace, where strikes are a notable drain on efficient.

You also don't seem to have responded at all to my pointing out how countries did not grow by lassie faire economics, which is what you had claimed.

This is a really good post by the way and deserves to be on every page until it is addressed.

Caros fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Oct 12, 2015

# ? Oct 12, 2015 03:29

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

He won't answer those points that the US and Britain did not become developed industrial powers using laissez-faire. Hell he never even answered your healthcare posts from last year Caros.

He is going to focus on the scattered posts pointing out how racist all this North American homesteading stuff is and claim victory because left-liberal-progressive-muslim-socialist-kenyan-jacobins have no arguments and only know how to cry "racism!"

# ? Oct 12, 2015 05:12

Caros: May 14, 2008

VitalSigns posted:

He won't answer those points that the US and Britain did not become developed industrial powers using laissez-faire. Hell he never even answered your healthcare posts from last year Caros.

He is going to focus on the scattered posts pointing out how racist all this North American homesteading stuff is and claim victory because left-liberal-progressive-muslim-socialist-kenyan-jacobins have no arguments and only know how to cry "racism!"

I know you're right. But there is always hope. Right? Right? :negative:

# ? Oct 12, 2015 05:15

E-Tank: Aug 4, 2011

Caros posted:

I know you're right. But there is always hope. Right? Right?

Have I ever told you the definition of Insanity? :vas:

edit: :tem:

# ? Oct 12, 2015 05:19

burnishedfume: Mar 8, 2011; You really are a louse...

I think we should build concentration camps for muslims, leftists, and gays and then ban all non-Aryans from immigrating to our State.

Go ahead an tell me I'm racist lieberals, but I'll have you know my words are those of the great Hans-Hermann Hoppe! Tremble with terror as you try to fling your accusations of "racism" at me.

Don't worry Jrod, I'll take up the Libertarian cause while you're away! :patriot:

# ? Oct 12, 2015 05:24

woke wedding drone: Jun 1, 2003; by exmarx; Fun Shoe

*buys plutonium in an open-air market in the Khyber Pass*
*builds time machine*
*replaces 15-year old jrod's copy of Libertarianism in One Lesson by David Bergland with Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions*

# ? Oct 12, 2015 05:27

ToxicSlurpee: Nov 5, 2003; -=SEND HELP=-; Pillbug

VitalSigns posted:

He won't answer those points that the US and Britain did not become developed industrial powers using laissez-faire. Hell he never even answered your healthcare posts from last year Caros.

He is going to focus on the scattered posts pointing out how racist all this North American homesteading stuff is and claim victory because left-liberal-progressive-muslim-socialist-kenyan-jacobins have no arguments and only know how to cry "racism!"

He has a long history of completely ignoring any and every post that actually disproves him or shows that his arguments are idiotic. He seriously sounds like a cult leader and I've pointed out he is engaging in some serious magical thinking. His arguments are full of fallacies and based on nonsense but if you point it out he either ignores you or goes "well if you were smart you'd realize it's obvious that..."

Yes it's obvious, despite an entire human history's worth of evidence, that laws are stupid and bad and must all go away.

# ? Oct 12, 2015 06:26

jrodefeld: Sep 22, 2012; by Shine

Caros posted:

Alright, wife's in bed, laptop has power and there is wi-fi I can crib off my phone. Lets do this. Lysaaaaaaander Spooooooner!

I've already covered the fact that the libertarian thread was intended more as a preserve for you people than anything else. I actually made it for some other long gone libertarian after he did the same thing you're doing now. The fact that I front loaded it with insults shouldn't really be taken with umbrage by the by, if only because every single political thread is loaded with insults. If you look at Canada politics we make fun of Stephen Harper, Angry Tom and Pothead Trudeau despite the majority of SA readers being left leaning. You would know this if you'd bothered to learn anything about the culture of SA over your time here instead of coming solely to D&D to jump face first into the dogpile that you know is waiting for you.

And as I said I'd be happy to let you rework (or add) a chunk of your posting to the libertarian thread opening if you'd like. I'm really just looking out for your best interests because you will get banned again and end up giving mighty Lowtax more if you keep opening up with posts like this one.

I think in a lot of ways this typifies your particular brand of libertarianism. You're treating this as you treat everything, as a system of perfectly logical rules that will result in a good outcome for you if followed the way you view them. In reality SA is a community of people, and as a community we not only have the obvious rules but also basic standards of community that you refuse to learn or acknowledge. You are interacting with the forums as if it is a rational system when it is in fact a group of people and prone to irrational behaviour, such as banning amusing libertarian posters before all the comedy has been mined.

In this aspect you're not too far from a Sovereign Citizen and their 'magic words' view of the legal system. Just a minor gripe anyways.

This is literally how you have described libertarianism multiple times over previous threads. Please stop treating your readers like children who are unaccustomed to the glory of libertarianism. We know what it is you are selling. We disagree with the contents, not the packaging.

Now before you get into your rambling about how great property rights are I want to make sure everyone knows precisely what we're talking about, Property. As a former libertarian I think I can give a pretty solid definition of what property is from the libertarian viewpoint. Please correct me on this if I'm wrong:

Property Rights are the right to sole use of a material or resource and the accompanying authority to use force in their defence.

I think that is a pretty solid definition of Property Rights from the libertarian viewpoint. Much as governments are a monopoly on force within a geographic area (to a libertarian) a property right at its core is the right to sole use of something and the authority to use force to defend your claim. If you own your home and someone breaks in against your whim they are intruding on your sole use of the home and you can use violence against them or have someone use violence in their defense of your property rights. Likewise if someone attempts to attack you they are intruding on your right to own your own body and thus you can us violence to defend yourself against their intrusion.

Now here is the crucial point about property rights. They are a fiction.

What do I mean? I mean property rights do not exist in nature. There is no inherent ownership of objects by people. Down later you're going to quote Locke's theory of homesteading and to you I say this, that is an arbitrary system of determining who owns what that is no more or less correct than any other, because property rights by their very nature are an arbitrary fiction.

Consider the description above: "The authority to use force in their defence". That description by itself puts the lie to any idea of property rights that exist in nature absent the human condition or societal agreement. The authority we're talking about doesn't come down from on high, god doesn't illuminate the ground around someone when their house is broken into while a booming voice says "Thou shalt defend thine property rights!" The authority is an understood human consensus, it is an agreement that what's yours is yours and what isn't is not.

Still further in your post you talk about the abstract "Right" to healthcare and how if you have this right but there aren't enough doctors then your right to healthcare is sort of irrelevant. I'd argue that property "rights" are just as ethereal as a right to healthcare. To bastardize an old saying, if you sit down to dinner at a Japanese Sushi Restaurant with 80's rock band Prism but the band includes none of the original members, are you still eating with the band Prism? The answer is of course "Does society consider that band to be Prism?"

_{They were total assholes by the way.}

That might have been a bit of a ramble, but my point is that while you might be (you aren't) technically correct that you have a right to certain property, if society doesn't agree with you then from a practical standpoint you do not have that right. If you claim to have a property right to a home through locklean homesteading but no one agrees with you, do you have that property right? If society agrees that you are my slave, does it matter that your particular theory of property rights doesn't allow for that? A key aspect of property rights is the right to defend what you believe to be yours, but in absence of the agreement of others you appear to the outside observer as a sociopath. If you walk into my house and claim that your theory of property rights says that it is your house... well I mean lets see how far it gets you?

Furthermore there have been vast differences in the theory of property rights over the centuries. Several posters have already taken you to task for your incorrect suggestions that early humans lived with Locke style homesteading, when in fact property rights were something that was almost entirely absent from those societies. I however am going to present a different object, and with this I'm going to answer your question from the very end of your post. Sorry for going out of order.

Genghis Khan was a leader of various nomadic steppe peoples from ~1206 -1227. Over the course of his lifetime he greatly expanded his empire and rapidly improved the quality of life for his people. When Genghis came to power some of the people of his particular tribe were so desperately poor that they wore clothing stitched together from field mice. In many cases mongols of that period would wear clothing so long that it would literally rot off their skin over the course of weeks or months before they could procure something better.

The man was the founding father of Mongolia, brought the Silk Road under control and is credited with largely making it passable. Perhaps one of his lesser known accomplishments was the imposition of a single rule of law over a very wide area, the Yassa code. The mongols were a meritocratic society where even men who had previously attempted to kill the great Khan in battle could rise high in the ranks if they proved their skill and loyalty. On top of all of that the mongol empire was actually religiously tolerant, believing that you can worship whoever you drat well please so long as you ask them to pray for the Khan while you're doing it.

So why am I rambling about all of that? Because the Mongols, a 13th century warrior people had a system of property rights that makes as much sense to me as yours does. In Mongol culture everything belonged to the Khan. Every single thing alive in the world, every castle, every bit of gold or wine all belonged to the Khan, and when the Mongols came upon people they told them to submit to the obvious divine goal of the mongols (to bring everyone together as one) or to be crushed. The mongols then took (by force if necessary) huge amounts of loot from these societies, that was then given to the great Khan, who in turn gave it to his generals, who gave it to their officers and so on.

Now I ask you, what is wrong with this principle of property rights? It is logically derived, particularly for the standards of mongols (Genghis Khan was a huge badass who got people to follow him en masse as he conquered). It deals with the problem of scarcity as everything belongs to the Khan to divide as he sees fit. It solves the problem of initial acquisition because everything belongs to the Khan and simply needs to be taken if he wills it. What is your issue with Mongol Based Economics (MBE)?

You might say that this is reducto ad absurdum, and maybe it is... but please, explain to me why your theory of property rights is any more objectively correct than MBE. I'll agree with you wholeheartedly that making mountains of skulls from the bodies of the slain killed in your rampage across europe is a little disgusting by modern standards, but if we're arguing that something is an incorrect system of economics simply because society finds it morally reprehensible then I'd argue the same applies to Anarcho-Capitalism which wouldn't poll at 1% if it were brought to a vote. If your argument is that it's inefficient I will say gently caress you, that is a consequentialist argument and we're talking deontology here bitch. To my eyes MBE view of property rights is equally as valid from an outside viewpoint as your homesteading belief, or the version we as a society use now. If there is an objective morality out there then that could shed some light on things, but unfortunately if there is we don't know what it is. For all we know Khorne is sitting up on his throne of skulls being all pissed off shouting "The Goal of All Life is Death! The mongols had it right you fuckers!" and we'll never know.

I'd like to hear you come up with a reason that Mongol Based Economics are somehow less valid than First-Use. Because as far as I can see both are utterly arbitrary if you ignore consequentialist arguments, and if you add in consequentialist arguments then first-use gets the everloving poo poo kicked out of it due to real world applications.

I personally believe Murray Rothbard jerked off into the deed of his house on a semi-regular basis, I'm not sure fetish even covers it. Paraphillia maybe? And yes your insistence on private ownership does create those conflicts which is why the only people who like libertarianism in any large numbers are the people who are statistically most likely to succeed in society (white males).

News flash, this is not crystal clear to anyone else and is in fact an utterly arbitrary distinction made by you and you alone. Side note, do you realize how creepy you sound when you talk like this? "We realize that human rights ARE property rights, and we recognize that private property is so crucial to human progress! Why don't you? You loving peasents just accept me!"

I might have added that last part but it is what you come off as. Many people have probably said this to you before, but libertarianism appeals to you because it gives you a false sense of accomplishment and a cultist belief that you understand how things really work. The same feelings you get from libertarianism are found in cultists and conspiracy theorists for the same reason. Incidentally this is another reason it appeals to modern white males, we feel that society isn't giving us what we promised. We grew up with fathers who made more than we do, in a society where white males succeeded as a general rule and there must be something wrong because it isn't that way any more. The search to deal with this feeling of powerlessness leads to destructive behaviour, like Anarcho-capitalism.

Fun fact, in this document where you talk about how you aren't obsessed with property you use the word property 43 times out of 2,500 words. It is your seventh most used word after "the of and to that is". Just thought I'd put that in perspective.

Speaking as a consequential I will point out that we live in a society where we have the capability to feed, clothe, house and provide basic medical care to every person in the country (probably the planet) if we devoted those resources appropriately. Yes, scarcity will be a thing in human society for the foreseeable future, but as it currently stands the argument is not one of "Can we produce enough to meet basic needs" it is "What do we have to sacrifice to do so." Capitalism suggests we sacrifice in areas that many of us find abhorrent for reasons that don't make much sense to many of us in the search for profit.

That aside, I do not consider my body property. Your entire argument about self ownership is nonsense to me because my body is fundamentally different from property. I cannot sell my body (my wife won't let me ) in the same way that I can sell my house because I cannot physically give up possession of my body. Beyond that however, I refer you to my very large argument above where I discuss the fact that property rights are an utter fiction created by people. There is no property right to "Caros" out there, if only because we as a society honestly believe that is a stupid loving thing. You are certainly entitled to believe the way you want, but stop acting like something is a universal fact when it is in fact only part of your weird pseudo-cult and not accepted by anyone outside of it.

Hey cool guys! Jrodefeld is agreeing with me that property rights pretty much solely exist as a way for hairless monkeys to keep from killing each other over scarcity. Also, no, agricultural societies did not require private property to grow, in fact many early human civilizations lived in what can best be described as communes. I'll let other posters field this one.

Just what part of evolving from H. rhodesiensis to H. sapiens required the recognition of property rights.

I know that is probably a cheapshot and I do hope what you meant was 'evolution' as in societal evolution rather than physical. It still is funny to read anyone writing something liek that without a hint of irony. Also I'd like to ask you to stop begging the loving question so hard that it is getting disturbed by your kink.

I think my favorite thing about this entire section however is how you talk about 'the libertarian answer' because that is what it is and looking at it from that perspective is a hell of a lot more honest than much of what you post. You aren't talking about some objectively correct answer, you're talking about your particular answer which is as correct as the one suggested by the mongols. That said, no, homesteading principle was not widely recognized among primitive humans. If anything most humans throughout the centuries have practices something significantly closer to MBE than homesteading. The romans, for example, ruled the world for centuries with a recognition of private property that in many cases can be boiled down as "Veni, vidi, vici."

This is wrong.

I mean I could just leave it like that, but lets be clear, it is wrong for a variety of reasons. Early humans lived largely in commune with one another. Later humans may have used first use in some cases, but more often the term I would suggest is 'current use'. If I'm here farming this is my land. Stevicus down the way agrees that it is mine and we've got a militia or an army to back up our claim. When we go all Carthago delanda est on a certain city that will remain nameless then the outlying provinces use a property system that can best be described as 'ours now you fuckers'.

If you have evidence that early humans lived in the way you suggest I would ask you to provide it. Anthropologists disagree with you on this issue and there is nothing to suggest that homesteading of the variety you are suggesting played a large or critical part in human history. Even when people did expand outwards I'd argue that homesteaders were working less off a theory of 'first use' and more of a theory of 'why don't you come and try to loving take it'. If I am a roman colonist the argument I use to decide what does and does not belong to me is not first use, it is "I'm roman, suck my balls."

Might I recommend you read Debt: The First 5000 Years before you talk any more. It is by no means an academic treatise on the issue and I'd highly suggest you read more on the subject afterwords, but it is a good introductory primer that contains enough narrative to keep you interested on a dry as gently caress subject that you'll be willing to search out other factors once you're done. I say this because what you're talking about here is completely and utterly ahistorical to modern understanding. I don't give Locke poo poo because he didn't know any better, you live in a modern society and absolutely should. Stop treating the words of a man who died three centuries ago as if they were fact.

Social rules like taxes!? Statist.

Industrialization and modernization is the engine that drives the greatest and most robust increase in society-wide wealth for everyone. The soviet union drastically increased the society wide wealth and overall conditions as they industrialized. You do not need to be a capitalist or worship private property to grow society.

Mongol Based Economics. Alternately, the system we have now. Alternately, any other system.

While I'm at it can we bring this back to the genocide of native americans and how 'original appropriation' seems to cut off the moment it is inconvenient for modern libertarians?

gently caress you. I make my life as a writer and eliminating intellectual property rights would essentially ruin me and impoverish my family. But who gives a poo poo about consequences right?

I spend, on average, about 800 hours writing a full length novel. In absence of intellectual property rights I would post that novel, and then instantly see copies of it being published by other companies who sell it to the end consumer without giving me a dime. But there is no scarcity or theft right Jrodefeld? I mean I put in the equivalent of about twenty weeks working on it but who gives a poo poo right?

And no crowdfunding is not a functional replacement for sales for a whole variety of reasons.

Please explain why any drug company would make a drug absent the ability to make money by the monopoly of that drug. Please explain how I wouldn't be living destitute in the gutter if people could get a free or drastically discounted copy of my new releases the moment they hit the shelves.

Psst, scarcity isn't as severe as you think and socialism is just as successful with things like healthcare.

Speaking of which...

I want to make something absolutely, perfectly clear to you Jrodefeld. This does not happen in any significant numbers. I went googling and I could barely find more than a few dozen cases over the course of the last decade in which patients died on waiting list. And even that number, scary as it is, is misleading. Winnipeg for example, has had twelve people die while waiting for care in a three year period. Of those not a single one was an emergency patient. Of those the wait time was between 52 and 57 days, significantly below the recommended benchmark of 180 (a number used in the US) of those each patient was waiting because a team of trained medical professionals said that it was safe for them to wait. Of those all twelve had other serious medical issues that contributed to their deaths. Finally and perhaps most strongly, when the doctor was asked if their wait times would have been shorter with unlimited resources his answer amounted to "Maybe" because heading into heart surgery without proper research and preparation can actually increase mortality rates.

Moreover, it is important to remember that the US absolutely does ration care. People bitch about waiting lists in Canada because they are an obvious sign of rationing limited care. You wait because we only have X doctors. In the US there is care rationing, but rather than simply waiting lists (and you do have those) the rationing takes place in the cost of care. 45,000 die annually in the US due to inability to receive medical care. Tens of millions have no insurance and thus no real access to medical care outside an emergency room. The US rations care as much as a UHC country, you just do it really, really poorly.

Capitalism is as much responsible for this failure as anything else. One of my favorite examples of the utter failure of capitalism is the great depression. One day the economy is booming along and everything is great. The next factories are shutting their doors, workers are being laid off and so forth. What changed? Did a war start? A natural disaster? Did we run out of fuel? No. The market simply decided that it was time to go backwards for a little while and ruin lives for no good reason. We have the ability to produce the basic 'stuff' we need to give people a reasonable standard of living. The resources are there, the factories are there, it is the allocation that is corrupt.

Scare quotes around democracy? Really? Hans Hermann Hoppe is that really you? Tell me more about the natural social elite and time preferences.

That aside this post is actually pretty disgusting. Why should the people who do all the work have any say in what they're working on! gently caress that, this one guy should be the one to determine what happens because he jammed his dick in the soil. Believe it or not there are plenty of union factories that run far more efficiently than factories run by fiat of a single power mad individual.

You realize that it was capitalism that utterly ruined the american buffalo while the 'socialist' native americans were completely capable of not murdering the poo poo out of their food source for no reason. The tragedy of the commons here is that a bunch of entitled pricks decided to reap a huge profit or kill for sport. Cool story tho.

I'd like you to talk more about your arbitration services. Walter Block discussed them on his interview with Sam Seder and they sounded insane. We've previously discussed DRO's and I think we can both agree that those are crazy as gently caress. Have you come up with some new alternative to deal with the necessity of a legal system, preferably one that isn't laughably bad?

The problem is that no one likes it. Your proposed system of private property is about as anathema to most modern people as Mongol Based Economics. As a result it will not be implemented in any significant scale because people think the idea of totally unregulated markets and a total obviation of social government is loving insane. If you're talking "People who own something own it" then you're talking the system you have now and no one really disagrees with that. Its when you start getting into the crazy weeds of taxation is theft and government is immoral that people tell you to go suck a lemon.

Socialism is feasible and coherent because mixed economies with significant socialist elements are the norm throughout the world and have been for some time. Moreover countries that trend more socialist are happier and in many ways more prosperous than those who are not.

Human society survived without first-user because first user is largely an irrelevant concept made up well after the fact. Hope this helps.

This is a nonsense argument that effectively argues from a position that because countries started out as capitalists any success they've had with socialist programs (Social security reducing elderly poverty from 66% to 13%) happen only because capitalism. This is basically the same argument that cackles about how socialism can never work because an impoverished, brutalized country ruled by a strongman dictator only 'mostly' caught up with the US in the aftermath of the second world war rather than overtaking it.

Just as an aside, Jrodefeld, how do you attribute the incredible growth of the Soviet Union in terms of wealth. The soviets were a barely functional 'industrial' country when they came to power, decade upon decade behind the US in terms of industrial and scientific technology. The suffered the brunt of ALL total losses from both world wars, totaling tens of millions of soviet citizens and yet despite all that they still managed to become a super power running neck and neck with the US in a large number of fields throughout the 20th century. I'll happily agree that the US won that race, but lets not pretend they started at the same place.

Pot, meet kettle. I'm done here. Time to relax.

Edit: I do find it funny that the thread is named for a question I asked myself through the entirety of this post. Even Jrodefeld agrees with me that property rights are an arbitrary fiction, and since that is the case I find myself wondering why should we care about property rights, in particular why should I care more about them than the wellbeing of people in general.

Another good question is "Why does first-use homesteading mean taxation is theft" but if he gets back I'm sure I'll see an answer.

You skirt the issue of taking a stand on which rules are best for society by stating that since all property rights are arbitrary, you know "whatever society democratically decides" should rule the day.

I doubt you would take the same stand if the majority decided that it was right and proper to enslave some minority and force them to work hard labor for no wages. So obviously majority rule is no standard by which principled ethics ought to be determined.

The first user principle is not arbitrary because it is derived logically from a previous moral principle, which is that of individual self-ownership. Let's term it "body-ownership" since "self" can be misleading to some people. What we are referring to here is that people should have the right to control over their own physical bodies.

Whether or not you quibble over the use of "property right" as applied to peoples right to control their bodies, the claims are the same. I (as should everyone) should have the right to control my body as I see fit unless my actions aggress against another persons body or property (leaving aside our differences about what constitutes just property titles external to our bodies). Therefore, what I choose to eat or ingest should be up to me and me alone. When I go to sleep and get up in the morning should be my determination. When or if I exercise, who I decide to date or have sex with, are all things that individuals should have the final say on.

Do you agree with this so far?

Do you accept the principle that people ought to have the final say in the use of their physical bodies so long as they don't harm others?

If you do NOT accept self-ownership, then your moral theory has some very serious problems that you have to account for. There would be no principled reason to oppose slavery or rape or murder. Sure you could try and make a utilitarian case for why it would be a net negative for society to permit these things, but it is easy to imagine situations where utilitarians could argue for such violations of human rights. Maybe slavery was found to be incredibly efficient in certain circumstances? What if an economist could demonstrate that a certain level of enslavement of physically gifted individuals would slightly raise the GDP if they were forced to work in certain jobs without pay?

Or imagine a eugenicist arguing that it was okay to murder all mentally handicapped persons because they don't contribute much to society from a productivity standpoint, they require a huge amount of care for their entire lives and they "contaminate" the gene pool if they reproduce by passing along so-called "inferior" genes to future generations.

These are obviously morally repugnant views but still there are a million ways to construct a utilitarian justification for their implementation.

If you give up on the right of self-ownership, then what are you left to fall back on if a consequentialist has a stronger case in a given situation? I am quite sure that you didn't decide that murder is wrong because you studied the utilitarian effects and long term consequences for society for killing different groups of people some might consider "undesirable". Like most decent people, I assume that your view is that people have certain rights as human beings that ought to be respected, which includes not being murdered, raped or enslaved.

This conception of "Natural Rights" had a great deal of influence on the founding of the United States and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It animated most abolitionists who fought to end slavery and grant equal rights to blacks in the United States.

Whether or not these rights exist in nature, or are mere practical constructions of man is not as important as you think it is. We argue for certain ethical rules for civilized society based on our reason, the coherence of our arguments and the nature of man. Pretty much all religious and spiritual traditions teach that there is something inherently immoral about the taking of an innocent life. There has been a long-standing acknowledgment of the principle of self-ownership throughout the centuries.

I hope you do agree with me that people should have the right to control their own bodies and not have force used against their bodies.

So when determining how people are to acquire legitimate property outside of their physical bodies, the reason the libertarian principle of "original appropriation" makes the most sense is that there exists a tangible link between a person's ownership over his or her physical body and the external object that is brought into ownership. By plucking an untouched object out of nature and transforming it for your use, to further the attainment of your goals, you have thus imprinted your "self", which you own if you believe in self-ownership, onto a material object. Like a sculptor who carves a statue or a painter who paints a picture, the object that is transformed has an impression of you in it. So in what sense could any other person have a better claim over the use of such a scarce resource that the one who initially transformed it? Until he or she voluntarily gives it up in a contractual exchange of course.

Now, collective ownership is not impermissible in a libertarian society. Individuals can freely contract with a group of others to enter into a partnership over the ownership of a piece of land, or a factory. There is nothing wrong with this. But someone had to originally have a claim on whatever property they are considering making into a collective. And that person, or people, who originally homesteaded the property must voluntarily enter into a contractual partnership to have a collective ownership. A group of people cannot simply decide that they ought to own part of some land and force the original owner to vacate the land they homesteaded.

If you do accept people's right to universal control over their physical bodies so long as they don't hurt others, and you don't have to accept the phrase "ownership" to accept this general idea, then you ought to accept the notion that property rights in external objects should be in some way linked to this antecedent principle which hopefully has been agreed to.

So original appropriation is not just as defensible as any other system of property acquisition, it is much more defensible because it logically follows the acknowledgment of self-ownership which most people actually DO accept.

# ? Oct 12, 2015 08:22

BENGHAZI 2: Oct 13, 2007; by Cyrano4747

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open veins of latin america posted: