Why Should We Care About Property Rights?

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Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

You know, there's a point at which the "intellectual property" concept gets taken too far (and the US sprinted across that line years ago), but it's a useful fiction that lets people who aren't rich dilettantes create things that are useful to society and get compensated for it. Like the concept of property rights in general, it's a thing that people agree on because it serves a purpose (when not done stupidly).

And to hit on a few classics:

* Employers generally do not set wages based on what people are worth, but what they can get away with paying to get competent people. In fact they're willing to let their business be less efficient in order to have lower wages. The free market fails people who it deems to have less "valuable" skills, even if they are in fact highly profitable for their employers.

* We've tried having capitalism handle health care, and it has failed by numerous metrics. Single-payer systems such as in the UK and Canada provide care to more people for less money. These systems aren't perfect, but they tend to have very high approval ratings from the people who use them and better outcomes overall.

* Regulations on businesses came about because people got tired of being murdered. That's a little hyperbolic, but not by nearly as much as it should be. People literally conducted business in ways that needlessly ended human lives in order to make more profit, and we had to bitterly fight back to stop that. This fight is still ongoing, and large businesses continue to do things that create death and misery around the globe.

* For-profit businesses are very skilled at preventing consumers from making rational, informed choices, and in some cases from making any choices at all. If there's a problem within an industry, it often becomes virtually impossible to find a vendor who will let you get away from it, and if there are it is often at an exorbitant cost. And on top of that there are massive portions of the private sector that normal consumers simply have no power over because they do business first and foremost with other large companies.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 21:13

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 04:28

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

I'm surprised China didn't make the list, since (although the President is apparently trying to turn things around) businesses there have the freedom to do things like pollute rivers until they're full of neon orange sludge, but I guess that would be giving away the game.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 15:52

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

DarklyDreaming posted:

The Libertarian go-to answer to this is that European settlers ~mixed their labor with the land~ which makes their right to it more special because factories got built on it or some poo poo. It is an effectively meaningless distinction that only serves to benefit those currently sitting on the land.

That or the go-to libertarian answer is along the lines of "Hey look over there!" followed by a rant about the evils of fiat currency.

So what I'm getting from this thread so far is that the answer to the question of "Why should we care about property rights?" is actually "For the most part we shouldn't, at least not in the way that libertarians want us to."

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 16:24

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

The real point is just that libertarians are dumb when they act like corruption (and coercion and any number of other things) are unique properties of the evil State, and not something that could ever sully the pure glory of the true Free Market. (Though Jrode seems to like to play No True Scotsman by adding "crony capitalists" into the mix, as though we could somehow separate them from the True Capitalists.)

# ¿ Oct 18, 2015 03:10

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Beliathon posted:

Crypto-Socialism? What's next?

Excerpt:

All you misguided libertarians (read: ignorant privileged white male american assholes) may now proceed to kill yourselves in the most painful ways imaginable. Thanks.

Meanwhile in real life Bitcoin has been fraught with all kinds of fraud and criminal activity, and to anyone who's not a cryptocurrency maniac it illustrates why having a currency with a regulating body involved is preferable.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2015 23:48

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Caros posted:

Phone posting so I will keep this brief.

Are you real?

I mean I am going to go further into this once I get home but are you really incapable of believing that seeing the death of a good friend at the hand of an uncaring private medical establishment might get me to renounce my kooky cult beliefs?

My decision to stop libertarianism come as a direct result of that issue. Libertarians were wrong about health care, and the more I looked at it the more I realized they were wrong about other things.

The vitriol I gave for the ideology isn't at all reflected at all libertarians. I don't hate you jrod, I pity you. I feel for you the same as I do a Scientology cult member, I just hope one day you get better and realize that your fantasy world is just that.

On the other hand I do hate a lot of the top libertarians. People like Walter block and Hans Hermann hoppe actively spread your foul ideology and do so in racist and insulting ways. While there are certainly libertarians like the antiwar ones you mentioned my take on them is very simple. They are wrong more than they are right. I can agree pot should be legal without going full pants on head retarded, and there are people on the left with the same ideas who wouldn't also destroy the public health care system.

For me you can boil it down to public health care really. If you don't think people should be able to get medical care regardless of ability to pay then I have zero respect for you. Watch someone you care about deeply die of a treatable disease and then talk to me about how great the free market is.

Seriously, there are just so many cases where I look at libertarian proposals for how to set things up and go, "We tried that, and then we stopped because it killed people." Health care is complex and messy, but unless your only metric is adherence to Libertarian Magic Principles, socialized medicine as seen in the UK and Canada is just plain better for ensuring the greatest number of people are healthy.

In my mind there are basically two types of libertarians. There are the ordinary sort who believe some odd things but are basically just ordinary people (if like 99% white guys). Then there are the libertarian intellectuals, who are trying to develop logical underpinnings for libertarianism, and wind up proposing DRO dystopias, "race realism," or just obvious horse poo poo like HHH's argumentation ethics.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2015 19:00

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

So some people in Arizona are trying to start a competitor to Uber and Lyft, called Dryvyng (yes, really). Their marketing guy is Craig R. Brittain, best known for running a revenge porn website, and he's been cozying up to Gamergate, whining about #SJWs (with the hashtag), and occasionally going on rants that make it clear he's a nutty libertarian and then some.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 18:49

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Who What Now posted:

Is there even one single leading libertarian "thinker" who isn't a piece of bigoted poo poo?

I've noticed that while there are libertarians who are decent enough, every libertarian "thinker," everyone who espouses theories and publishes articles and such in the name of libertarianism or its many minor variants, is just awful and out of touch with reality.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2016 17:48

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

jrodefeld posted:

Nobody said they would "collapse as soon as economic bad times arrive". You are acting as if it is some revelation that people give less to charity when they have less money, which tends to occur in a depression. Yeah, no poo poo. This might as well be an argument against charity as a whole.

But you have made a gigantic error in your thinking and I will now expose your faulty thinking.

Most progressives have claimed over and over that the reason we created a Federal Reserve in 1913 was to "even out the business cycle" and prevent the exact sort of economic crises that occurred under their watch in the 1930s. When libertarians propose a return to the gold standard and the abolition of the Fed, we are told that we had far more economic recessions in the 19th century and suffering was great for average people due to all this economic volatility.

This is literally the basis for the justification for the Fed's existence.

But if what you said is true, that mutual aid societies "would collapse as soon as economic bad times arrive" and you also hold the common progressive view that without the Fed, the economy suffered from systemic and frequent economic "bad times" then how is it that fraternal orders and mutual aid societies survived and even thrived throughout the late 19th century and early 20th century?

These are mutually contradictory views. Either you must concede that economic times were generally good in the 19th century because mutual aid societies were thriving in which case you should support ending the Federal Reserve and bringing back the gold standard or you'd have to admit that economic downturns don't necessarily hurt fraternal orders and their efficacy in which case you're argument here has no merit.

The last refuge you could seek to salvage your argument would be to claim that the Great Depression was an even larger economic crisis than any we've seen before or since and that is the primary thing that killed off mutual aid societies. In the first place, the libertarian argument is that the Great Depression is demonstrably NOT a market phenomenon and instead was caused by Federal Reserve credit expansion, then exacerbated and lengthened by foolish and counterproductive government programs. But even if this were NOT the case, arguing against mutual aid societies because they don't do too well in a one-in-our-history scale economic depression is hardly any argument at all. Lots of things suffer in a massive economic depression that doesn't mean those same things are not efficacious during the other 98% of the time.

I'm sure Caros et al can answer this better than me, but I don't see how they're contradictory. The Fed (and other regulations and such) exist to try to smooth out bad times. They are better than a lack of such things, but they are not perfect and bad times still happen. Mutual aid societies tend to have serious problems and collapse under bad times. That does not mean that they automatically and irrevocably perish as soon as there's an economic downturn, and it does not mean that people will still try to put them together again, especially during eras when (despite a tendency to collapse under stress) they were still the best option. Basically they're only mutually exclusive if you make the mistake of being excessively absolutist about the whole thing.

And yes, we know that libertarians and Austrian school economists reject the mainstream explanations for the Great Depression, but given everything we know about them and how they think, that's not a terribly convincing argument when pretty much the entire rest of the field thinks differently.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 21:01

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

jrodefeld posted:

To again quote the great Frederick Bastiat:

�Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.�

What would make you assume that because I don't support the State providing social welfare for the poor, that I don't support social welfare? And making the claim that you think I'd be "fine" with people needlessly dying is a ridiculous accusation and serves to purpose other than to stir the pot. We can debate issues without resorting to impugning the motives of our opposition.

It's not that you object to these demonstrably good things happening, it's that you object to using what is by far the most effective mechanism for achieving them, and prefer methods that we know from history (and in some cases the present) have largely failed. It's not that we think you "want" people to die in the streets, it's that you're opposing the most effective means of actually preventing it, which from a practical standpoint is more or less the same thing.

jrodefeld posted:

Jesus loving Christ. I am absolutely talking to children.

No, you're talking to people who, due to your own actions, have mostly stopped engaging you seriously.

Like, I don't think you've ever replied to one of my posts, and while I'll be the first to say I'm no Caros, I'm also not the guy who accused you of loving a watermelon. You've given me zero incentive to particularly respect you or put effort into my posts in this thread. What effort I expend is for my own amusement, tempered by the standards of the forum.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 03:32

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Literally The Worst posted:

jrode its not that you cite mises

its that mises is pretty much all you cite

Seriously, this should be blindingly obvious.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 19:59

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

StandardVC10 posted:

jrodefeld if you're really so interested in a substantive debate, you should have responded to the bolded question in the Caros post you quoted, rather than just going into your rehearsed spiel about how persecuted your intellectual tradition is or whatever the gently caress. Because it's far more important to making your worldview remotely persuasive as far as we're concerned.

We've basically reached a point where for pretty much any topic jrod might bring up we could link/quote previous posts on it, or for that matter we could just repost them and he'd apparently be none the wiser since he doesn't appear to even read 3/4 of the thread.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 00:51

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

jrodefeld posted:

Okay, so you support the entire War on Drugs, right? Consumers need to be protected from themselves, don't they? Frankly, and I don't say this lightly, you are a barbarian and a savage. What you are suggesting is that if two or more individuals come to a mutually agreeable transaction on the market that you disapprove of, you think it is justified to kidnap one or more of them and throw them in a cage. You must support prohibition of alcohol also, right? All kinds of people develop alcoholism and drink way too much. Don't we need to protect people from themselves?

It is a gross fallacy to think that in the complex world of medicine and health care that any group of individuals, even if motivated by pure intentions, is capable of accurately determining which drug or treatment is efficacious and which is not is absurd on the face of it. Such an institution would doubtless be subject to external pressure by established interests whose profits would be threatened by newcomers into the market. Corruption would abound.

What a civilized person would do, if they were truly concerned, would be to advise people of which products and services were worthwhile and which were not but never to forcefully prevent a voluntary transaction from taking place. The very fact that you cannot understand how barbaric such coercive aggressive acts are displays volumes about your character.

How on earth do you jump from rules put in place to prevent fake medicine that can kill people to supporting the war on drugs or prohibition?

The FDA is not perfect--albeit mainly due to capitalists fighting tooth and nail to influence it at the expense of consumers--but it's yet another one of those inconvenient things that we as a nation put in place because we were tired of industry pointlessly deceiving and killing human beings. I wouldn't say that people need protection from themselves so much as they need protection from capitalist enterprises that have demonstrated time and again that they are perfectly willing to deceive and kill human beings in order to make a bit more money. The backlash you earn when you suggest removing these protections is, for the zillionth time, because we've seen the death toll of going without them.

The problem with the War on Drugs is that our prohibition on many drugs is based on faulty premises, it involves disproportionate sentences, and it persecutes minorities. It's not because they're keeping people from having crystal meth, it's because they're imprisoning a huge (and disproportionately non-white) number of people for non-violent crimes involving substances like pot that are demonstrably less harmful than many legal drugs. Ending the the drug war would also have the advantage that the legalized drugs could be regulated, and thus there'd be dramatically less risk of being sold a fake and/or poisonous product.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 17:02

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

jrodefeld posted:

In all seriousness, can't you see the potential problem with this? Don't you think that a political institution that has the power to ban medical treatments and drugs would be pressured to keep out good and effective medicine from the market if they would undermine the profits of the most politically well-connected medical and drug companies? Don't you have any concern for the millions of people who have died from diseases because the FDA wouldn't allow them to access medical treatments that are widely available in other countries?

If you are dying with cancer or some other horrible disease, what moral justification is there for preventing them from trying cutting edge, but yet experimental treatments? It takes a long time sometimes for new treatments to become widely acknowledged as effective medicine, especially if they are radically different from the prevailing orthodoxy. For example, in cancer treatment today, Chemotherapy is a mainstay of treatment. It is very expensive (ask Caros) and the providers can make a lot of money by selling it. Newer treatments that are in their early stages of development will do away with most, if not all, of radiation therapy towards a more targeted approach.

Don't you think those who provide the current cancer drugs and chemotherapy treatments have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo?

So again we come back to the thing that the profit motive is the actual problem here. Without pressure from pharmaceutical companies, the FDA would be free to be impartial, and even with that pressure it's still better than nothing (or the void of competing and often dishonest private sector agencies that would be left in libertopia).

There is merit in potentially allowing people with terminal diseases try out cutting edge treatments from reputable sources. If the FDA is really getting in the way of that then it should loosen up those regulations, but it definitely shouldn't loosen up on the other bullshit that people pretending to sell medicine have tried in the past and continue to push now.

Here's a relatively benign example: The FDA regulations on supplements are very limited. When the FDA did a study of supplements sold at major retailers, they found that a massive portion of them didn't even contain the ingredients they claimed to, and in a few cases they had powdered legumes with no labeling (which is pretty loving bad news for anyone with severe allergies to those). This has apparently gone on for years, has come from companies that otherwise have decent enough reputations, and largely flew under the radar until the FDA took a closer look. Herbal supplements vary quite a bit in terms of their effectiveness and side-effects, but they're a lot less effective when they actually consist of powdered soybeans and sand.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 18:45

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Who What Now posted:

Absolutely. Because whatever you claim to support your policies will actually lead to a new age on conquistadores slaughtering and enslaving people in order to pillage natural resources. That is the world your ideology leads towards. You ignorant child.

Yeah, it's like the thing about how libertarians say "Just because we don't want the government to do a thing doesn't mean we don't want it to happen." They don't intend for the poor to die of starvation in the street, they just want to remove the things that are keeping that from happening while claiming (based on no evidence) that it'll magically make everything awesome because taxes are theft (they're not).

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 22:05

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

jrodefeld posted:

Is this honestly the type of rhetorical tactic you've lowered yourself to? "My opponent probably smells bad! He's probably a loser who lives in his parents basement!"

Juvenile doesn't adequately describe it.

I never know what to make of how some people conduct themselves in a way that flagrantly and consistently provokes a certain reaction, yet can't see any flaws whatsoever in their own behavior.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 03:53

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Saeku posted:

I think Libertarianism is a very American ideology. The argument I just critiqued makes much more sense in a frontier mindset. If you can obtain unsettled land for essentially free, and go and work it and produce crops and housing and other capital assets through your labour with little capital outlay, then this idea of free entrepreneurship makes much more sense. Similarly, the Libertarian idea of "mixing labour with the land" posits unworked & unpopulated arable land, which in modern times is the American frontier (and that's only because it was forcibly depopulated and the prior inhabitants' labour unrecognized.)

I'd be much more amenable to Libertarianism if an individual could be self-sustaining through their labour, but in a modern society with property rights, that's not the case. This isn't the frontier. If you don't have marketable skills or inherited wealth in the USA, you can spend your whole life trapped working just to keep yourself alive; student loans are an ostensible solution to this, but that system has its own huge problems. A substantial proportion of Americans have zero or negative net wealth. How is that freedom? It's just a larger-scale version of the company town.

They're probably a bit different from libertarians, but the Bundy guys have an outright obsession with the value of land, and they outright said that wealth comes from land (and thus in their eyes any government ownership of land is a tyrannical theft of wealth from the people). Their philosophy basically doesn't recognize anything before a century or so ago, and conveniently leaves out how the government did the ranchers the nice favor of kicking the natives out, or just how much government assistance they've received overall.

And while working the land is one way to generate wealth, it's 2016 and there are a heck of a lot of people who get their money--in some cases a whole lot of it--in other ways, so that for a lot of us the land is at best a necessary container for the buildings where people do the stuff that actually makes money. I'm a translator, and while owning a house would be nice (despite how unattainable it is these days), whether I have a 100-acre property or a small apartment makes no difference whatsoever to how much money I make. Of course, without the (publicly-funded) infrastructure of the internet I'd be a heck of a lot poorer because a lot of what I do would be at best vastly more cumbersome.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 18:06

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

jrodefeld posted:

The answer is that I've got some sort of a problem and I don't mind wasting my time writing thousands of words for an un-appreciative audience. I never really expected anyone here to actually be persuaded, though even if they were, they are unlikely to admit it to me.

Honestly, I build up a certain reservoir of frustration about politics especially during an election season. I think just working out what I believe by writing it down has value. What keeps me going on this website is that I receive push-back to what I am saying. Even through all of the substance-less replies and name-calling in my direction, there are enough of you who respond with substance to keep me coming back to this site when I feel the need to vent about politics.

However, I think I should be welcomed here as a libertarian contributor if only to enliven the discussion. It seems like some of you are just hoping I'll go away so you can have general ideological conformity. But what fun is that?

Granted libertarians by and large haven't fared well on SA in recent years, but I am absolutely certain that a libertarian who posts more like a functional person and good-faith debater wouldn't get the kind of reaction you do.

Of course, a libertarian who seriously considered the evidence people showed them might not remain a libertarian for very long.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 02:48

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

jrodefeld posted:

So, to paraphrase Bastiat, if we don't support a thing being done by the State we don't support that thing being done at all? It's sad that Bastiat crushed this fallacy a century and a half ago, yet you keep parroting it without understanding how fallacious the argument really is.

Because I oppose the Welfare State, you state that I think "we have no obligation to our fellow man"? This is just flat out wrong and completely dishonest.

We absolutely, positively have a moral obligation to our fellow man. And this obligation can be carried out through voluntary cooperation in a free society and does NOT require State aggression. Most libertarians, whether you agree or not, believe that if you care about your fellow man and his or her well-being, you should reject Statism and favor peaceful assistance and mutual aid to our neighbor.

So the claim that libertarians have black hearts, and secretly chuckle about the prospect of mass starvation and widespread suffering is worse than dishonest, it is downright abhorrent.

Let me cite another common "lifeboat" scenario that is thrown against the libertarian position. If a poor person is starving and steals a loaf of bread from a store, is he or she committing an act of unjustified aggression?

For the libertarian, the store-owner would have the right to sue for restitution. If a store-owner was so petty as to make a Federal case about a starving person stealing a $3 loaf of bread to keep from starving, there are all sorts of social pressures that come to bear even where the law doesn't tread.

Even if we recognize the legal right of people to behave in ways that we might find morally objectionable, that hardly means we need to remain silent on the issue. Decent behavior is encouraged through ostracism, social pressure, persuasion and, for some people, religious, ethical and spiritual teachings.

So AGAIN, it's not that we think that you don't want poor people to be unable to avoid starvation, it's that based on all of the available evidence we're reasonably sure that the way you'd like to structure society would have that result. You may believe that there's a moral obligation to your fellow man, but the one truly effective way of providing an adequate safety net is a no-go for you because of your fantasies about Evil Statist Men With Guns.

We already have social pressure, and it does fuckall to stop rich people from demonizing and persecuting poor people. A store owner who gets a shoplifter sent to jail for stealing a loaf of bread is not going to face much in the way of criticism for it, and whatever he does get will be met with plenty of people saying that the starving shoplifter obviously has plenty of welfare money and is a dirty thug who deserved to be arrested or worse.

Also, "Statism" just isn't a thing. It's an idiotic term that basically every non-libertarian either hasn't heard of or rejects. You can basically replace "statist" with "non-libertarian" and you'll have a more accurate and less condescending way of saying things.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 23:28

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Grand Theft Autobot posted:

I dug up this article by Tom Woods in noted neo-Confederate rag Southern Partisan called "Christendom's Last Stand," in which he holds up the antebellum South as a bastion of freedom and morality. I'm just not seeing how we can call him a neo-Confederate, so I guess jrod is right.

I like how he thinks it's a flaw that people reconsider and improve on their ideas, by way of misinterpreting that as "discarding" entire systems of thought every decade. Also the convenient idea that States are a special type of government entity that should totally be able to discriminate or whatever if it wants.

I don't think it's something Jrod has ever really addressed, but I get the impression that libertarians vary quite a bit in terms of that tribalistic anti-individualist worldview. Some want the freedom to be super-tribal without those pesky "human rights" getting in the way, while others are libertarian precisely because they're so hyper-individualist that they're capable of ignoring or defaming the tiniest bit of consideration for fellow human beings.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 18:06

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

I am no Caros, but I'm pretty sure Jrod never once replied to anything I said, and he almost never actually integrates new factual information into his understanding of the world either, so we're pretty much where we started on that front.

I learn way too much about the world by way of smart people correcting dumb people, so I've learned a ton from the smart posters in this thread correcting Jrod.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 18:51

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 04:28

Guilty Spork: Feb 26, 2011; Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Thanks Jrod, for proving what I said in my previous post completely correct. The above post would literally be impossible for anyone who read this thread or the previous one and possessed the ability to take in new information.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 03:26

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