The problem of Capitalism

So what? The same goes for people running a footrace: if they all have to carry someone on their back, some would still be able to run, others wouldn't. The fact that some would still be able to run while carrying someone on their back does not mean those who couldn't are to blame for not being able to run while carrying someone else, or that those being carried over the finish line by their mounts should be credited with having run the race themselves.

But they don't, and the playing field is anything but level. Those who want access to economic opportunity must pay landowners full market value just for PERMISSION to access it.

Human nature is always the key, and I fully account for it.

But that does not resemble the capitalist world, where workers are on a treadmill, and landowners are on the escalator the treadmill powers.

I have made no such claims.

No, that is false. I am complaining about EVERYONE being stripped of their rights to liberty, and those rights being made into the private property of the privileged, especially landowners.

No, it's to stop making people's rights to liberty into other people's private property.

No. I have not rejected ANY suggestion that would restore people's equal individual rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.

Huh? Where do you think government comes from?

I'm seeking equal individual rights to life, .liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor.

Not in any place that offers meaningful access to economic opportunity.

Don't make me laugh. The kind of location you can buy for $10K in the USA isn't going to get you access to any meaningful economic opportunity.

 

You are exhorting slaves to save up their money and buy their freedom from their owners. It's not responsive to their grievance.

Funny how it's always the people who already have lots of money who can afford the most creative accountants....

And the more money you have the easier it is to avoid paying taxes on it.

All human progress, from the first stone axe to the Internet, has been provided by those who were not satisfied with what was, and dreamed of something better. Your way of "thinking" is the enemy of that progress.

I also do the best I can with what I have. But unlike you, what I have includes a brain that can understand what is wrong in the world, and is willing to fix it.

 

No, your statement is self-contradictory because liberty and justice require law. Duh.

"...to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..."

Recognize that?

Ah, no, you cannot. That is why landowners are the wealthy and privileged elite in virtually every Third World country.

Refuted above. Lawlessness is not liberty and plutocracy is not justice.

I definitely prefer capitalism to feudalism or socialism and democracy to oligarchy or anarchy. But "better than X" doesn't mean, "the best possible."

 

No, they are taken.

Having the "right" to pay someone else for permission to exercise your rights is not the same as actually having those rights. Hello?

Ah, no, if those who excluded others from it made just compensation to the community of those whom they deprive of it, no one would have grounds for complaint. There's no problem as long as no one seeks to inflict injustice on others. The problem is precisely that you and all landowners seek to inflict injustice on everyone else for your own unearned profit.

 

But they haven't got rich, or even risen above subsistence, except to the extent that GOVERNMENT has intervened massively in the economy -- through minimum wage laws, welfare, public education and health care, labor standards laws, union monopoly laws, public pensions, etc., etc. -- to rescue the landless from enslavement by landowners. Where government has not done that, the condition of the landless has always been indistinguishable from that of slaves.

I see nothing of the sort. What has life been like for landless workers in EVERY SINGLE SOCIETY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD where private landowning has been well established, but government has not intervened massively in the economy to rescue the landless from enslavement by landowners?

 

All privately owned land has been stolen from all who would otherwise be at liberty to use it.

With government's generous help.

You know the process. Government grants a "land patent" that confers on the holder a legal right forcibly to deprive everyone else of their liberty rights to use the land -- and government even kindly enforces it for him.

 

Yes, they most certainly have.

Oh, but I do. You, however, don't. Watch:

It also doesn't mean that your liberty to use what nature provided for all to sustain yourself and your family somehow "belongs to" other people.

What if the government gave ownership of the earth's atmosphere to private interests, as it has given ownership of the land? Would you claim no one had taken your liberty when the owner of the earth's atmosphere demanded 90% of your income as rent for air to breathe? Or would you demand your right to breathe without paying anyone for permission to use what "belongs to" them, and damn them to Hell for being so viciously evil?

 

So, on the exact same basis that slave owners owned their slaves' rights to liberty. Check.

If the government decided that Jeff Bezos owned the alphabet, would you agree to pay him rent for using his letters? He owns it. Or would you protest that your liberty right to use what you were otherwise at liberty to use had been taken from you?

Yes, they do. They just don't want to pay for what they are taking.

They most certainly and indisputably are. If they -- with government's help -- were not forcibly depriving everyone else of the use of the land, they would be at liberty to use it. Just like Bezos and the alphabet.

 

No. There is a difference between rightfully owning what you produce and wrongfully owning something that was formerly free for everyone to use. It's the difference between a right that does not make anyone else worse off, and a "right" that is based on making others worse off by depriving them of what they would otherwise have.

Right. Like no ownership of the sun, the oceans, the alphabet, etc., because owning such things is nothing but removal of others' liberty rights to use them, depriving them of what they would otherwise have.

 

False. Government took my rights and gave them to the privileged, especially landowners, as their private property.

 

No, just buying stolen land. The granter of the initial land patent stole it.

?? Inexplicable. That has nothing to do with anything I said.

 

Yeah sure .. so willing that you reject every path to the existence you claim you want. Living the life you say is evil, while complaining it's evil is mere lip service. ALL change starts with YOU. YOU are 'society'.

Willingness is evident in action, not words. As long as you refuse to take action, no one can take you seriously. It's ENTIRELY possible to live exactly the model you claim to want, yet you are not doing it. You refuse to do it. It's 'not quite right', somehow. Too hard. Too far away. Too whatever. Always an excuse for not changing your path from the cushy First World capitalist life you clearly love.

 

Absolutely untrue. Many millions of Third Worlders have set up their homes without legal land ownership or govt interference. When govts do very little, the last thing they care about is building codes and title deeds. That's what you want, isn't it? Freedom to make use of land to your own advantage? Well there you go .. easily done in the Third World. Now let's hear your excuse again

 

But you don't have the right to use what is owned by others. Your concept of "right to liberty" is contradictory.

 

Everything our friend says is contradictory.

 

Sure I do, if what they "own" is my right to use it. We have long ago established that human rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of our labor are above the law, and law nothing but an imperfect attempt to formalize and secure those pre-existing rights. Thus, if the government decides that some people's -- call them "slaves" -- rights to liberty are owned by other people, the slaves still have their rights, which are merely being abrogated with government's help; and if that government does not desist, it should be destroyed by force. If the government decides that Jeff Bezos owns the alphabet, we still have a right to use it. Government is merely being evil by abrogating a right which it cannot rightfully abrogate. In exactly the same way, if government decides that some people -- landowners -- own other people's rights to liberty, that just means government is being evil by abrogating those rights. It doesn't affect the actual possession of those rights.

No, the concept of a right to own other people's rights to liberty is contradictory.

 

It is most definitely and indisputably true.

Only temporarily and precariously, and they are vastly outnumbered by landless tenants of private landowners. The record of people who set up their homes without legal landownership is very clear: they can't protect themselves or their property from crime, and government doesn't do it for them, so they can't live safely or accumulate any significant wealth; and when the powerful want the land, they just get the government to bulldoze the people's houses and forcibly dispossess them.

Wrong again. They don't care about building codes -- that's not landowning -- but title deeds are one of the things that even the most primitive governments make sure they control because that's what government IS: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land. If it doesn't control possession and use of the land, it's not a government.

I want my RIGHTS to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of my labor. Lack of government administration of possession and use of land gets you the liberty to use land non-exclusively, as our hunter-gatherer and nomadic-herding forebears did, but without the rights to property in the fruits of one's labor, it can't support an economy or living conditions above that level.

Wrong, as proved above. I'm not advocating a return to the pre-government form of economy where all were at liberty to use all land non-exclusively. Secure, exclusive tenure is necessary to an economy above the hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding stages. My position is that the landholders who benefit from the secure, exclusive tenure government and the community provide should justly compensate that government and the community of those whom they deprive of the land, and those who are deprived of it should get just compensation for what the landholders are taking from them.

I'm not against secure, exclusive land tenure. I'm against the injustice of some people getting to benefit from secure, exclusive land tenure without making just compensation, while others suffer the injustice of having their rights to liberty removed without getting just compensation.

 

No, that is just another objectively false claim on your part. I have stated very clearly the only path that can lead to the liberty, justice and prosperity for all that I want: EQUAL human rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor, with just compensation from those who benefit from necessary abrogations of those rights, and to those whose rights are thus abrogated.

Again, that's just a bald falsehood on your part.

What an absurd and disingenuous load of garbage. When Thomas Paine wrote "Common Sense," it was effective in creating the United States precisely because the justice and reason of Paine's arguments persuaded others, not because he picked up a musket himself and went into battle against the British. Give your head a shake. Seriously. It's time.

Nonsense. You could with equal "logic" say that emancipation of slaves had to start with the abolitionists. Sorry, no, the abolitionists were not the problem. The SLAVE OWNERS were.

GET IT???

No, sorry, that is just absurd, disingenuous GARBAGE, as proved above.

<yawn> Oh, really? Is that why no one took Paine or Jefferson seriously? Because they didn't grab a musket and go stand in the front lines? Really? REEEEEAAAAAALLLLLYYY????

False, as proved above.

No, YOU refuse to address what I have actually said, and insist on pummeling strawmen of your own contrivance.

I have identified exactly how it is not right.

But mostly, too different from what I have actually advocated. Which you know you cannot address.

I do love life, and modern civilization, and the liberal culture I grew up in. I am aware that capitalism is superior -- has amply proven itself superior -- to socialism, feudalism, and all the more primitive forms of economy history attests. But what would you say of someone who castigated an ancient Roman who opposed slavery because he criticized the institution of slavery in the most advanced society in the world instead of going and living among primitives (the only people who did not then hold slaves)? Or who castigated Southern abolitionists for not just shutting up and moving to free states? Wouldn't you consider them despicable servants of evil? I certainly would. Utterly despicable.

 

You have a strange vocabulary, but the fact is that you have no right to trespass against the property of others.

 

So when you use the word, "right," you are saying slaves had no right to leave their owners, and no one else had any right to help slaves leave their owners. You are saying that if the government made the alphabet into Jeff Bezos's private property, no one would have any right to use the letters of the alphabet without paying him rent for each letter they used.

And you say my vocabulary is strange....

 

Nope. Not saying that.

Nope. Not saying that.

Nope. Not saying that.

You have no right to trespass against the property of others.

 

Then I don't know what you incorrectly imagine, "You have no right to trespass against the property of others," means.

Then I don't know what you incorrectly imagine, "You have no right to trespass against the property of others," means.

Then I don't know what you incorrectly imagine, "You have no right to trespass against the property of others," means.

What do you incorrectly imagine that means?

 

The biggest issue for many today is they think they deserve the same as everyone else. That's why capitalism is a problem for them. Not everyone got a trophy at the end of the season. It's okay to just get a free ice cream and not the trophy. Those should be saved for outstanding performance. Socialism says they will correct this for you. bahahaha

 

Humans can't legitimately be owned.

As before, humans can't legitimately be owned.

the alphabet doesn't exist, so it can't be owned.

You have no right to trespass against the property of others.

 

You have no right to stand where I am already standing, you have no right to take the apple I found while you were sleeping. To take either by violence is a theft of labor.

When man moved from the hunter/gatherer society to an agrarian society private property rights were eventually established to protect the labor of the occupier of the land. It is they that did the work to make the land more productive and more beneficial to society.

It is not the government that dictates the value of land, it is the land and the people that determine the value, and that is based on the lands productivity, location, and general desirability.

As a non-landowner one has the right to use the public services provided by property taxes, roads, schools, libraries, swimming pools, police, etc.

These are just random thoughts I have after reading your posts of the last year. It would be helpful if you could discuss the right to land vs the need to protect one's labor.