The problem of Capitalism

Right .. you're FOR private property. It's not as though we haven't seen that all along, you know. You're FOR capitalism, and FOR private property.

Do you realise you're talking to the sole surviving Commie in these forums?

 

PS: No one is "having their rights to liberty removed". We're all free to become property owners, but not everyone wants to work that hard. THAT'S the difference, it has nothing to do with Govt.

 

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.[/QUOTE]

This seems to be the crux of your premise. So how do we determine just compensation from the landowners to the landless?

My property taxes average about 1/3 of the income from the property, but that income requires some labor on my part. By law, I am required to control noxious weeds, I also am responsible for building maintenance, fence maintenance, and water source maintenance, and a few other responsibilities.

What is just compensation?

 

And you have no right to stop me from standing on a spot where you aren't standing by claiming that you "own" it.

GET IT?

And you have no right to claim the tree as your property just because you picked an apple from it.

To appropriate land or other natural resources as private property by violence -- and it has never been done any other way -- is a theft of the right to liberty.

Wrong. It was to protect the RIGHTFUL property right of the producer of fixed improvements. Occupation had nothing to do with it, because occupation doesn't earn anything. The only valid property rights are founded on acts of production, not of occupation or appropriation. And land is not the result of any act of production.

Wrong again. The land was ALREADY productive, or they wouldn't have occupied it. Indeed, they often made it less productive by exhausting the soil, overcultivating, etc. It is society that made the land more productive through the services -- especially security of tenure -- and infrastructure government provided and the opportunities and amenities the community provided at that location. The land USER produces fixed improvements, goods, services, etc., relieving the general condition of scarcity, but the landowner qua landowner is always by definition a pure parasite, a pure thief, pure evil.

Creates, not dictates. There's a difference.

No. The land was there all along, and worth nothing until government and the community created the economic advantages accessible at that location that gave it value.

The market determines the value, but the community CREATES that value. It is the producer who creates value, the market only decides how much value he created.

What makes a building lot "productive" enough to be worth $1M, hmmmm? Blank out.

What is it about its location that makes land valuable, hmmm? Blank out.

And what makes it desirable? Land value is nothing but the market's estimate of the future net subsidy to the owner: how much more he will be able to take from the community by owning the land than he will pay in taxes on it. It has no other meaning.

No, one does not. One must pay a landowner full market value for permission to access such opportunities. And one is taxed on one's production, consumption, etc. to pay for the desirable public services and infrastructure one is also paying the landowner for. Producers and consumers must therefore pay for government TWICE -- once in taxes to fund desirable public services and infrastructure, and then again in land rent to landowners for PERMISSION to access the services and infrastructure their taxes just paid for -- so that landowners can pocket one of the payments in return for doing and contributing exactly nothing. THAT'S WHY LAND COSTS SO MUCH. A land title is a license to steal from taxpayers.

Yeah, they seem pretty random.

The natural right is to use all land non-exclusively. It is property in the fruits of labor that needs protecting, because that is what stimulates production and relief of scarcity. Once an economy moves above the hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding stages, people start to produce significant value in fixed improvements, and their property right in those improvements needs protection. Landowning is just a quick and dirty solution to that problem, just as slavery was a quick and dirty solution to the problem of labor shortages resulting from warfare and the waste inherent in killing defeated captives to stop them from seeking revenge. But today we know there are better solutions to those problems.

 

Absolutely. I am FOR rightful private property in the fruits of one's labor. I am NOT FOR wrongful private property in other people's rights to liberty, whether their liberty rights are owned individually, through chattel slavery, or collectively, through private ownership of natural resources like wild plants and animals, the rivers and oceans, the atmosphere, the sun, or land. I thought I had made that clear.

No, no. Capitalism requires private ownership of the means of production: producer goods and natural resources ("land" in classical economics). I am definitely for private ownership of producer goods except in the case of natural monopolies (mostly infrastructure that it would be wasteful for competing private firms to duplicate). But owning natural resources like land means owning other people's rights to liberty, so I'm not for that.

Oh, I doubt that.

 

Neither can the sun, rivers and oceans, land, the alphabet, etc., because they are naturally in the public domain.

And neither can land.

The alphabet most certainly exists, and the only reason it can't be owned is that government hasn't given anyone title to it. Yet.

I have every right to trespass against the property of others when that "property" consists of my right to liberty, taken from me by force without just compensation.

 

1) 'rightful' is about as useful a term as 'whimsical'. one man's rightful is another man's theft. BUT, if you so keenly wish to usher in this Age of Aquarius, why aren't you doing as suggested, and buying that 1000 acres of land and sharing it amongst the thousand? what does any of your talk accomplish other than to make you sound like a complaining armchair habitue who wants free stuff? Stop moaning about how evil everyone else is, and be the change you demand of others.

2) Yes, you ARE for private ownership of land. You can, this very day, go to any one of hundreds of places around the world where a man can simply 'enter the forest, and live off the land' freely and without interference. But you don't actually want that, do you? You want all the boons and benefits of a highly regulated Freehold Title model of capitalist democracy.

3) I figured you'd 'doubt it'. Too embarrassing otherwise.

 

Land is a physical resource. It can be owned.

The alphabet is a concept. It is not a physical resource. Therefore it can't be owned.

Someone owning land does not violate your person or property, therefore someone owning land can't possibly violate your rights.

 

Only when you are against right and prefer wrong.

We can get into that if you like. It's not that complicated.

Because like buying slaves to free them, it doesn't address the problem -- and could make it worse.

It enlightens those who are willing to know crucial facts of economics (i.e., not you).

Is that how the abolitionists ended slavery? By merely eschewing ownership of slaves themselves?

No, I am really, really not.

And without access to the economic opportunity that landowners do not create, but are nevertheless privileged to charge him full market value for access to.

I want justice and the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor that I have described. Which is not what you described.

No; unlike you, I don't want to profit from injustice. I would rather end it than profit from it. Most people would prefer to maintain any injustice that they perceive themselves as profiting from.

I don't see why it would be embarrassing. Nothing to do with me.

 

In HK and China, land can't be owned. You stand refuted.

The sun is also a physical resource, as are the oceans, rivers, atmosphere, etc., none of which can be owned. You again stand refuted.

Your "argument" is therefore comprehensively and conclusively demolished.

Strike One.

 

1) You cannot change laws, but you can change the lives of a thousand people by buying a thousand acres and giving it away an acre at a time. But let's talk about the REAL reasons you won't do it - ie, because you would cling just as tightly as any slumlord to that thousand acres, were you to self-sacrifice to the degree you must in order to buy it, and because you know that only some of those thousand would actually make it work. Your efforts (and land) would be wasted on a significant proportion.

2) It enlightens no one, as long as it's inconsistent and contradictory.

3) And here's that contradiction. You either believe in private property, or you don't. If you do, and that appears to be the case, then you can buy that thousand acres and give it away an acre at a time. BE THE CHANGE.

4) So provide that 'justice', one acre at a time. It's the best you can hope to do until human nature changes.

5) I don't 'profit from injustice', I work damned hard to both acquire and keep private property. Profiting from injustice would be claiming welfare while being able bodied.

6) It's embarassing because I'd wager I'm the only person here who has actually walked the walk. You're (attempting to) sell ice to an eskimo. Very badly.

 

No, yours is. As long as you refuse to act according to your belief that you should be free to utilise land/nature as you see fit.

As long as you voluntarily remain in the system you claim you hate, your protestations are literally whimsy.

 

Why couldn't any of those physical resources be owned?

Get your quotes right, and maybe I'll respond to the rest.

 

Why not? Somebody does, and I would do a hell of a lot better job than the gang of crooks, narcissists and toadies doing it now. It is precisely by pointing out injustices in laws that people do get them changed. See the current liberalization of marijuana prohibition. It is the result of thousands of people like me identifying and protesting against the wickedness and irrationality of marijuana prohibition. You would have told those people, "You cannot change laws, but you can change the lives of thousands of marijuana users by buying each of them a doobie." And if we had heeded such stupid and disingenuous advice, the laws would never have been changed. Which is obviously the result you are trying to effect.

Right?

I see. You want me to devote my energies to marginally improving the lives of a thousand, so that you and your ilk can go on robbing, terrorizing, enslaving, torturing, immiserating, oppressing and killing the billions whose rights are abrogated without just compensation by landowner privilege.

<yawn> Without reading further, I know that you will now make some silly $#!+ up and falsely attribute it to me:

See? You can't address anything I've actually said, so you just ignore it, make up some silly, disingenuous $#!+, claim it represents me or my views, and pretend you have responded to what I said. You are a disgrace.

How would that be relevant? Only a fraction of emancipated slaves ever made consensual wage labor work, mainly because they had not been raised to learn how to manage it, same as the people who have been deprived of their liberty by landowners. Did that mean they had no grounds to resent being enslaved? Give your head a shake.

Which might be one of the reasons your proposal is an absurd, irrelevant, disingenuous red herring.

Which you know very well it isn't, which is why you can't actually respond to any of it.

No it isn't. It's just going to be more absurd and disingenuous garbage from you. Watch:

See? That is nothing but ABSURD, DISINGENUOUS GARBAGE, and I can prove it: Do you believe in private property in other people, i.e., chattel slavery? If no, then by your own idiotic and disingenuous "logic," you don't believe in private property. Do you believe the sun is rightly private property? If no, then by your own absurd and disingenuous logic, you don't believe in private property. See how easily I always prove your absurd and disingenuous garbage is absurd and disingenuous garbage?

Why even bother with such self-evidently absurd and disingenuous garbage? That wouldn't change the system of institutionalized robbery and oppression of the landless by landowners, any more than abolitionists buying a thousand slaves and freeing them would have changed the system of chattel slavery. AND YOU KNOW IT.

No, because that's not justice, it's just a way to waste my time and stop me from enlightening people about the evil you profit from, and YOU KNOW IT.

No it isn't. Human nature is already compatible with liberty and justice. It's the desires of evil, greedy, privileged parasites -- like you, maybe? -- for unearned wealth and power over others that aren't.

Of course you do, and you know it. That's why you are so fanatically devoted to preserving and aggravating it.

EXACTLY as slave owners did. And they said the EXACT SAME THING to justify it that you are now saying. The EXACT SAME THING.

Sorry, but no amount of work or sacrifice can buy rightful ownership of other people's rights to liberty, whether they have been packaged as private property or not.

Yes, well, less than 1% of GDP goes to people who do that, while 30%-40% of GDP is going to wealthy, privileged interests who profit from institutionalized injustice, like you.

What walk? I've been a principal in start-ups, a landlord, an employee, a self-employed business owner where I worked for large and small companies, governments and NGOs.

Nonsense. I'm selling liberty and justice, and you haven't got Clue 1 about them, having never seen them.

 

Because it is universally recognized that they are rightly in the public domain, and making them into private property would be absurd and intolerable, like making the alphabet into private property.

 

<sigh> More of your absurd and disingenuous garbage coming, I see...

That's not my belief. That's just the absurd and disingenuous garbage you made up and attributed to me, and continue to falsely claim is my belief.

My belief -- which is actually a fact of objective physical reality -- is that people naturally ARE free to utilize land and nature as they see fit, as our remote ancestors did to survive for millions of years, and WOULD STILL be thus free if land had not been appropriated as private property. The normative implication is that they are therefore owed just compensation for what has been taken from them.

No, that's just more absurd and disingenuous garbage from you. By your evil, despicable, and dishonest "logic," the abolitionists should not have opposed slavery, but just moved to a different country that didn't have slavery. In fact, if you had been a slave owner in the Antebellum South, that is what you would have said to them, because you are in favor of any form of evil, any uncompensated abrogation of others' rights, that is in your narrow financial interest.

Imagine for a moment that you have a magic button that when pushed, will put $1K into your bank account and kill a random poor person. You would spend all your free time and energy pushing that button, wouldn't you?

WOULDN'T YOU???

 

The Apple brand is also a concept and not a physical resource. But it can be owned.

Strike Two.

Someone owning land most definitely and indisputably violates my person, as I am forcibly deprived of the liberty I would otherwise have to use that land. In extremis, people have been and still are starved to death by someone owning the land they could otherwise have used to survive, in effect murdering them. In former times, landowners called others' exercise of their rights to liberty, "poaching," and simply murdered those who attempted to exercise their liberty rights to live off the land, which the landowners had removed. The WHO tells us that about 12-15M people per year die of poverty. Almost all are landless, and almost all could have survived if landowners had not forcibly stripped them of their rights to liberty. To claim that this death toll of two Holocausts per year is not a violation of anyone's rights is despicable and evil beyond the power of the English language to express.

That's Strike Three, son. You're out.

 

Where is it? Is it under lock and key?

I don't think you understand what it means to violate your person or property. It means messing with your body or the stuff you own. When someone owns land, they do neither of those things.

Yes, you don't like people owning land. We get that.

I know a guy who owns a quarter acre where he has his house. How does his ownership of this quarter acre effect you in any way?

 

So enter politics! Get a law degree, work for a couple of decades in local politics, and work your way up.

Look, guy, I'm small potatoes. I have worked-for income as well as private property, and can actually live without either of them. That happened because myself and my husband both educated ourselves .. the hard way .. going to university at night after working all day in minimum wage jobs. We sacrificed enormously to pay off our mortgages early. A good portion of our married life has been in collective, in either communes or with relatives. We grow our own food. We collect our own rain water and solar power. We ride bicycles. We have lived in the Third World. But most importantly, we grasp that the First World is extraordinary in its freedoms and opportunity, and that those opportunities are the very reason people like us can escape poverty.

 

I said it is NOT a physical resource, so of course it can't be anywhere, or be kept under lock and key.

Oh, but I do. You, however, do not.

Well, "messing with" is a pretty vague term, but when a landowner physically stops me from accessing the economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible to me at that location, he is self-evidently and indisputably interfering with my liberty right to use my body to sustain myself.

That's just false as a matter of objective physical fact. The landowner stops others from using -- i.e., with their bodies -- what nature provided, and which they would otherwise be at liberty to use. When Crusoe claims to own the island, and on that basis points his musket at Friday and tells him to either get to work or get back in the water, he is violating Friday's person. Full stop. Case closed. You're wrong.

You don't seem to get why.

He owns such a tiny slice of my right to liberty that its effect is imperceptible, especially if his quarter acre is far from where I live -- and of course, the effect is larger on the people nearby. But each of millions of other landowners owns their own tiny slice of my rights, and together they add up to most of my right to liberty, and everyone else's rights to liberty, too. Consider an analogous case: he owns the number 230,549,867, and will charge me rent if I use it. It doesn't affect me in any way. But if other people own 3, 6, 24, 59, 82, 187, etc., so that pretty much all the most useful numbers are someone's property, as almost all the most useful land is someone's property, and they want to charge me rent for using them, that is going to affect me.

 

That's not where my talents or interests reside. I'm the one person in a million who can think clearly and deeply about refractory philosophical problems, solve them, and explain the solutions clearly to those who don't have that ability. I have fans who beg me to write a book, and I am. Part of my reason for posting the truth in forums like this is to get experience dealing with the kind of fallacies and irrationalities people resort to when they don't like the truth -- and believe me, lots of times it's stuff I couldn't make up. But meanwhile, I have to earn a living.

I get it. You compare what you have with what you would have in any of a hundred $#!+-hole countries, and feel grateful. I also live in a wonderful country, and am aware of the benefits. But I am also aware of the problems, and how things could be better. Just because a country is a lot better than average is not a reason to think it couldn't and shouldn't be made even better.

 

If the advent of individual ownership of the land is theft, what is your solution to the disastrous history of the abuse of the commons, understanding that there are over 7.5 billion people living on earth today?

 

You are hallucinating.

It never ceases to amaze me how close-minded the American public can be. No wonder we elected a Donald Dork ...

 

I've heard this is a debate forum not a message board.

Would you indulge me and clarify your response. Why do you believe I am hallucinating?

 

Glad you asked. Garrett Hardin, the author of "The Tragedy of the Commons," said later that he wished he had called it "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons," because there have been successfully managed commons for millennia, the village commons of Britain before the Enclosures being a good example. So the question is how to manage them. Appropriation as private property is the quick and dirty way, but it abrogates the rights of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the resource without just compensation, and now we know there are better ways.

We can think of natural resources in three classes: minerals, fertility, and location. Minerals are depleted through extraction, and do not replenish themselves on a time scale comparable to a human lifetime. Those who deplete minerals should be required to pay the market price for doing so to the community of those who are thus deprived of the resource. Fertility replenishes itself and can be used sustainably, but is depleted by over-use. Arable soil, wild game, and fish stocks are good examples. Those who deprive the community of their use should pay the market price for doing so, under regulations that prevent over-exploitation and degradation of the resource. Location is not depleted by use, but the most productive use typically requires requires secure, exclusive tenure. Urban land and broadcast spectrum are good examples. Those who exclude others from the opportunities accessible by use of a given location should pay the market price of the opportunity to the community of those whom they deprive of it.