6 ms·

>His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it. Th

• mox1 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
  • aminok 10y ago
    Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argument.
• smhost 10y ago
  The resource has to belong to the public to begin with. Your body belongs to you exclusively. We can play your game the other direction. If using "practically free" natural resources doesn't deprive you of your rights, you would have no objections to a company rolling into your neighborhood with bulldozers and taking all of the nutrient-rich soil so that they can turn it into something highly valuable and sell it to other people. You would have no objection to a company like Nestle claiming ownership of a local river and prohibiting nearby residents from drinking from it.
  • aminok 10y ago
    But your body came from natural resources initially. If you do not have a legitimate right to appropriate natural resources and make exclusive use of what you transform said resources into, it follows that you cannot have a right to your own body. I have no problem charging private entities rent for the appropriation of natural resources. What I have a problem with is demanding a share of the private property that they fashion out of those natural resources. From a public standpoint, it should make no difference if someone appropriates a ton of iron ore and places it in their living room as a collector's item, or if they use it to create a supercomputer. They should pay the same fee to the public in both cases, since it is the natural resource usage that should be charged, (and that the public has a legitimate right to charge a fee for), and not their private actions upon that material. But current tax laws, and Proudhon's argument which the parent comment cites, delegitimizes the value that one adds in the process of creating the latter.
    • smhost 10y ago
      I don't disagree with you on policy, I'm just pointing out that thought experiments pushed to their logical extreme don't really make sense. Before your body was formed, there was no "you", so the concept of ownership didn't apply. The "offender" in that case was the laws of physics, or some deity if you prefer.
      • kemayo 10y ago
        I suppose that if we want to take the "a legitimate right to appropriate natural resources and make exclusive use of what you transform said resources into" argument to its own silly-extreme, we could say that slavery is a natural right, because that sounds like a fairly good description of parents making a baby.
      • aminok 10y ago
        I don't follow. What offender?
• _delirium 10y ago
  > exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources that you've appropriated and applied work to in order to turn it into something highly valuable Things like land, mineral resources, and water are definitely not "abundant and practically free", but in most places, scarce and highly contested. Furthermore, the people who control them to a large extent did not work for them, but inherited them. So to what extent you have access to some portion of these scarce resources doesn't depend on your own labor, but on whether you happened to get lucky in the birth lottery and get born to someone who, in the 19th century, signed a favorable water-rights contract in California, or a favorable ranching/mineral-rights contract in Texas. You'd have to have quite some metaphysical faith in the "labor mixing" theory to believe that because some pioneer in the 1850s got a good deal on land or water, it metamorphosized into "his land" in perpetuity, even though he didn't create it. Or, in many cases, even put any actual labor into it in the first place (many of these deals were "paper" deals where east-coast financiers acquired Western land holdings, and sent other people to work them).
  • aminok 10y ago
    Natural resources that are scarce can be justifiably taxed, but the argument the parent comment paraphrased is not a Georgist one of taxing only land and other natural resources. It is claiming that no form of property rights are legitimate, and that all enforcement of property rights is a violation others' rights.
    • vidarh 10y ago
      No, I did not claim that no form of property rights are legitimate at all. If you think that, then read again. What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others. That does not mean it can not be legitimate - we reduce the liberty of others for various legitimate reasons all the time. It does mean that whenever we enforce property rights we are making a tradeoff between the liberties of differents sets of people.
      • aminok 10y ago
• TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  It's not absurd at all, and your first example is nonsensical. There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas, and extractive rentier capitalism, which is a zero sum game that works on the principle of monopolised control of limited resources - to the extent that it may actually deliberately limit those resources purely for profit. (See also Enron, pharmaceuticals, OPEC, and many other examples.) If I own a significant amount of property in a town I can increase rents to "the level the market will bear" - which will have the sole effect of enriching myself at the expense of everyone else in the town. Proponents of capitalism who don't understand how capitalism actually works always say "Yes, but someone can always compete with me and charge lower rents." Except they won't, and this never happens, because once an exploitative individual begins creating a monopoly, the feedback loop never works in that direction. It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own. Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results. Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous. A more nuanced definition of economic rights would severely limit rentier capitalism while encouraging creative capitalism - but intervening to maintain innovation before monopolies or cartels become the main political and economic players.
  • aminok 10y ago
    >It's not absurd at all, and your first example is nonsensical. It is absolutely absurd, and my first example makes perfect sense if one has the capacity to understand what is being discussed. >There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas, Proudhon's argument is that all property is "theft", so there is no such distinction in his philosophy. He was the angsty teenager with the edgy arguments of the 19th century. >It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own. Government is a monopoly of force. You want to cure market monopolies by expanding the power of a monopoly that employs threats of violence. Good luck with that. >Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results. This is unscientific quackery. You have provided no evidence at all for this inflammatory fearmongering. You're making a very specific argument about the cause of a particular outcome, in a system with an untold number of factors at play that could explain any set of outcomes. >Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous. Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights. Trying to justify this grotesque violation of human rights with economic quackery that you are trying to pass off as fact (just another variation of the "if you don't rob the rich guy, you'll starve to death" snake oil that is always used to justify socialist ideology that violate human rights) is childish idiocy.
• vidarh 10y ago
  > That makes absolutely no sense. People starve to death because we find protecting property rights more important than letting them eat. How does it not make sense? I am not saying that reducing enforcement of property rights does not negatively affect the owner. I am saying that there are plenty of cases where property rights reduces the ability of others to make us of it. This makes it a tradeoff, not something worthy of absolutes. > That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer. And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it. Liberty is not some absolute - pretty much every one us would agree that directly harming someone infringes more on their liberty than outlawing it would. It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection. But one that simultaneously increases our overall liberty by constraining a tool of oppression. > I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access. But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so. > deprives others of their rights. If you starve to death because you can not afford food, much less land to grow a crop, nor afford to move anywhere else, you might think otherwise. That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island. They were deprived of their right to life because others property rights were given precedence - to the extent of the UK giving military escorts to ships exporting food. Were those who died not deprived?
  • aminok 10y ago
    >People starve to death because we find protecting property rights more important than letting them eat. How does it not make sense? You're not framing the situation accurately. The question to be asked is: should people starve to death because we refuse to rob someone? The answer is yes. Even if you don't care about the moral reasons for this, you must see that a legal system which allows those who are resource-poor to legally plunder those who are resource-rich perverts incentives and misallocates capital, leading to less innovation and development, and consequently, less progress in reducing the total number of deaths. >And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it. My point was that even if they would be richer for being able to cannibalize you, denying them that 'right' is not morally wrong. They do not have a right to feast on you. Even if a group of people were starving, and murdering and cannibalizing you would let them all survive, it would be morally wrong for us as a society to allow that to happen. >It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection. Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to another individual's person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means. >If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access. You're not getting my point. I'm saying that if someone takes abundant resources, applies work to it, and produces something of value that is scarce, they should have full moral rights to it, yet Proudhon's argument, as well as yours, denies them that right. >But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so. And therefore it's perfectly suitable to tax valuable land. What is not appropriate is taxing everything a person generates. Let's say that each tonne of iron ore extracted from the crust costs society $10.00 in diminishment of natural resources, and in environmental damage. Let's say society charges an iron ore miner $50 to extract a tonne of iron ore, to compensate for these costs. Now if the iron ore miner pays the fee, mines the ore, smelts the iron, and fashions the iron into an incredible machine, you have absolutely no right to what the machine produces. An income tax is not a tax on using scarce natural resources, or a charge for damaging the environment. It is robbery against someone successfully generating economic value. It is a human rights violation. Proudhon's argument rationalizes the violation of human rights and legalized plunder against those who strive and succeed. >That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island. The Corn Laws prevented the Irish from importing food. It was not liberty that caused the Great Famine in Ireland.