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Agree? I couldn't disagree more. Property is liberty. The government, at least in the form of the Constitution of the USA, exists to ensure & protect ownership

Agree? I couldn't disagree more. Property is liberty. The government, at least in the form of the Constitution of the USA, exists to ensure & protect ownership of property. My whole thesis in this thread is that you can achieve complete self-sufficiency with little more than a few quite affordable acres, and that it is perfectly reasonable to expect every able-bodied adult to produce at least that much by some equivalent effort. Go to zillow.com, enter a very low price range as search criteria, and select whatever state you like. Land is absolutely available to anyone who wants it. Should you buy land, the government exists in major part to precisely identify what land is yours, to defend it, and to provide at least minimal infrastructure (roads, mail) to facilitate it. You are in no way forced to sell labor-power for wages, it's just a whole lot easier & more convenient & productive than tilling the soil the hard way. Capitalism succeeds precisely because mutually-beneficial contracts let people voluntarily leverage each other for greater mutual productivity. I'm not sure how you construe "taking [property] is theft" into "property is theft". Polar opposites to me. You're landless? you don't want to sell your labor-power for wages? For just $8000 (obtainable via gov't welfare or your own productivity) I can put you on 20 acres next week, with a comprehensive multi-thousand-page manual on how to live off it.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Go to zillow.com, enter a very low price range as search criteria, and select whatever state you like. If you punch in a max price of $1, interestingly enough, you find foreclosure auctions on other people's urban and suburban houses. Nothing that would allow you to leave the capitalist market and live self-sufficiently, though. >You are in no way forced to sell labor-power for wages, Well yes, I am. I will die of starvation if I don't, while also homeless, because all available means of subsistence on this continent are monopolized by private owners (including, in many places, the state). >You're landless? you don't want to sell your labor-power for wages? For just $8000 (obtainable via gov't welfare or your own productivity) I can put you on 20 acres next week, with a comprehensive multi-thousand-page manual on how to live off it. First of all, I know of no welfare program which will simply give me $8000 to go live off the land. Secondly, if unused land costs anything at all (rather than being available by usage), then, as previously established, you're forcing people to work for wages. You then have the next problem, that even if unused land was just given away for free, for instance under Homestead Acts, that land was of course forcibly stolen from its native inhabitants if it's in the Western Hemisphere or Australasia. Every single scheme of capital or real property ever established in the world was established by violence. You can't get away from that. Half the time, it was done deliberately to dispossess self-sufficient peasant societies and create, artificially, a cheap labor force.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Go to zillow.com, enter a very low price range as search criteria, and select whatever state you like. If you punch in a max price of $1, interestingly enough, you find foreclosure auctions on other people's urban and suburban houses. Nothing that would allow you to leave the capitalist market and live self-sufficiently, though. >You are in no way forced to sell labor-power for wages, Well yes, I am. I will die of starvation if I don't, while also homeless, because all available means of subsistence on this continent are monopolized by private owners (including, in many places, the state). >You're landless? you don't want to sell your labor-power for wages? For just $8000 (obtainable via gov't welfare or your own productivity) I can put you on 20 acres next week, with a comprehensive multi-thousand-page manual on how to live off it. First of all, I know of no welfare program which will simply give me $8000 to go live off the land. Secondly, if unused land costs anything at all (rather than being available by usage), then, as previously established, you're forcing people to work for wages. You then have the next problem, that even if unused land was just given away for free, for instance under Homestead Acts, that land was of course forcibly stolen from its native inhabitants if it's in the Western Hemisphere or Australasia. Every single scheme of capital or real property ever established in the world was established by violence. You can't get away from that. Half the time, it was done deliberately to dispossess self-sufficient peasant societies and create, artificially, a cheap labor force.