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As a society, the moment that you allow for private property, you take over responsibility for the livelihood of everyone. Property is theft on the common good
by esarbe 7y ago
As a society, the moment that you allow for private property, you take over responsibility for the livelihood of everyone.
Property is theft on the common good. If you steal from the common good, you have to deal with the consequences. If you deprive people from making their own living, you have to accept that these people will find ways and means.
You didn't build that.
- jaldhar 7y agoAs a society, the moment you allow for freedom of Religion, you take over responsibility for everyone’s practice of religion. As a society, the moment you allow the right to bear arms, you are responsible for providing everyone who wants one with a gun. The “commons” are waste land until they are improved by human effort. (I’m assuming you are not a nomadic hunter/gatherer.). That is the ultimate basis for property rights. It’s true I didn’t build that but neither did those homeless moms. What they are doing is theft.
- esarbe 7y agoYour counter-examples (thanks for providing them, by the way) don't quite work. Sure, they work grammatically, but not contextually. Both the right to bear arms and the right to religlious freedom are immaterial rights. There's not necessity to bear arms for my survival, there's no necessity for religlious freedom for my survival. There's however the necessity of food and shelter for my survival. As soon as you take these away by assuming property rights, you take on the burden of supporting everyone that might have used said assumed property for their own survival. Since we all started out as nomadic hunter/gatherers, this assumption of the "commons" being a wasteland does not quite hold, don't you think?
- jaldhar 7y agoYes, we all started out as hunter/gatherers millennia ago. We are not now. We have been mostly improving the wastelands ever since. (I say mostly because occasionally we re-waste them again but thankfully less and less often these days.)
- esarbe 7y agoI'm not sure that I would consider i.e. cutting down the amazon rain forest and turning them into pastures for cattle or fields for mono cultures as an improvement of wasteland. Pretty much the same happened to the European rain forest and is currently happening to east-Asian rain forests. What we've been doing is changing the environment to suit our needs as agriculturalists, but that's not an objective improvement from wasteland to garden-of-Eden. Indeed; exactly with this transformation from "wasteland" (as you would maybe call it) to predatively exploited ecosystem (as I would call it) we (as agriculturalists) have infringed on the rights of all hunter/gatherers that have been there before. We've set up enclosures to limited their ability to travel from hunting ground to hunting ground, we've slaughtered their prey animals (i.e. bisons), all the while claiming that their are uncivilized and barbaric and that this is all for their best.
- jaldhar 7y agoThe Amazon has 50,000 species of beetles which is good for beetles I guess but what makes it wasteland or not is what it does for humans. There as well we can discuss whether cattle or biodiversity is a better improvement but that is a different topic.
- esarbe 7y agoThe Amazon (and similar environments) has been supporting human life for millennia. Even if you discount beetles (as I wouldn't, since beetles are awesome), calling it a wasteland does not seem very appropriate to me.
- jaldhar 7y agoWaste as used in e.g. the Domesday Book literally means “land not under [human] cultivation.”
- esarbe 7y agoThat's an interesting definition I knew not about. Thanks for sharing! https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wasteland https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wasteland In the previous discussion, I was mainly focused on the 'barren' and 'barely inhabitable' aspects. If your sentiment was about cultivation; yeah, you're probably right. Hunter/gatherer societies usually do very little cultivation. (There's some indication that the Amazonas river fronts were heavily cultivated in pre-columbian times, as the presence of terra preta implies, though) In that case however we'll run into the discussion about 'improving the land', since arguably cutting down woods to make room for agriculturalists is not improving the land for hunter/gatherers.
- jaldhar 7y agoAt the most you’ve established that homeless moms need to live somewhere. It is not necessary to live in a particular house in L.A. for survival.
- esarbe 7y agoIf I've established that, I'm already very happy we've had this exchange. Now we can bicker about the details. :D
- jaldhar 7y agoSure. It is possible to be against theft and for compassion at the same time. However I am not in CA and it seems “society” over there has decided its not interested in housing homeless moms.
- esarbe 7y agoIf society is unwilling to take responsibility, then society has no right to expect obedience.
- jaldhar 7y agoJust a while ago weren’t you arguing that social needs trump individual rights. (I.e. the right to property.) If society through its chosen spokesmen decides homeless moms don’t need to be provided housing (they are still free to find it in some legal way.) why can it not compel their obedience?
- esarbe 7y agoI don't think I argue from social needs. I solely argue from individual needs and rights; the need of the individual to food and shelter; the right to existence; the appropriation of the common good for individual property. Please let me know if I diverge from that at any point, since "social needs" are highly subjective, whereas the individual needs usually aren't.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoSpot on!
- whb07 7y agoYou sound like someone who isn’t aware of the wonderful events where tens of millions of people suffered and died of starvation and political prosecution where such schemes were plentiful. Perhaps living in the USSR was indeed the golden years for you?
- esarbe 7y agoYou sound like someone ... [insert boring and repetitive, possible derogatorive epithet that doesn't provide anything useful to the conversation and end with a snarky, rhetorical question].
- foxyv 7y ago> "Property is theft on the common good." Who are you? George Orwell?
- esarbe 7y agoIndeed, I am. How did you figure it out? Seriously; where does any property come from?