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I am reading Capital & Idelogy currently. I find interesting how Piketty challenges the view of property rights. Many think it is something completely natural,

I am reading Capital & Idelogy currently. I find interesting how Piketty challenges the view of property rights. Many think it is something completely natural, sacred. But he shows it is actually ideology. It is not "the nature of things". As I understand it in the book, property is not, and should not be seen as, a 100% inalienable human right. If it was so, it would be completely fair that slave-owners in Haiti and Santo Domingo were paid to forego slavery, when slavery was abolished. It was seen as a compensation for this new law that reduced the value of their property: slaves. Of course, slaves themselves were not compensated. Since they were the main beneficiaries of this new law, they actually had to pay for it in some cases. This is actually what happened. In the USA, there were discussions about a similar outcome, but the sheer enormity of the needed compensation made it impossible This was one big reason that lead to the civil war. This is the kind of weird, morally unacceptable reasoning about property rights that you will run into if you accept property as a all-powerful, unconstestable principle.

refurb 7y ago
Of course property rights are ideology. Anything to do with society and how it's organized is ideological. I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons).
- bisRepetita 7y ago
  >I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons) I don't thinl it is all or nothing. Private property is overall a very good idea and principle, and Piketty says that too. But when someone sees property it as inalienable right, at any level, is a problem. For example, if one person talks about a tax based on wealth, two people can have a healthy disagreement, and discuss how to implement. But when someone does not event want to consider it... because it would supposedly bring us back to communism dark ages, that is basic ideology in action, not rational thinking.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    I think that the idea of private property as an inalienable right is rooted in the enlightenment and on the same level as human rights. It is to protect individuals against spoliation by the state or powerful, and even to assert an even more basic right to own property at all. It obviously does not mean that property cannot be taken away from its owner but that this must follow a fair and lawful process.
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      The Enlightenment never really worked this through. In fact modern economics hijacks a lot of humanist rhetoric (including the idea of rationality and human rights) and glues it rather awkwardly onto concepts that are actually derived from monarchy - specifically individual sovereignty, and a kind of individualised version of divine right which elevates unlimited individual economic freedom-to-profit as the highest possible good. It's actually a bit of a mess, conceptually and practically. Property is really not a simple concept. Most people think of it as "Stuff I own" which reduces the argument to "I don't want the government stealing my house or my furniture," which sounds trivially obvious. In fact all claims on property are complex - see also IP, stocks, and so on - and personal ownership is always a trade-off between individual benefits and socialised/externalised costs. This doesn't just apply to extreme situations like a war economy, or impounding the proceeds of crime - it's inherent in the practice itself. You won't find much about that in orthodox economics.
      - atlih 7y ago
        Taxes are derived from monarchy as well.
  - cies 7y ago
    Exactly. The difference between private (capital what you make money off) and personal (what make physical use in life) property is interesting. I propose to make the threshold between these two very crisp, expressed in a currency amount, say 20 million US. Also the folk against the eternal protection of priv prop is not all authoritarian commies. You find them a lot on the left, all the way to the democratic socialists (not to be mistaken for socdems).
- amatthew 7y ago
  I mean, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for saying that there are loads of great alternatives besides choosing between property rights and the tragedy of the commons. https://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/OstromSJ.pdf https://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/OstromSJ...
  - leepowers 7y ago
    Ostrom's work is parochial. Her real-life examples center on small populations adjacent to large natural resources with access negotiated via long-standing community mores. That simply doesn't apply to the high-density populations urban environment where most of humanity lives, and where community ties have less sway. In these situations where most interactions are transactional a robust and fair regime of property rights is probably the ideal solution. With property rights the transaction costs are borne by the property owner up front, while in the community-based the transaction costs are encoded in tradition and personal relationships.
    - fulafel 7y ago
      I think you are nailing down a part of the equation that shouldn't be. What about other ways of organization for our societies? Transitions are possible.
- vidarh 7y ago
  No country has absolute property rights, and in fact many have massive carveouts. E.g freedom to roam in the Nordic countries is based on the idea that it is unthinkable that we should allow people's access to nature to be monopolised.
- justforyou 7y ago
  That's a drastic oversimplification. Most alternatives which have been tried were either both with extrememe ideological prejudice and in wildly different social and technological enviornments. Malthus does not stand up to scrutiny.
roenxi 7y ago
> This is the kind of weird, morally unacceptable reasoning about property rights that you will run into if you accept property as a all-powerful, unconstestable principle. The average person has no ability to connect past and future. Most people, when tested, struggle to connect yesterday with today. Typical people don't save enough, don't plan and don't risk assess. If society gives an inch on property rights as an all-powerful, uncontestable principle then how exactly are we supposed to give people who plan ahead enough power to influence the flow of society? For example, we're currently facing what is probably a 1:100 year pandemic. There are specialists out there (actuaries, some entrepreneurs, some doctors) who are comfortable with thinking about 1:100 year pandemics. If property rights were truly unbreachable, those people would quite happily build up a strategic supply of masks, tinned food, etc, etc ready for deployment in a crisis. Their families would make out like bandits once every hundred years; we'd be minting people as wealthy as Croesus. They don't do that. Because it would be stupid to. Because in a crisis, property rights break down a bit and it would be quickly identified that they don't 'need' supplies for 100,000 people and they would be pressured to give up supplies at an economically irrational price. Nigh unconstestable property rights and the ability to act like a bastard in the short term are critical tools for linking the past and the future. Break that at your peril. I know 95% of people don't care about that link as much as they'd like to; but the 5% who use it are the people who accomplish literally all the infrastructure creation and planning. You won't miss it until it is gone; even then most people don't seem to understand what is happening if the communist failures we see every decade or so are any guide.
- empiricus 7y ago
  Currently you are not allowed to make a big profit from selling masks, you can only donate them if you have huge quantities :(
- bisRepetita 7y ago
  This sounds like the "meritocracy" argument. To consider your example, in the current crisis, there are plenty of people who did not link anything from past to present, but who do show up in hospitals evry day, help people and save lives. They have a much bigger impact on society than the smart planner who could link past and present, but they see no rewards for it. Property rights do very little for those people. See how first responders of 9/11 got treated as another example. I am afraid that incentivising property rights to absurd levels such as protecting slave-owners through compensation, or protecting people stock-piling masks does not do much for society, even in the long run. There are ways to do it in an organised, moderate, law-abiding, rational and fair way though. To me, using words like "communism" is just a red-herring to avoid a rational discussion.
leepowers 7y ago
No country views property rights as inviolable. Eminent domain trumps individual property rights. Property can be seized pursuant to a lien due to debt, non-payment of taxes, criminal activity, etc. We're not operating under some slavish, unyielding notion of property rights. There's two distinct concepts being confused as one. The first concept is property rights in general. This concept is singular and correlated with the ideas of ownership and territory. This is may be a universal concept and may be a good candidate for designation as a "natural right". The second concept is the classification of what counts as property. This concept is numerous because we have to actually enumerate everything that counts as property. Slavery is exceptional because it counts people as property. The error is not with the first concept of property but an error of the second kind, an error of misclassification. Owning a farm and working the land is ok. Owning a farm and owning slaves to work the same plot is immoral. We see this reified during Reconstruction with Sherman's promise of forty acres and a mule. Where former slaves would be compensated by being granted property rights to the land they worked. Property rights were to be their salvation. As we all know that didn't happen. And a century of systematically denying the rights (including property rights) of their descendants (or anyone who looked like them) is the major reason for the disparities between black Americans and other racial groups.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > No country views property rights as inviolable. Eminent domain trumps individual property rights. Property can be seized pursuant to a lien due to debt, non-payment of taxes, criminal activity, etc. We're not operating under some slavish, unyielding notion of property rights. However, quite a few individuals do seem to view property rights as inviolable, and reject the exceptions you enumerated.
pas 7y ago
Rights are a fairly new thing altogether: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q
liamconnell 7y ago
Interestingly, the moment when property was supposedly deemed sacred was the end of the 18th century ("Life, liberty, estate", derived from Locke but was codified in society with the US Constitution and French Revolution). This idea is deeply ingrained in our values, but let's investigate what those founders actually believed. At the time of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were in agreement about playing down the protection of property. Franklin saw property as a "creature of society"[1]. This is why they changed the language of the Declaration of Independency to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The last is not meant to be a stand-in for "property" or "estate," it actually derives from a separate clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights[2]: "life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson intentionally dropped the property clause in the Declaration of independence, reflecting how he saw property: not an inalienable right. Entering into the early US, the majority of fiscal revenue was based off of taxing property (there was no income tax). This aligns with Franklin and Jefferson in basically saying that the state has a claim to the property that is possessed by citizens. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness#Virginia_Declaration_of_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... [2] The Virginia Declaration of Rights was an influence on Jefferson's Declaration of Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#Influences_and_legal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...

refurb 7y ago

Of course property rights are ideology. Anything to do with society and how it's organized is ideological. I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons).

bisRepetita 7y ago
>I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons) I don't thinl it is all or nothing. Private property is overall a very good idea and principle, and Piketty says that too. But when someone sees property it as inalienable right, at any level, is a problem. For example, if one person talks about a tax based on wealth, two people can have a healthy disagreement, and discuss how to implement. But when someone does not event want to consider it... because it would supposedly bring us back to communism dark ages, that is basic ideology in action, not rational thinking.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  I think that the idea of private property as an inalienable right is rooted in the enlightenment and on the same level as human rights. It is to protect individuals against spoliation by the state or powerful, and even to assert an even more basic right to own property at all. It obviously does not mean that property cannot be taken away from its owner but that this must follow a fair and lawful process.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    The Enlightenment never really worked this through. In fact modern economics hijacks a lot of humanist rhetoric (including the idea of rationality and human rights) and glues it rather awkwardly onto concepts that are actually derived from monarchy - specifically individual sovereignty, and a kind of individualised version of divine right which elevates unlimited individual economic freedom-to-profit as the highest possible good. It's actually a bit of a mess, conceptually and practically. Property is really not a simple concept. Most people think of it as "Stuff I own" which reduces the argument to "I don't want the government stealing my house or my furniture," which sounds trivially obvious. In fact all claims on property are complex - see also IP, stocks, and so on - and personal ownership is always a trade-off between individual benefits and socialised/externalised costs. This doesn't just apply to extreme situations like a war economy, or impounding the proceeds of crime - it's inherent in the practice itself. You won't find much about that in orthodox economics.
    - atlih 7y ago
      Taxes are derived from monarchy as well.
- cies 7y ago
  Exactly. The difference between private (capital what you make money off) and personal (what make physical use in life) property is interesting. I propose to make the threshold between these two very crisp, expressed in a currency amount, say 20 million US. Also the folk against the eternal protection of priv prop is not all authoritarian commies. You find them a lot on the left, all the way to the democratic socialists (not to be mistaken for socdems).
amatthew 7y ago
I mean, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for saying that there are loads of great alternatives besides choosing between property rights and the tragedy of the commons. https://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/OstromSJ.pdf https://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/OstromSJ...
- leepowers 7y ago
  Ostrom's work is parochial. Her real-life examples center on small populations adjacent to large natural resources with access negotiated via long-standing community mores. That simply doesn't apply to the high-density populations urban environment where most of humanity lives, and where community ties have less sway. In these situations where most interactions are transactional a robust and fair regime of property rights is probably the ideal solution. With property rights the transaction costs are borne by the property owner up front, while in the community-based the transaction costs are encoded in tradition and personal relationships.
  - fulafel 7y ago
    I think you are nailing down a part of the equation that shouldn't be. What about other ways of organization for our societies? Transitions are possible.
vidarh 7y ago
No country has absolute property rights, and in fact many have massive carveouts. E.g freedom to roam in the Nordic countries is based on the idea that it is unthinkable that we should allow people's access to nature to be monopolised.
justforyou 7y ago
That's a drastic oversimplification. Most alternatives which have been tried were either both with extrememe ideological prejudice and in wildly different social and technological enviornments. Malthus does not stand up to scrutiny.

roenxi 7y ago

> This is the kind of weird, morally unacceptable reasoning about property rights that you will run into if you accept property as a all-powerful, unconstestable principle. The average person has no ability to connect past and future. Most people, when tested, struggle to connect yesterday with today. Typical people don't save enough, don't plan and don't risk assess. If society gives an inch on property rights as an all-powerful, uncontestable principle then how exactly are we supposed to give people who plan ahead enough power to influence the flow of society? For example, we're currently facing what is probably a 1:100 year pandemic. There are specialists out there (actuaries, some entrepreneurs, some doctors) who are comfortable with thinking about 1:100 year pandemics. If property rights were truly unbreachable, those people would quite happily build up a strategic supply of masks, tinned food, etc, etc ready for deployment in a crisis. Their families would make out like bandits once every hundred years; we'd be minting people as wealthy as Croesus. They don't do that. Because it would be stupid to. Because in a crisis, property rights break down a bit and it would be quickly identified that they don't 'need' supplies for 100,000 people and they would be pressured to give up supplies at an economically irrational price. Nigh unconstestable property rights and the ability to act like a bastard in the short term are critical tools for linking the past and the future. Break that at your peril. I know 95% of people don't care about that link as much as they'd like to; but the 5% who use it are the people who accomplish literally all the infrastructure creation and planning. You won't miss it until it is gone; even then most people don't seem to understand what is happening if the communist failures we see every decade or so are any guide.

empiricus 7y ago
Currently you are not allowed to make a big profit from selling masks, you can only donate them if you have huge quantities :(
bisRepetita 7y ago
This sounds like the "meritocracy" argument. To consider your example, in the current crisis, there are plenty of people who did not link anything from past to present, but who do show up in hospitals evry day, help people and save lives. They have a much bigger impact on society than the smart planner who could link past and present, but they see no rewards for it. Property rights do very little for those people. See how first responders of 9/11 got treated as another example. I am afraid that incentivising property rights to absurd levels such as protecting slave-owners through compensation, or protecting people stock-piling masks does not do much for society, even in the long run. There are ways to do it in an organised, moderate, law-abiding, rational and fair way though. To me, using words like "communism" is just a red-herring to avoid a rational discussion.

leepowers 7y ago

No country views property rights as inviolable. Eminent domain trumps individual property rights. Property can be seized pursuant to a lien due to debt, non-payment of taxes, criminal activity, etc. We're not operating under some slavish, unyielding notion of property rights. There's two distinct concepts being confused as one. The first concept is property rights in general. This concept is singular and correlated with the ideas of ownership and territory. This is may be a universal concept and may be a good candidate for designation as a "natural right". The second concept is the classification of what counts as property. This concept is numerous because we have to actually enumerate everything that counts as property. Slavery is exceptional because it counts people as property. The error is not with the first concept of property but an error of the second kind, an error of misclassification. Owning a farm and working the land is ok. Owning a farm and owning slaves to work the same plot is immoral. We see this reified during Reconstruction with Sherman's promise of forty acres and a mule. Where former slaves would be compensated by being granted property rights to the land they worked. Property rights were to be their salvation. As we all know that didn't happen. And a century of systematically denying the rights (including property rights) of their descendants (or anyone who looked like them) is the major reason for the disparities between black Americans and other racial groups.

ardy42 7y ago
> No country views property rights as inviolable. Eminent domain trumps individual property rights. Property can be seized pursuant to a lien due to debt, non-payment of taxes, criminal activity, etc. We're not operating under some slavish, unyielding notion of property rights. However, quite a few individuals do seem to view property rights as inviolable, and reject the exceptions you enumerated.

pas 7y ago

Rights are a fairly new thing altogether: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q

liamconnell 7y ago

Interestingly, the moment when property was supposedly deemed sacred was the end of the 18th century ("Life, liberty, estate", derived from Locke but was codified in society with the US Constitution and French Revolution). This idea is deeply ingrained in our values, but let's investigate what those founders actually believed. At the time of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were in agreement about playing down the protection of property. Franklin saw property as a "creature of society"[1]. This is why they changed the language of the Declaration of Independency to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The last is not meant to be a stand-in for "property" or "estate," it actually derives from a separate clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights[2]: "life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson intentionally dropped the property clause in the Declaration of independence, reflecting how he saw property: not an inalienable right. Entering into the early US, the majority of fiscal revenue was based off of taxing property (there was no income tax). This aligns with Franklin and Jefferson in basically saying that the state has a claim to the property that is possessed by citizens. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness#Virginia_Declaration_of_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... [2] The Virginia Declaration of Rights was an influence on Jefferson's Declaration of Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#Influences_and_legal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...