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> * The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!* Be caref

> * The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!* Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs. Private companies are of the second kind: more freedom for shareholders, fewer freedoms for employees… and if they’re big and inevitable enough (like YouTube), that’s fewer freedoms for users as well. Even if we didn’t distinguish the two kinds of property, I could easily twist your sentence into meaning that the whole point of property is to make sure rich owners have more freedom than the poor. Which is probably not the point you were trying to make. Freedom is a tricky thing to balance.

jameshart 3y ago
Owning a factory doesn’t give you the right to tell people what to do. Having employment contracts with people gives you that right.
rhelz 3y ago
Freedom is certainly a tricky thing to balance, and private property rights are not absolute. But neither are freedom of speech rights. Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations would otherwise be subject to. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc. So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways. Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.

jameshart 3y ago

Owning a factory doesn’t give you the right to tell people what to do. Having employment contracts with people gives you that right.

rhelz 3y ago

Freedom is certainly a tricky thing to balance, and private property rights are not absolute. But neither are freedom of speech rights. Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations would otherwise be subject to. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc. So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways. Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.