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I recently bought Proudhon's "What is Property?". I'm sure it's going to be an interesting read.

• happyscrappy 11y ago
  Is property theft or is property liberty? Proudhon's nineteenth century opinion is itself conflicted.
  • danbruc 11y ago
    I think any attempt to logically deduce absolute arguments for or against property is doomed. It's just a convention made by a society or any other group of people. You could just put everything including the things everyone produces in a public pool and everyone can use or consume bits and pieces probably according to some rules. Or you assign an owner to everything by some rules who then has special rights to decide about what happens to the things he owns. Or any combination of both extremes. I guess we ended up with property because it is the system that was easier to realize or caused less issues but I see no way in which there could be any fundamental truth behind the concept of property.
    • happyscrappy 11y ago
      Regardless of your concepts of property someone has to be the arbiter of disputes, which leads back to the need for a formal system for dealing with property.
      • danbruc 11y ago
        You can of course always widen the definition of a word to capture anything. Let's for example say all cars are in a public pool. If you sit in the driver's seat you can use the car until you leave the seat. You could now say that the car is your property while you are sitting in the driver's seat or you could say that all people own all the cars. Neither matches the common usages of property well. But you are of course right, it is a resource allocation problem and it will only work well if there are commonly accepted and enforced rules, but there is no need for this system to resemble our current system and understanding of property.