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I consider myself pretty far anarcho-libertarian in many things (especially the removal of the exclusive use of force from any way humans organize) but I just can't pitch a world where you don't own anything and can't claim something as yours. As long as we exist in a world of scarcity we need some means of claiming something as ours, especially if we spend our time to acquire it without harming others.

Likewise, the only way I can think to facilitate the concept of private property (including land - I don't prescribe to the ideology that since you can't pick up the dirt to the core of the planet and the air some distance over your head, plus the coordinates and area of that portion of the planets surface and move it it can't belong to you) is to have some kind of collaborative agreement between all parties in good faith to not do business with anyone that actively violates any member parties property rights, and you need to depend on that collaborative organization to have enough economic influence to keep people from robbing them. But likewise, if they have sufficient economic influence to manipulate behavior, you are pretty much at a borderline government because they can act in self interest to harm others for their own benefit since others depend on their economic productivity.

So how do you not "own" anything and have a functioning interaction between peoples? How could someone walk up to me, take the computer I just placed on a table (through no altercation of force, which is more cut and dry - party A engaged in violence against B, and must be ostracized by the group - who owns what is more nebulous - but even who initiates violence can be a conflated argument) and walk away with it, and I lose that possession but have no recourse to claim its mine. I mean, I could go and pick up someone elses laptop, but I "lost" anything I put into the work on mine (without distributed backups or something, which also aren't "mine"), and the party I take the laptop from will lose any input they impart on theirs.

I don't see how you can have productivity without ownership, but you can't enforce ownership without either violence or a collective entity power enough economically to influence behavior to their whims, which is no better than most governments. They end up acting in their own self interest, which often means witch hunts.




I sympathize with your sentiments because it's very difficult to break out of the "conventional wisdom" of the zeitgeist.

If it helps, consider that the idea of democracy was very radical to the age when conventional wisdom said only property owners deserved political power. After all, the country does belong to them. In comparison, the idea that everyone had equal say was basically inconceivable, and function infeasible with lack of ballot technology anyway.

Now substitute the word economic for political, it's similar to how capitalism works today. The factory owner gets to tell you what do because he owns the place. "Communism" as an idea wasn't any sort of immaculate conception, but the simple application of democracy to the economic realm. Socialism was just an intermediate step from capitalism (ie aristocracy) whereby only the factory employees (the stakeholders) are given input rather than everyone.

As to the "impractical" argument, as mentioned folks must've had the same reservations before all the implementation details of democracy (eg republics, parliament, congress, etc) were hashed out. For example, in your computer case, it might be simply recognized that sharing some things is not practical and thus some system of reservations/allocation is devised, just as we figured out who gets to write laws when it's clear not everyone can it simultaneously (or otherwise it becomes a mess).


I don't think there is enough evidence to go either way, but from the traditional animalistic self-preservation mindset, I don't see any large group of people willingly giving up their right to "own" things. It seems like an implied natural order of things to possess - in the presence of scarce resources, it is impossible to organize socially in a way without force that also "forces" people to give up their right to try to keep things theirs. It is also impractical for the vast majority of resources.

Factory ownership and ownership of labor I always felt wasn't an issue with property rights but with an ongoing millennial long battle with inheritance and grandfathering, compounded by race and sex biases. The elites of a thousand years ago have, indirectly, maintained perptual ownership of the upper echelons of society for hundreds of years.

If you started everyone truly equal, without one man getting a billion dollars inheritance and another being born as a crack baby, ownership rights wouldn't be much of an issue because by merit you would come to possess things you deserve through your efforts. I also think it would be easier to eliminate illogical biases and classism towards other humans than to eliminate the desire to own and possess physical goods.

The reason the industrial revolution had so many issues revolving around the introduction of wage labor was that, even then, very few owned tremendous land and material resources and there was a great wealth divide. That divide enables some to exploit the desire for goods of the other to put them in a position where they don't benefit from their own productivity.

I am for communal ownership of the workplace, and that any worker who doesn't get his share of the profits is effectively a wage slave (just at a wage they agreed to be enslaved at). But I don't think you can render all land, material goods, etc public and expect anyone to aspire or behave any certain way because on a consistent basis humans reveal themselves to act in self interest.

Maybe in another hundred years when we have robots fabbing carbon from rock and they can manufacture anything on demand for no labor and there is no scarcity, communal resource ownership will be a reality. It will at least be essential with an automated means of production as is emerging now, because if the extremely small ultrawealthy class continues to own foundries of unlimited productivity with magnitudes less human capital invested, they are going to drain everyone except other wealthy automation owners dry. It is happening now, but the extreme case is there is no need for the worker and the owner controls the resource production in entirety. I'd also argue we are in an exponential spiral towards this now that human capital is no longer the most in demand resource to consume in the market.

But I think that just requires an extremely progressive tax system (although I lean anarcho, I still can't construct a functioning society without at least some consensus representative law council, even if they can't exercise force, that can direct culture through logical process rather than mob mentality, so I call myself libertarian) to allow people to prosper, but to prevent the run away successes (Apple is the obvious candidate of our age) from accumulating absurd amounts of total economic wealth and exploiting it as ownership of the means of production.


IMO people are too caught up with the ideal of personal ownership, and this likely stems from being constantly bombarded with an individual culture of consumption. "Communism" doesn't mean there's no "ownership" all, only that ownership/possession is determined by society at large, not unlike democracy for political decision making. For example, if a few friends pool money to buy something none can afford on their own and find some equitable way to allocate possession -- or similarly the instinct to share is already quite strong with close tribe members (family, BFFs). Likewise, sharing the burden of work is also fairly natural, eg roommates and chore schedule. Note the similarities to the democratic goal of sharing (political) power, where potential fear of giving up "ownership" of personal determination (ie having to follow everyone's rules) isn't realized as long as implementation of election/leadership is reasonably fair.

Frankly you already seem like a libertarian in the classical sustainable sense, and not the american "free market" bastardization built only to protect the upper crust with the language of "freedom" (from taxation). A parting point worth mentioning in that vein is the "free market" and all its siblings are entirely artificial constructs of our mutually agreed rules. For instance, if you desired to trade your wool for my corn, the only incentive I have to leave with only the wool instead of the corn, the wool, and a slave is the social consequence of break the rules. Everyday we already implicitly follow hundreds/thousands of rule of conduct, so I have little reason to doubt that people can live perfectly fine with more equitable rulesets of conducting economics just as they have for politics.


I like private property. I love to collect things. I just think that it is a privilege awarded by men with sticks, and the more things that you allow to be private property, the bigger your state has to be. If you're a socialist, or a communist, the state growing in order to enforce interpersonal relations doesn't trouble you. If you're a "Libertarian," you don't acknowledge that the problem exists.

>land - I don't prescribe to the ideology that since you can't pick up the dirt to the core of the planet and the air some distance over your head, plus the coordinates and area of that portion of the planets surface and move it it can't belong to you

Me neither:) I subscribe to the position that justifications for private property are things like "I made that" or "this was given to me by someone who made it" or even "I can make the best use of it right now." The only justification for land is that you can defend it. The only ways to get land is to draw lines on the ground and threaten to kill anyone who crosses them, or to license the land from somebody who did. Same for air, oceans and rivers. Land ownership is crystallized violence.

When you have closed groups of people agreeing to defend each other's private property with violence, the only thing stopping them from claiming anyone outside of the group's property as their own private property is the size of their guns. As history shows, this starts with finding representatives (self-appointed or otherwise) to "sell" them land, and with the reification of the title to that land, forcing its residents to pay rent under pain of death. This is called wage labor.




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