Precisely, Len! Precisely!
Right, that doesn’t make sense to me. How is selling it all off to a single person or entity not central planning, but doing so to multiple ones central planning? It doesn’t make sense to me either that passing the whole thing to a single owner is a very good idea for a proponent of decentralization and competition to suggest. Would it not seem to make sense that the more different independant entities there are controlling such things, the better? And that the notion of passing it into the hands of one single individual or institution is kind of monopolistic, or at least quasi-monopolistic in comparison to the alternative?
You’re making quite a leap there. The reality is that a powerful criminal organization currently controls a lot of property. I recognize that reality, which is precisely why I don’t try “homesteading a public park.” I realize that the powerful criminals would kill me if I tried such a thing. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re criminals, and their property is stolen.
For some reason you react to the situation by deciding that the criminals weren’t criminals after all. But I’m the one denying reality. Hmmm. It’s like words suddenly mean their opposites when you get your hands on them…
–Len.
You still do not understand the austrian theory of monopoly.
Granting property rights of public property to those who currently control it is the safest way to privatize property, simply by virtue of the fact that they can wreck things in the process of fighting them for control of the property.
That’s a false dichotomy. There are other choices beside (1) giving clear title to the thieves that stole the property originally, and (2) declaring everything up for grabs and calling for a feeding frenzy. It’s clear enough that #2 is problematic. But it’s equally clear that #1 is completely immoral.
–Len.
You’re not getting it back unless you’re willing to amnesty people for what they thought was legal. In fact, you’re not getting anywhere.
The morality of it is irrelevant. Inequality is immoral, but it is a fact that we accept. The material reality is that you will have to fight them for it, or let them keep it and have peace.
So your claim is that the Austrian understanding of monopoly requires that government property be given to politicians if it is to be privatized? That is an awfully odd view.
I take it your point on the Austrian view of monopoly is that it isn’t monopoly for one person to control the good, as long as there are no forceful barriers to entry. I agree. But I don’t see that this helps with the question at hand. It seems, from the previous posts, that your claim is that all parts of a city must be owned by a single person or entity. On the Austrian view, it’s true, this doesn’t imply a monopoly. But it doesn’t follow that you’re correct. You’ll need a positive explanation for why garbage collection cannot be owned separately from subways.
I have no idea. I don’t imply to know this to be true either way. But to act in order to separate them is to assume this, just as to act in order to join them. The only correct choice, given what we know of economic calculation, is to leave them as they are to the new owner.
Some of the weakest pro-border arguments I have ever seen in this thread.
Basically it all boils down to Boudreaux’s (and Hoppe’s) argument that since we don’t live in a free society, we should view “public” property as privately owned property belonging to the government. Most of us reject that view for the same reason Stranger gave about stolen property. The land (or the taxes used to pay for it) were stolen from the people. Anything that is stolen is not legitimately “owned”. If you know who something was stolen from, do you have a moral obligation to return it to them? If so, who would get the proceeds from this city that we are going to sell?
The only logical conclusion is that everyone has as much of a right to that property as anyone else, basically putting it in the same category as any other unowned land.
On what moral code is inequality immoral?
Your last few posts seem like arguments against certain very poor libertarian strategies. I agree with that point, they are lousy strategies for libertarians to follow. But to claim that morality is entirely irrelevant makes me wonder just what the hell we’ve been doing on this thread. If morality is irrelevant, let’s just kill people who disagree. If you’re now arguing that might makes right, maybe we should just fight over it. In any case, I don’t see how statements like “morality is irrelevant” have any place in a discussion of libertarian theory.
Your logical conclusion has no concern for the material consequences of such a policy, which would be widespread chaos. It is also not logical, since, while homesteaded property is not used by anyone, thus making it possible to be homesteaded, public property is used by many people for different reasons, all of whom would immediately be in conflict with one another if your policy were to be imposed.
We do not do this because it is not in our interests to do so. This is an economics forum, we understand that people are motivated by self-interest, not by morality.
This is absurd. I’m not “acting in order to separate them” - I’m letting the market decide. If the same buyer wishes to buy both, he can. That’s an entrepreneurial decision, and ex post he’ll find out if he was right or not. Your suggestion to bundle them pushes aside the one thing that can calculate - the market.
The wertfrei nature of economics doesn’t imply that the people economics talks about have no morals either. It simply means that the laws of economics apply to them regardless of their motivations. Your claim that people are nothing but economic actors might be well received in a neoclassical forum, though. Mises explicitly rejects it by saying that economics makes no claims about what motivates people. It may as well be morality as self-interest. But the fact is when you talk about political economy, values and morals do come into play.
You’re assuming that the good can be reassembled at no cost. It’s tantamount to sawing a car in half and selling off each half under the justification that the market can calculate if it should be welded back together.
It’s interesting how people can use some terminology, a few incomplete ideas and a lot of logic-twisting to present conservatism and racism as libertarianism…sort of “war is peace” I guess…
Well, Stranger also believes that children are ‘owned’ by their parents. So he’s a libertarian (property rights, you know). On the other hand, people who don’t believe that politicians have the ‘right’ to ‘own’ their subjects(or their subjects’ property), are commies…
By the way, libertarians never concerned, or concern themselves with ‘morals’. We only care about the price of gold.
We seem to have found the next in a list of words you understand differently than the rest of us. There’s nothing immoral about “inequality.” There’s unequal intelligence in the world, so where does the “immorality” lie? Are the smart ones immoral? Or the dumb ones? It looks like you say “immoral” when you mean “unfortunate.”
Stealing is immoral. We don’t give thieves title to their loot.
Sure. The material reality is that when Don Corleone demands protection money from me, I’ll probably pay it, because I like all my body parts right where they are. You once again seem to think that means something.
–Len.
The problem is that I don’t think what you’re proposing would really work in our modern society without a dissolution of government.
Government will always be around to fight “discrimination,” “intolerance,” and “racism,” even if the property owners of a certain city or region just don’t want immigrants.
Are you going to make the mafia turn in their properties along with the other criminal gang you say doesn’t have property? If you mean what you say, the mafia must be made to give up everything they have too.