So basically your answer is that a miracle happens and results in the state being overthrown from within.
I never ponder the question how best to privatize. I am not concerned by that, since I have nothing to privatize in my possession. I ask how to achieve peace and freedom that would create the impetus for others to privatize and thus provide to the market goods that were once not available. That is the economic question.
Duh. Someone here has a workable plan for eliminating the state without violence? Then why the hell hasn’t it been implemented yet?
Your answer, on the other hand, is to rename “government” as “Gov. Inc.,” and pretend it’s a private entity. That’s even worse than no plan. It’s worse than retarded. It’s Orwell’s worst nightmare. Public is private! Coercion is voluntary!
You have no peace and freedom to offer, so why are you concerned by that either? Your proposal so far is to redefine words such that the status quo becomes “peace and freedom.”
–Len.
More red baiting!
Coming from the guy that basically says he doesn’t care how the market would solve the problem of decentralization in a market anarchist society, I’m not taking that seriously.
Besides, if ethics stands in the way of economics, then I’m a primitivist. Seeing as ethics support economics, however, I call myself a counter-economist.
Uh huh… Except, often times when workers are seen as cooperating to homestead the land as a group, it would be considered a syndicate of workers. How they deal with this syndicate is up to them, however, the fact remains that the syndicate exists and the owners own the land in shares.
I don’t know what your point was about the free market coming out of ownership and I don’t know what relevance it has. If you’re saying that the free market requires everything to be owned, then apparently a free market is unattainable.
This doesn’t answer the question to the relevance of ethics.
Oh God, a Randroid!
Economics may be value-free, but libertarianism is definitely not..
You don’t make much sense, do you? Social cooperation and Peace are the same thing. One can’t exist if the other doesn’t. And what do you mean by ‘just’ law anyway ? You’ve just said that there’s no moral problem, only ‘economics’. If that’s the case, the word ‘just’ is meaningless. You should drop it if you want to achieve minimal consistency. (I suggest you also use legislation instead of law…)
No, this is not what would happen. People could only post a sign on the front of their lawn, not at the front of the town.
Let me ask you something. If the State of New York declared bankruptcy tommorow and announced they would privatize New York City in order to fund their pension obligations, then you would be opposed to that? You would believe this to be a reduction in freedom?
Apparently you’ve never seen La Zona, or any gated subdivision anywhere, or apparently never been anywhere without front lawns. Yours is an argument from wishful thinking.
I’d be delighted–since that would be an example of the sort of “miracle” I described earlier. It fits my view just fine.
So why are you asking as if I’d be less than ecstatic? My only guess is that you’re confused about something. Perhaps you think “privatize the city” means “sell the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, to Warren Buffett”? It doesn’t mean that. Or perhaps you think the pension fund complicates matters somehow? It doesn’t. Though you’re raising interesting questions. If the city is privatized, then the municipal government disappears. Unless you think that privatization creates a “private government,” which is a contradiction in terms, or you really mean partial privatization. Because after the city is fully privatized, who is paying these pensions?
–Len
I think you’re hitting a language barrier. He means that such signs can only be posted by the property owner. In general, a town is not a property with an owner, so nobody has the power to ban blacks from TOWN. Such could only be done if ALL the property owners, including the owners of the roads, sidewalks, etc., agreed to such a rule. That might happen, but it would be extremely rare.
I couldn’t even convince my town to ban francophones, and they annoy the crap out of EVERYONE.
–Len
Your view is that the state is not entitled to the money from privatization because the property either does not exist or does not belong to them. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Nonsense. One only needs the rights to the outer property, in the United States typically held by homeowner associations or Co-ops for residential buildings, and not the rights to every inner property, to block people passing through the outer property.
Multiple people have claims like who? You just said ownership comes from production. You can not own something if you don’t make it produce. So who are these multiple people with claims are? You are, and continually have been, trying to equate ownership with use. You claim that multiple people will have claims to government property, and I say that is fine.
But all we have to ask is, did anyone claiming ownership “produce” this? Not, did anyone of you participate in receiving services from it, including paying any fees or upkeep on it, but did any of you produce this? This will rule out most them as having legitimate ownership claims over government property. If some of them did produce it then it will be up to them to find someone to arbitrate the matter. I don’t know why you think they would fight it out, since the aggressor would be breaking a cardinal rule right off, thus taking them off the list of possible “owners”. So are you asking how I think that arbitration will develop? Well, since production is proof of ownership, the one able to make it produce is obviously the owner. Like I said, someone claiming to own the power lines obviously has no way to make those power lines produce anything unless they have the neccesary resources (ie tools) to put those lines to use.
Until you lose the concept that government owned property is public property or that the public has some equal legitimate claim to it, I don’t know what else I can say about the matter. When someone pays their taxes, they haven’t purchased anything. The taxpayer doesn’t own X amount of the roads.
The free market flows out of self-ownership. When you mix your resources with your labor, you are producing something. When you produce something, you own it. Or, you can own it because you got it from someone else. You can’t own something just because you said, “Hey thats mine.”
That is of course the applicable principle for all goods produced in the present and the future under private law, what we call homesteading. It however does not provide any insight into goods produced by government enterprise in the past. As you said, no one claiming ownership produced the good, since by law the good does not belong to anyone. There are therefore no claims of rightful ownership to the good, even though the good is quite valuable. What this means is that many people will want to appropriate it for themselves with no single party having a rightful claim to the good, what is generally called a tragedy of the commons. Democratic government resolves this problem by re-electing the controlling owner at regular periods. This replaces one form of communism with another, but still does not provide us with a legitimate producer.
Correctly interpreted, this means that the public property ought to go to the highest bidder (the highest bidder under capitalism is also the one making the strongest claim as to his management aptitude by taking on the most risk). But then the unresolved question is who gets to keep the money?
What I hope you’re not saying is that whoever shows up with some tools in front of a pylon now owns the power lines, as that would also create a race to appropriation (multiple people can be qualified) and a tragedy of the commons.
Mwahaha!
Right. Only the individual owners could decide such things for themselves. In the absence of unanimous consent within the entire community, there could not be a uniform restriction policy. So long as even one individual property owner on the margin wishes to have an open policy, the homogeniety is going to be broken up.
A town is a whole freaking town, not just a dinky little subdivision. And just because I said “lawn” does not mean I was stating a lawn is the only place someone could put a sign. If you need me to spell it out for you, a sign saying keep out can only be put up on ones own personal property, in a free society. Unless a town is wholy owned by one individual, then no, someone could not put up a sign saying keep out in front of the town, in a free society. Try and remember, we are talking about a free society. In a free society, you would never be able to get a whole town to agree to keep out a certain kind of people, unless the town is only made up of a very few people. Of course, then, it is not a town.
That is again an incorrect statement. I can appreciate that you want to turn the discussion to one of the tragedy of the commons, but I am just not interested in the idea that there is some kind of call to a greater good to be served by centralizing power. If that is where you want to go with your argument I will pass. If that isn’t where you want to go than it isn’t what we would generally call a tragedy of the commons.
It is unowned property and should be treated as such. I think you bring this up again, I will address it there.
How is that a problem with unowned property? Who gets the money if someone does that with some other unowned property, out in the middle of a national park? No one. It is unowned.
Why are you hoping that isn’t what I am saying and why do you keep referring to the tragedy of the commons? We are not talking about a finite resource, we are talking about disposable property. People will not be flocking to the power lines. They wouldn’t know what the hell to do with them even if they wanted them. For someone to be able to claim ownership on them, they have to make them produce. Very simple concept. If there are several people that are able to do that, they will find a way to either do it together or find a compromise. If one of them uses force or violence, then the other ones will not put up with it. I hardly see anything like that happening though, since we are not talking about a finite resource. A competitor that is more efficent can create the exact same system and make it profitable. Either way, in the free market, the best will rise to the top.
The tragedy of the commons argument is a typical statis (or if you prefer, socialist) argument that is misapplied to situations that don’t deal with a finite resource. Already been down that road enough times to know that it is nothing but circular reasoning. Boring.
You still don’t seem to understand the difference between unowned and public property. The government must exclude appropriations from public property because it is desired by many people (otherwise why would they bother with exclusion), which is not true of unowned property. (Unowned property is by definition not desirable as no one has revealed a preference to appropriate it.)
Once this difference is understood, then the idea of homesteading public property is revealed as nonsense.
Once again, that is only argumentation from incredulity and not economic or philosophical reasoning.