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1

From the “Human Rights” as Property Rights essay on here. The last paragraph is just mind-blowing.

I don’t know where to being. With respect, I disagree with your perspective of property ownership. The concept of ownership to begin with is erroneous. An example that I often use to demonstrate the absence of ownership is the “borrowed water” example. Right now inside your body exists, a measurable amount of water. Whose water is that? Does that water belong to you? Soon, your body will involuntarily excrete said water and you will have to ingest more. In a sense, you’re borrowing that water. You have temporary perceived ownership over it. No matter how much you would like to keep that water for yourself, your body uses it to remove indigestible food particles and contaminants. Fear not though, that water will be recycled and re-used by the environment and other life forms.

Whether you want to or not, you must share water with everyone and all life on the earth. We perceive that the water company owns the water because they put forth the effort and expense in a capitalistic society to harvest the water for our consumption. When we pay the water company for that water that already belongs to us anyway, we’re paying for the time and effort they invest in keeping the water clean and attainable. We estimate that money is of equal value to time, even though due to a fractional banking structure, banks can create money out of thin air, thus deflating the value. We rely on this time to value comparison to justify our consumption of the water that belongs to the water company without doing any actual work to obtain it.

In your model of property ownership I could theoretically purchase overtime, all the water supply companies in existence (using whatever means necessary to prevent suspicion of a monopoly with or without integrity) and suddenly decide to shut off the water in every city on the planet at my leisure. Property ownership would afford me this freedom. I could also create false problems with the water distribution to give the impression that expensive upgrades are need in order to justify price increases in the distribution of the water (I think this is what we’re seeing with fuel prices). A capitalistic society rewards this type of behavior. Essentially the point is that ownership helps to create inequality, division and is too much power for any human to ever possess. Humans are volatile, inconsistent and irrational creatures incapable of handling the responsibility of managing ownership. We have proven this time and time again. Our inability to control anything is an immutable flaw.

So what’s the solution? I believe that technology is the solution. An intelligent societal design requires a tremendous amount of data. That data can be used to make determinations that we humans are not capable of making. This concept of ownership is barbaric and divisive. We must begin to architect a society that facilitates and rewards motivation to advance human compassion rather than profitability. Ownership does nothing to engender collectivism and equality. Equality is critical and it cannot be achieved within the confines of a capitalistic environment. Freedom is not determined by government policy, it is determined by the size of your bank account. Eliminate capitalism and ownership and then we might start to see progress towards a sustainable society.

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In your model of property ownership I could theoretically purchase overtime, all the water supply companies in existence (using whatever means necessary to prevent suspicion of a monopoly with or without integrity) and suddenly decide to shut off the water in every city on the planet at my leisure.

Priceless. This is what I would have written in satire!

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ownership helps to create inequality, division and is too much power for any human to ever possess.

Let’s suppose that this statement is true and is a given. Ownership (and hence control) creates too much of a concentration of power. Next, we learn that

Humans are volatile, inconsistent and irrational creatures incapable of handling the responsibility of managing ownership. We have proven this time and time again. Our inability to control anything is an immutable flaw.

Ok, fine. So what’s the solution? He explains that

An intelligent societal design requires a tremendous amount of data. That data can be used to make determinations that we humans are not capable of making.

Wait, what!? “We” need to create a computer system that solves our problems? And “we” can be expected to do this in some fair manner? But I thought that “Humans are volatile, inconsistent and irrational creatures” …? We thus want to create a computer program to control society, although we know that “Our inability to control anything is an immutable flaw” ?!
Computer programs don’t simply exist in a vacuum! They’re made by humans! The same humans who are “volatile, inconsistent and irrational creatures”! How can we expect this objective elite group of programmers to be objective, fair, and rational? Whereas in capitalism even the most lowly-educated member of society can contest the power of the rich by accumulating his own property and living as he wishes, in his society controlled by computers you have a centralized power control society without any alternatives. Furthermore, the programs are created by a few people who are told “you are God, fix the world.”
His reply belies a fundamental misunderstanding of history, economics, and computer science. In CS, although it might appear objective, there are some tasks which have no “best” or “fair” solution. One such example is the clustering task. There is no one single function for clustering data points. Researchers can choose different ones based on what suits the task. Perhaps he suggests that the scientists would then choose which algorithms computers should use. But then the power stops being in the computers, and back in the hands of the same scientists! The same scientists who can hardly be contested by the common, “uneducated” man. Capitalism, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. Some of the greatest achievements have come about after men have been scoffed at by superiors.
He’s poor at logic at best, a knowing liar at worst.

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I suppose that one could claim ownership of the water that passes through your body. I, on the other hand, am quite willing and happy to “abandon” that water down the freaking toilet.

EDIT: No, really, the guy’s starting position holds true. The water that you drink and hold in your body is yours. I don’t think anyone where wants to doubt that. However, nobody actually keeps that water, and property rights dissapear if you abandon or junk something. He neglects that point and therefore comes to the ludicrous conclusions in that comment.

5

LE, thanks for writing that out. That’s actually a very acceptable and coherent theory of the water that we ingest.

Indeed, if you want to store your pee in a jar, you are free to do so. The fact that you throw it away (moreover, in someone else’s sewer system) shows that you abandon it.

I am considering printing out copies of this to bring to my econ class tomorrow just to have other people have fun with this as well :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Wheylous pointed this comment out, but I wanted to as well:

Humans are volatile, inconsistent and irrational creatures incapable of handling the responsibility of managing ownership. We have proven this time and time again. Our inability to control anything is an immutable flaw.

A “volatile, inconsistent and irrational creature” is making this comment, and we’re supposed to trust him? And he’s suggesting that a group of these creatures can produce technology capable of organizing society?

What a bizarre case of special pleading.

7

You can tell from his rhetoric and the sheer illogical confusion of his remarks that this guy is one of those “Zeitgeist” fanatics. He watched one or two internet documentaries and thinks he seriously understands something about the world, and that the cure to all the complex problems of social organization is just to surrender all power to robot overlords.

Let me just integrate all the points that have been made so far into one cohesive point-by-point response.

If we assume that the Rothbardian theory of property is valid, then it depends. Did you acquire that water initially either through a) your own labour at a point when it was initially unpossessed, b) through voluntary exchange with someone else, or c) through the use of violence? If the answer is a) and b), then yes.

I’m not sure whether wanting to retain all the water you drink inside you forever is a very commonly held desire. As LogisticEarth says, I would be quite willing to abandon that water down the toilet. And at that point it would become unowned and anyone would be free to re-appropriate it.

“Borrowing” from who? This is incoherent. Borrowing presupposes ownership. I.e. to “borrow” something means to consensually acquire possession of it, while someone else remains the rightful owner. But according to this philosophy, nobody can own water.

This statement is vague to the point of being ridiculous. Is he saying that nobody ever works to acquire the money they use to buy goods and services? That is clearly false. What does he define as “work”? And in any case, why should we have to work for everything we obtain? What about people who are physically disabled, are they not entitled to drink? I thought this guy was for equality. The only thing that matters is whether an exchange is consensual and voluntary, not whether people “worked” for it.

Of course you could do that. But I doubt it would generate very much revenue, since all of your customers would flock to other sellers. And if you tried to cartelize the industry, your cartel would go the way most cartels in history have gone that weren’t propped up by government power: it would fall to pieces.

Actually, a “dilemma” like this could be posed for almost any political system. In his model of technocratic utopia, the people in charge of the (presumably extremely powerful) computers could “theoretically” program them to forcibly enslave and starve the entire population, just for kicks. I.e. all power can be abused. But since power is an inevitable feature of humanity, the question for creating a functioning society is: what structure of incentives can you create so that power is used for public benefit? In capitalism, there is competition/profit and loss. In technocracy, there is…what?

Incidentally, I don’t mean by this to deny the existence of planned obsolescence or high oil prices or anything like that. I’m only saying this guy has misdiagnosed the causes. Those phenomena are better explained with reference to things like our corrupt patent system, fiat money, American wars in the middle east, etc. (Amazingly, this guy recognizes the harmful effects of inflation but attributes this, not to state power, but to capitalism!)

Firstly, ownership does not “create” inequality or division. Ownership is a reflection of the inequality and division that naturally prevails among human beings. Human beings are fundamentally different. We are all individuals with distinct capacities, endowments, bodies, intelligences, and so on. This will obviously reflect in a tendency for individual outcomes and opportunities to be disparate. We should be glad this is the case. The only way to create pure “equality” is to forcibly stamp out human individuality and all opportunities for mutually beneficial social interaction.

I need to be able to exclusively control my bowl of pasta if I am going to eat it. If my pasta is to be shared “in common,” then others get to decide when I eat. You’re telling me the former scenario is “too much power”?

What? Is this serious? This has to be the most nonsensical thing I have ever read. You say the problem is inequality and division, and you want to solve that by create the most extreme division and inequality of power we can ever imagine: awarding some select group with the exclusive right to program human affairs. You say the problem is property, and you want to solve that by awarding one group monopoly rights to all the earth’s resources. You say human beings are too stupid, greedy, and irrational to manage their own affairs, and therefore we can trust them to manage the affairs of others. Have fun living in this lunatic society, I won’t join you.

I should also point out that, even in his ideal society, ownership (the right of exclusion) would still exist. Just imagine what would happen, once the computers are all set up, if I showed up and brought a hammer with me and smashed them all to bits, or if I brought a bag and decided to steal them for my own purposes. Obviously, rules would need to be enforced preventing such things. I.e. the computers would need to be owned and their use strictly regulated, organized, and controlled. Ownership and inequality, in other words, are such fundamental features of human life that even those who hate them can only propose to get rid of them by means of ownership and inequality.

No it doesn’t, and a very good thing too. We have seen far too many schemes in the past century to promote “collectivism and equality,” and the usual result is piles of human corpses. It’s bizarre that, having just witnessed the horrors of the gulag and the Holocaust, people still believe in centralized power.

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You can either have robot overlords who find it logical to terminate your existence or robot overlords who have yet to decide. Your decision.