If you are using the sidewalk for conversing (or for intimidation), you are wasting space that is purposed for transportation and accessibility. If a privately-interested owner controlled the sidewalk, he would make you move along because you are impeding those trying to use his sidewalk. The fact that the state doesn’t care about efficiency or the value of its assets is the only reason that strikers are now able to use public streets and sidewalks for economically counterproductive purposes. In a free market, strikers could never physically block scabs unless the scabs were crossing property owned by the strikers.
And Esuric said I was incoherent because he couldn’t pin me down as a statist.
If you are using the sidewalk for conversing (or for intimidation), you are wasting space that is purposed for transportation and accessibility.
Haha, that’s a very grim way of viewing things. It’s not incorrect, depending on how you define waste. It’s not exactly correct because the sidewalk’s design wasn’t against loitering. It’s just a very grim way of viewing reality, imho.
If a privately-interested owner controlled the sidewalk, he would make you move along because you are impeding those trying to use his sidewalk
In fact, private individuals can order people off the sidewalks in front of their store. Stores in cities still have no loitiering signs. So yes, some would shoo you away, many might not (especially, in a strike, if they are symptathetic to the strikers… or a competitor of the strikee).
The fact that the state doesn’t care about efficiency or the value of its assets is the only reason that strikers are now able to use public streets and sidewalks for economically counterproductive purposes
Wow, that takes the cake. Just strikers, or could anyone never use sidewalks for unproductive purposes in your world? Is there no room for dancing in the street?! Who would enforce this on sidewalk owners that allowed the strikes, dancing, and conversing?
In a free market, strikers could never physically block scabs unless the scabs were crossing property owned by the strikers.
What if it was a general, across the industry, PDA police strike?
“Strike” is just a euphemism for organized violence against uncooperative co-workers.
Here’s the thing we’re leaving out tho, I don’t know how I got sucked in. This is all a straw-man. Most strikes do nothing but demean and demoralize scabs, if they do anything to them at all. Strikes are, and always have been relatively peaceful, until the state steps in.
The K Mart workers out here recently had a strike that went on for 2 years, and all they did was stand outside the store with signs.
Sure, that’s what they do NOW that unions have gotten control of legislatures and they don’t have to do their own dirty work and employees don’t even have a choice in whether to picket.
Seriously? It’s just as legitimate for a group to use public property to obstruct others as it is for people to use the street to go to work?
This doctrine of allowing people owning property to treat adjascent public property as if it were an extension of their private property is no more legitimate than allowing picketers to use to treat the streets as their own private property.
I said counterproductive. I realize this is somewhat subjective since we can never know a counterfactual and democracy/bureaucracy can never adequately deal with it in a way private property rights could, but the standard I’m going by is whether others (who presumably paid taxes into the maintenence of that private property, just like the picketers) are prevented from using the street for its designated purpose by those who are not. On a wide street, that takes an concerted, organized effort (picket line, barricade, parade, etc…) not some random dancer or street musician or conversers. The government “owns” (at least as a caretaker, if not a legitimate financial owner) the street, so it SHOULD evict those that harm the value it derives from the property, but it DOESN’T actually do this because it’s the government and its incentives are too perverse, in everything it attempts to do.
Even if you don’t want to try to salvage a private property argument from the government-created legal morass of public property, you can still go by a purely Coasian ethic and pretty easily argue that letting the workers work will increase aggregate wealth relative to letting the picketers block them.
Why would that be any different?
Seriously? It’s just as legitimate for a group to use public property to obstruct others as it is for people to use the street to go to work?
*Epicurus is forced to unleash his trademark LvMI phrase. “You are misrepresenting me.” I said you were not wrong. I just said it’s a very grim way of looking at things. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
This doctrine of allowing people owning property to treat adjascent public property as if it were an extension of their private property is no more legitimate than allowing picketers to use to treat the streets as their own private proper
I never said it was right. I simply used it as an argument against your assertion that “no private property owner would allow it.” In fact, many businesses do not tell people to get off their sidewalks, tho some do. You have no way of knowing if the other property owners would allow the strikers there or not.
I said counterproductive. I realize this is somewhat subjective since we can never know a counterfactual and democracy/bureaucracy can never adequately deal with it in a way private property rights could, but the standard I’m going by is whether others (who presumably paid taxes into the maintenence of that private property, just like the picketers) are prevented from using the street for its designated purpose by those who are not
Yes, but earlier you were talking about non-productive in general. It seemed to me, perhaps I was mistaken, that you were arguing that no unproductive use of roads/sidewalks would occur in a propertarian society.
And either way.. strikers do not need to, and frequently do not, do anything other than demean scabs. The view being purported that strikes are violent is very much the exception to the rule. Most strikes are entirely peaceful until the police get involved. And now, 150 years later, that the state tacitly supports unions (instead of the staunch opposition the showed in the earliest periods) they are almost entirely non-violent…because the police are no longer attacking them at the behest of the ownership (notice that is not a pro-state argument, it’s a pro-labor argument).
Why would that be any different?
Who would shut down a strike if the strikers were the entire police force?