I had always envisioned a big ass auction on everything? Where the taxes payed is the credits. But then comes the problem of what do people who were wrongfully imprisioned get? How do you value a lost year etc etc?
I would think the American response would be miles different. The soviet people had for a long time not been used to managing any of their financial affairs. They had thought of wealth in terms of favors for goods. That is how people were able to acquire what they needed, by trading corrupt little bureaucrat favors for black market goods. They didn’t really think of wealth as banknotes or shares. That is certainly how Americans regard wealth and I would expect them to apply more prudence to the management of their shares.
They didn’t really think of wealth as banknotes or shares.
Not entirely true, my grandma saved up quite a lot both in cash and in government bonds, hoping this would be useful for her kids. Needless to say, both were devalued to nothing by government.
I guess this bitter experience with paper issued by government was part of the reason the workers sold their shares ASAP.
I think bridges would tend to be owned by those who own the roads that they’re parts of.
so if bridges just become part of the roads, who gets to own roads like this that span from canada to mexico? does one company get to own the whole or does it get broken up?
maybe i just get the idea that something like the kkk is going to want to purchase a road or parts of a road and lynch any black person that wants to use it or ban blacks from using the road or charge higher fees or something.
if the state just simply sold it’s assests i feel the buyerwould be benefiting from theft of my money and then somehow have the right to exclude people that paid those taxes from use of the road they paid for.
Probably the easiest answer would be to change the local city governments into corporations and put into their hands all the property formerly owned by the city (except undeveloped land which has never been owned, only kept unowned by the state) and put everyone who lives in that city as a shareholder in the corporation. From there the market will take care of itself.
put everyone who lives in that city as a shareholder in the corporation.
People who live just a hundred feet outside the imaginary city border will feel quite bitter, I would imagine.
Yet they will partake in some other property the people on the other side of the line will not.
I mean, I suppose the way to go would be try to figure out how much each person had paid in taxes to fund that bridge, and give proportional shares. If someone outside the city wasn’t forced to pay into it, they can be bitter all they want 
I don’t see how you can involuntarily offer people up for ownership. Even in a class action suit, you have to speak up to claim loss. So, until someone makes a claim for the property, they aren’t an issue in the matter regardless of the boundary in which they reside. Sounds like the DMV on crack. You’d lose all interest in anyone obtaining the property when you told them they’d have to establish an office to write $2.13 checks to all 12 million Los Angeleans or other such absurdity…
I’d think an auction would take place, with potential for everyone to buy each other out, and the claimants who must also be bidders splitting the winning bid, or ownership respective to their contribution. Kind of like a betting pool.
I’m talking within the context of a transition away from statism, where cities and dissolving in favor of rulerless regions governed by free association.
In such an instance, all public property is immediately in flux. Rationally, the people who were taxed to pay for the things therein bought should be made the owners, they are the ones who had their wealth confiscated to pay for those things.
Even if you held an auction and sold to highest bidder, you’d still have to pay those people back in proportion to the wealth they’d had confiscated individually, so you’re not improving anything in terms of logistics.
If someone outside the city wasn’t forced to pay into it, they can be bitter all they want
In some countries bridges are financed from the top-level budget (taxes), not from municipal one.
Yeah, it’s a point. Cross that bridge when we come to it
I see what you did there.
It goes back to the same principle. In order to claim ownership of something, you actually have to claim ownership of something. Applying ownership to everyone inside an arbitrary radius is just communism. Unowned property can be staked by anyone.
Again, this is within the context of supposing the world suddenly capitulated to libertarianism and asked us how to dispose of public property.
If I say the bridge rightfully belongs to those who paid for it, and we should make a corporation and give each shares in it and run the bridge for profit from there. That does not say anything about the mechanism of achieving that.
Probably you’d begin by putting the word out in newspapers and internet. Create a claims-website for people to put in claims, ask them for details of how long they’ve lived there, figure out a “tax multiplier” where you could translate taxes paid into shares owned.
It would be a mess, but my point about the principle that people who paid for it should own it is that, that should guide the process. A bridge is not immediately unowned just because the government went away. Nor is this an “arbitrary radius” as you say. There’s nothing arbitrary about figuring out how much everyone paid for it and offering everyone a chance to own it to that proportion.
How is it not unowned? The government owns it now. If they go away, then nobody owns it. Everyone has a chance to own it at whatever proportion they want it at. Remember, it is as of now perfectly legal for government to not only steal, but to own property. You don’t have a claim to the road jsut because you live there. It is arbitrary, as arbitrary as the boundaries you wish to use. No single tax dollar can be traced toward anything.
The government’s ownership is illegitimate. It had paid for a bridge from money it has stolen from others. The question of ownership when the current owner is removed from the equation is a question of whom has the best claim on that property. It is only just that those whom were forced to pay for that bridge should have the highest claim to it so that they can try to reclaim at least some of the wealth appropriated from them in order to build it.
In a similar way, if the government taxed people that year and failed to spend any of the money before it was disbanded, we would not say that the bank account with all the funds in it is now suddenly unowned and open to appropriation by anyone at all. We should instead say that the money should be divvied back out to those who paid into it by force.
A bridge is no different than that bank account, it’s just the account has been spent on the bridge. Since that money was never legitimately the government’s, neither was the bridge. It was actually owned by those who paid for it, but government had used force to prevent their claim from taking force.
I disagree. It may impossible to completely and correctly compensate those who’ve been stolen from by the government, that doesn’t mean all government property is suddenly up for grabs if it goes away. Those people whose wealth were taken to pay for those things have the highest claim, even if you can’t prove what exactly it was spent on. The answer is to give proportional ownership over everything. And it’s quite likely that once you’d given everyone who claimed one a proportional claim that all that property would be liquidated to pay people back as best as possible.
The flaw there is, their money was stolen. Not their bridge. The money is long gone. Sorry you got ripped off but that was yesterday’s system. And yesterday, it was totally legit.
A bank account is property of the bank. In any case of claim of loss, the burden of proof that you were damaged, is on you. It cannot be proven. Thus arbitrarily handing property out by some fictitious boundary, and a fictitious percentage. All of which is eaten in the process of determining what that percentage and boundary was by the way.
No, the principle is that if a thief takes your money and buys an apple with it, what should be done with the apple when the thief is caught.
At the very least, it should be given to him whose money was taken.
It’s ridiculous to think your claim to value stolen from you should end just because the thief bought something with it. The person stolen from certainly has a better claim on the stolen goods by virtue of having their own money spent on it by the thief than to assume that it’s abandoned property and open for appropriation by all.