If there was a dictatorship that owned the country’s oil fields, and it turned into a free society, who would own the oil fields?
a: whoever buys them
me: wouldn’t the tyrants and his family or friends or anyone who benefited from his tyranny have most of the resources? so, couldn’t they buy them easily?
I think it depends on whether the assets of said tyrant and his family were seized.
Whoever owns them. Not really a big deal. It would suck if the crooks ended up owning lots of them but unless they ran them well they’d end up losing them anyway, and it’s probably better than having a civil war with the wealthiest people in your country.
“I think it depends on whether the assets of said tyrant and his family were seized.”
surely there will be plenty of friends that made off really really well that will not have their assets siezed.
“If there was a dictatorship that owned the country’s oil fields, and it turned into a free society, who would own the oil fields?”
It’d be given back to those who it was stolen from.
“It’d be given back to those who it was stolen from.”
suppose they are dead…
Auction it off?
Auction it off?
VULGAR!!!
(Sounds like a practical solution to me)
Whoever owns them. Not really a big deal. It would suck if the crooks ended up owning lots of them but unless they ran them well they’d end up losing them anyway, and it’s probably better than having a civil war with the wealthiest people in your country.
This. I don’t even know how one could speculate anything further. If the “crooks” were really that bad to begin with, they probably would have been overthrown with the dictator anyway.
“Auction it off?”
Wouldn’t the friends who benefitted from the tyrant have the money to buy it at auction?
And for some reason it always seems to have been stolen from “the people.” I mean, in how many cases is it clear enough for courts or the mob to say “oh yeah, Billy Bob owned the oil fields before Mubarak took them.” I would love to see the property in the hands of its rightful owner, but when thats not an option, I’d rather have some connected bootlicker give me oil at a low price than a peoples union run an oil field like a vegan co-op.
Auction it off?
With the proceedings going to?..
If it ends up in the hands of the crooks the situation isn’t going to stay free market for a long time.
Rothbard proposed the USSR desocialize by giving workers ownership shares in their respective factories. An oil extracting company sounds close enough to a steel mill for this to apply to it as well, with the qualification that any undeveloped oil fields are proclaimed unowned and opened up for developers to homestead.
If it ends up in the hands of the crooks the situation isn’t going to stay free market for a long time.
Wrong. It is only the ideology of statism that protects government industries, not some kind of nebulous ‘economic power’. If they happened to own 80% of a country’s wealth, but the population was decidedly libertarian/anti-statist, then they would either have to efficiently use that 80%, sell it to someone who did or go into bankruptcy. This is why Mises did not much care about the fact that huge tracts of land in Europe were in fact taken by expropriation by feudal lords and states; since under the market they would either be efficiently managed or sold off and either was better than a program of expropriation.
You are basically taking the opposite position, that of Oppenheimer, which I think is ignorant of the nature of the market economy and is essentially the same as the argument that those who inherit great wealth have an ‘unfair advantage’ over others in the market economy.
This basically comes from a crazy ‘save the world’ drive that finds it more important to ‘correct’ the past than to move into the future. It’s like people obsessed with reparations over slavery. Has Prince Charles ever done anything economically productive? I doubt it. But if you want to expropriate Balmoral from him, you’re a fruit-cake and a troublemaker. Let the playboy keep his mansion, he’s not hurting anyone and it doesn’t belong to anyone else anyways. Property that far separated from its original owners is owned by no one at all. May as well let him keep it and not start some sinister trend of ‘getting back’ at those ebil rich pplz.
Hear, hear, some common sense. Of course they would be auctioned. How can one return those to ‘the people’?
That is if you asume the context is an-cap. I assumed (perhaps erronously) the context was “free market” in the conventional sense.
A ‘free market’ that is not under anarchism is just fuel for Empire. Anyways, you can’t have a free market in a statist legal system, that is one of the most distortive and destructive areas to have under a coercive monopoly: law, boundaries, torts and contracts.