the respect for private property is when people respect the product of another man’s labor.
Actually that’s precisely what usufruct is. How is it labor when someone is just entitled to a plot of land and can charge rent on it when he lives a state away?
You’re sounding kind of historicist here
That wouldn’t surprise me being that I have been reading far more Weber and Lachmann than Mises this past year. As you may have noticed from my past few posts in topics, there is a bit of a dissonance in how I am thinking about economics lately. I am probably a bit more confused in my thoughts than I was a year ago.
Anyway,
does this relate to Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons? If so, it is indeed very interesting stuff.
Furthermore, I am wondering if one could actually make a defence of what we have now (that is something that actually factually exists) vs a pie in the sky argument. Mercantilism, Keynesianism, Corprotism are “real” things to me as they are merely managment theories on real actions and real processes. This makes them less dangerous than abstract social structures to me, and more preferable.
If I heard people say “screw it we are reorganizing to this Platonic vision” - I would immediatley recoil and my mind wouldturn to the French,1848, and Russian Revolutions
I haven’t read Ostrom’s work but it’s basically a refutation of “The Tragedy of the Commons” and Hardin revised his title to the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons. If it’s correct then I think it would indicate the feasibility of voluntary collective life. That said, usufruct doesn’t depend on the feasibility of collective life in order to function. It would function very similarly, in my opinion, to an orthodox market setup, except that firm size would be smaller as the boss (if there was one) would have to be present at the factory at which he worked, and there would be no more people living solely off of rent. Probably more people owning their own businesses, lower profit rate, few employees per firm. As I said above I think there’s also a possibility for the emergence of a stock-market equivalent.
I think the advantage in effect that private property would have is in inviting more investment, though a mutualist territory could become just as wealthy.
vive: seen this? http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard56.html
OP - Minarchy, if you can keep it.
What:? not a republic??
i see what you did there ^^^
Yeah,
I never really bought that narrative all too much. I really think Catholicism has been irrelevant in actual factual actions of relevant things since the Reformation / Printing Press at the earliest to the fall of the Louis XVI at the latest, since than it has been effectively “in the dustbin” so to speak. Moreover I think the narrative was made by “Catholic Pride Right Wing Types” as an ad hoc thing because they like Catholicism and they like capitalism - so it’s just one ofthose things tomake themselves feel better, not really much of a social theory as it is a “rah rah” thing to me. As for social theory in relation to Weber, right or wrong, it has to show how people made use of it. I think British naturalism had far more of an effect on peoples minds and the way it dictated behavior than Scholastic thought, for better or worse.
More importantly,I think the point for Weber isn’t so much “what really happened” in history which he may kind of giggle at, but how to do a genreal exagesis to understand what is going on in an intelligible way. That is to say, there is nothing inherent about “Protestantism” that leads it to capitalism - however real fashions and real actions happened to arise from it, than so be it. Furthermore nowhere does Weber claim that Protestantism is soley responsible for capitalism - he just uses it because it is useful to do so (he points out that Florence was capitalist, but never really exploited that fact to a degree of significance)
Of course minarchism. I would find a world of city-states (my conception of minarchy) perfectly good for the time being , if not a necessary station toward anacapistan. If anarcho-capitalism can’t work for some reason, a global web of competing mini-states is still an alluring vision by any standard.
I congratulate kelvin_silva: the thread is very intelligent, it allows one to differentiate left- form right- leaning libertarians.
riot folk, poison girl, etc
Riot folk = shitty and unrelated. Poison Girls = amazing ‘obscure’ Crass Records material.
I’d rather be minarchist, as “anarcho”-leftist (see what I did there?) actually tends to be much more statist than minarchism, if the anarcho-capitalist definition of “state” is used. A lot of the branches of leftist anarchism are confused - especially mutualism. They’re also concerned a great deal with acquiring and maintaining power over freedom, but that’s rather hidden by their use of the word “freedom” to refer to both positive physical ability and the absence of opposing coercion.
Not to derail the thread, but infinite secession doesn’t seem compatible to government maintaining a monopoly on the law.
Mutualism is really, really confused IMO. For one thing, its support of usufruct over ownership seems like just a rationalization for its opposition to profit, interest, and rent - which means it opposed those things to begin with, and therefore for different reasons. For another, who’s to say that usufruct rights can’t themselves be alienated (i.e. given away or traded for other things)? And if they can, then doesn’t that make them owned? Finally, usufruct in no way prevents the kind of substantial wealth disparities we’ve seen in history. Indeed, usufruct over land was apparently the norm in the ancient world.
The term “usufruct” comes from Roman law, which considered there to be three kinds of rights in ownership - rights to use (usus), rights to the products or “fruits” of use (fructus), and rights to alienate (abusus). Usufruct, then, entails only the first two kinds of rights. As a result, it’s not the same as ownership. However, usufruct itself can be “commoditized” - that is, it can be considered alienable on its own.
usufruct was the norm? so what about feudalism? and state control of land?
as for your first point, i dont think that usufruct abolishes profit or interest, but it would do away with rent. one could easily be the boss of a factory and work there, have employees, and make profts. i think much of the mutualist claims of abolishing profit come from their banking idea, which is entirely of no consequence. the banknotes mutualists propose could probably be circulated but always much less valuable than things like gold. unless they tried to somehow enforce a currency monopoly, which i find doubtful as much mutualist theory rails precisely against that. more than anything mutualist banking would just be a big disappointment to its proponents, which is not a problem for market anarchism. it just means the marking down of low quality money.
usufruct rights could be traded away, but the reciever would have to use the land otherwise the occupiers would take it. that said, its not necessarily an impediment to market of profit bearing shares. bonds would take over the role of equities.
in the ways in which mutualism in confused, in its propsals on what the glorious people shold do it is of no consequence for market anarchists. just bad business going down. and theres also the usufruct, which i dont really think would be such a bad thing.