This is my land, because I said so, and you’re on it, so you have to do what I say, because I said so, and if you defy me I’ll kill you, and killing you is work, so therefore I’m combining labor with, um, …
4 Likes
pursuit of property happiness?
1 Like
Philosophy is funny, because it’s one of the very few discplines that go back to the ancient times (in both the East and the West). I think it probably appears like someone flogging their inner demons now because we live in a highly individualistic society…
4 Likes
It does nowadays. It didn’t always. It started at least theoretically as exactly what you propose. A more or less vountary arrangement by which someone exchanged their labour for reduction of their debt to someone else.
The fact that it almost inevitably ends up becoming a system where people can’t repay their debts is why most places have been pretty vehement about getting rid of it.
The difficulty there is who is doing the seeing? The person who owes the debt or someone else?
If the person who owes the debt gets to choose, how is that different from the current system where we expect people to work to receive money to pay their debts?
If it is not their choice, then you are forcing them to work when they do not wish to or cannot.
What does one do with the people who cannot perform any meaningful ‘work’? The classic case would be OAPs - in the UK, they may well be property-rich but cash-poor as well as being unable to work.
Unless you want a system where granny ends up required to knit socks for squaddies or the old bill 24/7, it’s hard to see how such a system works any better than the present one where granny’s house can be sold to pay her debts and she can use the remaining proceeds to live somewhere else.
Of course it would be nice if we could also ensure some sort of system to make sure that people can in fact find somewhere else to live at a reasonable cost or free if need be.
Still, I think we can do better than go back to Dickensian-era style debtor’s prisons or workhouses.
Huh. I was completely unaware of Locke’s owning stock in a slaver corporation. Thanks for bringing that up.
has some decent background, but is also a “it’s complicated, and he tried to stop it and got out relatively quickly” defense.
1 Like
I was actually thought Locke enslaved people directly. I’m glad I googled it before posting.
I don’t mean to hold Locke up as some egregious example of a racist from history, but Locke did participate in the system that kept the rich of Locke’s era rich, and that system was incredibly racist.
I’m in the habit of saying that when you read philosophy you are basically reading someone’s diary. I think Locke was probably aware of contradiction between the kind of liberalism that Locke talked about and the system that Locke lived in. I also think Locke directed their considerable intellect towards justifying that system rather than critiquing it.
4 Likes
I find that a kind of irrelevant distinction, in that his direct investment made slavery possible. Just because he wasn’t doing the actual kidnapping doesn’t let him of the hook remotely. In some ways, the remote investors were the key to the whole scheme.
Maybe we should stop holding people like Locke up as some unattainable and unassailable enlightenment ideal, though. Maybe we need to more closely examine the failures of the enlightenment instead of papering them over by assuming that the real evil participated in by people like Locke are justified by the outcome?
5 Likes
Yeah, apparently I don’t either since I hadn’t bothered encoding the actual facts in my memory. My memory said, “Locke was a slaver.” I needed google to check the nuance just so I wouldn’t be literally wrong.
Yeah, I’ve said elsewhere I think enlightenment values are a zombie philosophy that we need to stop exalting. But even if someone had great ideas I hate the whole “great man” view of history. (Though personally I never really cared for Locke. Kant was an interesting person who actually took a shot at doing something radical with that whole reason-driven thing).
5 Likes
It’s not you… I don’t think it’s common knowledge at all, which makes sense if there are people interested in white washing one of the most consequential intellectual thinkers that shaped the US Constitution.
Right? It’s not like there isn’t some value there worth preserving, but we also need to attend to some of the darker things that emerged out of the enlightenment. Time to humanize the whole lot of figures from that era, I’d argue!
4 Likes
Locke died before he could defend or condemn a “liberalised” slave trade. This recent article continues the wretched history past the Stuart dynasty.
1 Like
I’m coming in late, so apologies if this is redundant to something upthread, but I’m reminded of the scenario in some Robert Heinlein novel. Maybe “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” If I remember right, there’s no property or object tax, but everyone living in the society (in this case, a lunar colony) has to pay a tax to contribute toward the societal infrastructure supporting air and water supply. So you’re “stuff” can’t get taken away from you, but if you can’t scrape together the means to pay towards supporting essential services, you don’t get to stay.
It seems fraught with economic injustice thinking of it through our current economic lens, but maybe it will spur some ideas…?
3 Likes
Thats exactly the situation I’d like the world to get away from.
I didn’t ask to exist, neither did anyone else here currently, unless you willed yourself into reincarnation.
Quantifying a way to live without being hassled might sound like freeloading is the goal- it’s not. I just haven’t found an adequate way to describe it yet.
And yet, here we are. As organisms, we need resources to continue to exist. Humans are even higher maintenance. We either need to live as a collective - which just reimagines taxes as sharing what’s needed with those who need it - or we need to suck it up and pay taxes for the common good.
From your previous writing in this thread, I suspect your disconnect is that the common good isn’t always a direct good for individuals. However, making sure your neighbor isn’t starving is to your benefit, because your neighbor strengthens the community and you benefit from that strength.
6 Likes
Right. But the fact is that by being alive, we are breathing air and drinking water and taking up space. (And polluting all those things, in the current system). I was trying to introduce a framework that addressed your (and mine, and others’) concerns about things turning into a “renter of all things” economy. I don’t think the one proposed in my example is fair, but put it out there as a springboard.
How do you suggest setting up a system so that people contribute to maintaining the basic infrastructure needed for community survival and flourishing?
It might be through paying more for goods, factoring in the cost of maintaining the roads they travel down to get to you. I don’t know. But to say you want to own things that can’t be taken away, and are in support of some kind of taxes or fees to support the things you recognize as needed… I think I might have missed something. And I’m totally into exploring options. I just don’t yet see how rescinding all taxation on all things yet supporting infrastructure could work.
But I’m totally open to and curious about other approaches!
1 Like
The reason this is a worry is because capitalism has a tension with democracy. If you live in a democratic society without property ownership you aren’t a “renter” of all things you are a caretaker of all things. To say you’re renting implies that you aren’t part of the thing that has ultimate control, but democracy is government of the people.
If we don’t want to rent everything we have to have high taxes on owners of wealth. Otherwise, those owners will see their share of the limited wealth that exists expand on an S curve until there is nothing left for the rest of us but to rent.
But if you don’t have a stake in the government then it’s just another rich entity forcing you to rent. I get that a lot of people don’t feel they have a stake in the government because they’ve been disenfranchised - either literally in a voting sense or more metaphorically in that they can’t see themselves as part of the people the government serves and represents. They are individuals fighting against a larger society rather than people who are apart of the larger society. But then they can never really have anything to call their own, because there’s always someone who is trying to take it.
Individualism is authoritarian. An authoritarian doesn’t rule by social cohesion among their followers - their followers cannot have loyalty to one another, only to the leader. They rule by each individual being cowed into following them. Collective decision making would oust the authoritarian immediately because they suck. Scared individuals making decisions for themselves see backing the strongman as their best option.
5 Likes
As a mutualist, I think the issue with land ownership is the idea that the land and the thing you use it for (a house, a factory, or whatever) is the same thing. You can possess things you put to use on land or the things you extract from it like with mining or agriculture but you can’t truly possess the land itself. To me, the concept of land ownership seems like a vestigial organ of the feudal era that really needs to be disposed of since it causes more harm than good. At minimum, I think something like a Georgist land tax wouldn’t be bad but I think explicit common ownership and common management would be better with occupancy/use being acceptable if and only if no rents are extracted.
2 Likes
I can perhaps understand how you may have come to that conclusion, since I have mainly focused on this issue as it relates to individual, rather than a society.
The point you made is not lost on me, it’s just that I personally hadn’t brought it so much into discussion.
My situation has changed some, laid off. Currently trying to figure out how my bank literally deposited my last paycheck into someone else’s account, due to their error they admit- leaving me perhaps unable to pay rent now because of a bank’s fuck up.
I trust institutions and especially banks and Wallstreet nil, this situation is further engraining that.
I am not a freeloader, but I’m tired of a system that treats me in many ways as a battery, without my say often, to keep it going, at my expense, and certainly not to my benefit.
There is a different way, and as the person who originally turned this into its own island of a thread, helpfully so, I’d hoped that others would simply discuss ideas on how to get to something like the society of TNG or something else different than what we have now, without the devolution of the normal snide personal retorts gradually derailing the conversations- which are important and necessary, in my view.
As for my idea- not going to say its possible to make something that satisfies both me and society. It was never meant as “whining”, I really was just curious to see what other views there are and how others would address it. Intellectual discussions and debate are diminished in our modern age in too much of the world, I was hoping for some here is all.
2 Likes
Here’s the thing - your taxes are used to pay for things like road maintenance, policing, fire protection, often waste disposal, etc. Witholding those services from you without affecting your abutters / neighbors is often impossible; so the state leans on the theory of eminent domain to enforce it. Keep in mind that your ability to actualize your ownership of that property is usually enforced through policing and military defense (unless you have a private army), so it is contingent anyway. So no, you can’t truly own anything outside the authority of the state (or your own use of force, which of course has limits) to confirm your ownership.
1 Like
You are missing the forest through the trees here.
That’s not the gist of the discussion. I don’t think you understand the original concept here.
It’s trying to think outside of current systems, to envision other ways of doing things. I don’t really need someone to point out to me how the current American system works. I live here, I already understand it. The idea is how to change it.
I think you’re abstracting away all the reasons it’s necessary. This isn’t just about “how the American system works,” it’s fundamental to how a civilization works - either you pool money and cooperate on standards, in which case, all these things are emergent properties once the cooperating group is large enough to require enforcement (well, I suppose you could always go with pre-modern tax enforcement: confiscation without process), or you end up with the “strongest” enforcing their wants on the weakest. Galt’s Gulch is an unworkable fantasy at scale.
1 Like
