Again, you’re not really reading or grasping the intent of most of the posts here.
There are hundreds of other ways of doing things in a society than the way we happen to in America right now. This was originally a thread started with the intent of exploring that.
It’s fine if you have nothing to add to that, just don’t sit here and ignore the input of many bright people trying to find new or different ways of doing things.
I have nothing further to add for you.
Just to clarify a bit, ownership is an emergent property of violence. My ownership of something - my ability to control its use - is contingent upon my ability to prevent its theft. While in theory we can all agree to not steal things from one another, any sufficiently large group will have someone who is sociopathic, and is ultimately only controlled by the potential for violence. If you scale that up enough, you have the state taking a monopoly on violence and therefore ownership being contingent upon the actions of the state. The state needs funding to do this, and so it finds different ways of raising funds through taxation and fees (unpaid volunteer enforcement mechanisms are not scalable, either). In a just state, the sovereign authority (the law, or the people, or the “few”) attempts to relate much taxation to the very services that taxation supports.
You can’t own something, really, except through brute force or the abstraction of law.
I’m trying to show you that it simply isn’t possible, because ownership itself isn’t separate from the services the taxes pay for.
I own what I create physically.
When I finish my first watch, I own it. I made it, I own it.
It’s not tied to the land, it’s not something that anyone else can buy, because it’s something created from materials. Materials I must purchase, of course, but their end result worth hundreds of thousands of times more than the base components.
You are a bit myopic in thinking. You’re only thinking within the current system you’re a part of, this discussion wasn’t created to explain that system further.
I don’t follow: where do the materials originate from? How is that not tied to the land? Someone must have had physical control over the land in order to make the investments necessary to extract the materials, no?
Land here is an abstract concept that doesn’t mean just a physical plot of dirt on a continent or island but rather the total sum of all that which is pre-existing and not the work of humans which is literally the universe and the planet itself. So land in economic terms is a short hand for nature. And when you work to make something in nature useful to yourself or others that results in property in orthodox schools of economics (usually neoliberal leaning/aligned).
One last comment, and I’m done here - I’m sure you have other things to say and don’t need my input. But you’re not interrogating what “ownership” really means if you think it can exist outside the threat of enforcement.
Thanks for grabbing this clarifying quote from @RandomDude upthread.
RandomDude, this helps me understand your overall thought exercise better. I need to read the whole thread before adding more.
If I create something from materials obtained from the earth, and I hold my object- how is that NOT ownership?
Who would dispute that something as complex as a handmade timepiece is owned by anyone at all other than the person who created it if never sold?
I create value if I chose to, the same as anyone else can claim. It doesn’t require the threat of a gun to get people to recognize that someone who physically makes something from parts owns that thing. The basic concept here is simple.
If you can do nothing but add refuting without putting insistence aside and freeing your mind to think differently as a purpose for being specifically here, then you have nothing to offer here except yet another tired viewpoint from a closed mind.
You own the thing you made. I run by and take it from you and run off. Now who owns it?
And there’s no call to be snarky at people.
Right up until someone stronger and meaner than you takes it from you. So you contribute to society to have laws, people to enforce the law, etc.
And the problem of how to reach ST:TNG society has already been solved, above:
The trick is getting from here to there. And that’s going to involve taxation.
Closed based on (now removed) comments from the topic owner that they believe the discussion complete.
