The fascist mindset

[Harry Bosch]

If 2008 was a financial non-event, then any economic situation is fine. So no wonder everything is swimmingly.

What I see in all the finance pubs is that it was the most serious event since the great depression.

Was the GD just another blip?

What qualifies as a major financial event to you?

I don't think that the doctor was saying that 2008 was a "financial non-event". He was just attacking the absurd opinion that the economy was "destroyed".

 

[Horatio Parker]

If 2008 was a financial non-event, then any economic situation is fine. So no wonder everything is swimmingly.

What I see in all the finance pubs is that it was the most serious event since the great depression.

Was the GD just another blip?

What qualifies as a major financial event to you?

I don't think that the doctor was saying that 2008 was a "financial non-event". He was just attacking the absurd opinion that the economy was "destroyed".

Well, the opinion was that the economy would've been destroyed without substantial help. That's not so easily dismissed as hyperbole.

And, the implication is that the 90% of growth since 2008 that has gone to the 1% is just dandy. It's not.

Maybe I shouldn't butt in the middle like this, but it struck me as odd.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The economy or the people? What does that mean? There are no economics without people.

And of course a welfare state helps the economy. I suspect you mean productivity.

Yes

 

[DrZoidberg]

I don't think that the doctor was saying that 2008 was a "financial non-event". He was just attacking the absurd opinion that the economy was "destroyed".

Well, the opinion was that the economy would've been destroyed without substantial help. That's not so easily dismissed as hyperbole.

And, the implication is that the 90% of growth since 2008 that has gone to the 1% is just dandy. It's not.

Maybe I shouldn't butt in the middle like this, but it struck me as odd.

This is a separate discussion. Re-distribution of wealth (or "transfering" in fancy talk) is a matter of policy. USA has had the same policy before and after 2008.

The health of the economy is measured in if it's doing what the policy hopes it will. This non-transference policy is apparently what the American people want. That's not the fault of the banks. That is the fault of you, the American voter.

Help only arrives if the lenders think it's a worthy investment. Apparently they did. Which is the hallmark of a healthy economy = not destroyed.

Greece, now that's a badly crippled economy not likely to bounce back in a long while. But even that one isn't destroyed. Not quite yet anyway.

 

[SimpleDon]

We've argued this a million times. I would agree with you that capitalism tends to accumulate too much power and money to those at the top when regulations are low. However, capitalism is by far the best system for individuals. In it's truest form, capitalism is a system in which the means of production are owned by individuals, that their use is determined by private decision, and the prices, production, and distribution of the goods created by the investment are determined mainly by competition. If you enjoy freedom, how can you argue with that?

The "means of production" aren't just factories. They are also trucks, computers, software, calculators, shovels, and etc. I have a buddy who owns a private bookkeeping service. His means of production are a car, laptop, and the knowledge in his head. What right does the "collective" have in owning his means of production?

This question intrigued me. You got a guy with a car, a laptop, and some knowledge of how to keep the books of people with enough money to need a bookkeeper. This kind of question is always posed with the individual under discussion virtually in a vacuum of circumstances that might surround him and control how successful his business can be. Our world is changing rapidly and a lot of traditional labor employment is disappearing.

Yes, a lot of jobs are disappearing. But a lot of new jobs are being created. How many website designers and programmers' jobs were there forty years ago?

Conservatively one half of the jobs that we have today were created in the last fifty years. It is called progress.

There is no possibility that the job losses that we are facing in the next fifty years will in any way be more difficult than the changes that we had when agriculture was mechanized in fifty years in the latter quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Capitalism lacks a method of dealing with this situation and actually meeting the need of society as a whole.

This is demonstrably false. Capitalism does quite well at generating completely new jobs, from innovation, that is new products, and from increases in productivity, applying innovations to increase production with less effort. Capitalism produces these effects because of the stress of competition. No other system does this well enough to compete with capitalistic systems.

It can barely meet its own needs.

Again, this is demonstrably false. You constantly are reminding us that capitalism requires consumption which has turned into consumption for consumption's sake. This is the exact opposite of the claim that you are making here that capitalism is barely able to provide for its own needs.

People need connection to the commerce of their society and also need to have security within it.

And no other system provides a better connection to the economy than capitalism. An individual can connect with the economy in so many ways under capitalism. They can work for wages or they strike out on a higher risk-reward path to try to make their fortune or just to be their own boss.

Without security, the worker is in danger of becoming a casualty of unfair distribution of wealth.

There is no doubt that the greatest weakness of capitalism is if left on its own it concentrates income and wealth in progressively fewer and fewer hands, that is, without positive redistribution of income from the wealthy to everyone else. The Trustees annual report for the Social Security Trust Fund for 2016 is out. They report that more than 40% of the trust fund 75 year projected worse case shortfall is due not to the baby boom demographic bulge but to the worsening income inequality that we have seen over the last forty years or so.

The best that we could do would be to push up the wages of the poor and the middle class to increase demand in the economy and to make make changing jobs as painless and as smooth as possible. For the last thirty five years or so we done the opposite of this ideal in order to suppress wages. Also because of the widespread belief in the "Iron rule of wages" that the best wage is the lowest wage that employs the number of workers needed. Wages and salaries (thinking of you Loren!) are the way that we distribute the economic gains to the vast majority of the members of our society. Suppressing intentionally the wages and salaries of the non-rich is saying that capitalism should do this rather important job poorly.

The laptop...a product of society as a whole, the same for the car and the roads it drives on, the same for the cell phone towers. Society actually has quite a claim on that traveling bookmaker's income.

See bilby's response to this same post of yours. He is correct.

Here it is. Click to read.

....What we need is more extreme moderates.

Radical-reactionary moderation. To the ramparts!

 

[Elixir]

The left is about tolerance.

...

You funny, unter! All you have to do is go to a college campus to disabuse yourself of that notion.

Oh of course. If you want to hear about tolerance, listen to Donald Trump. He hires Mexicans! Who else would ever do such a thing?

 

[Horatio Parker]

Well, the opinion was that the economy would've been destroyed without substantial help. That's not so easily dismissed as hyperbole.

And, the implication is that the 90% of growth since 2008 that has gone to the 1% is just dandy. It's not.

Maybe I shouldn't butt in the middle like this, but it struck me as odd.

This is a separate discussion. Re-distribution of wealth (or "transfering" in fancy talk) is a matter of policy. USA has had the same policy before and after 2008.

The health of the economy is measured in if it's doing what the policy hopes it will. This non-transference policy is apparently what the American people want. That's not the fault of the banks. That is the fault of you, the American voter.

Help only arrives if the lenders think it's a worthy investment. Apparently they did. Which is the hallmark of a healthy economy = not destroyed.

Greece, now that's a badly crippled economy not likely to bounce back in a long while. But even that one isn't destroyed. Not quite yet anyway.

Yes, I recall post 2008 the entire financial sector was prepared to fall on its sword but for pernicious voter created policy. Self interest? Nevahoiduvit.

Any aggregation of humans will have questions of resource allocation and so will have an economy. Financial systems, not so much. But why let technical terms hinder miscommunication.

I'm sure the Greeks will be pleased to hear they're doing so well. Great news honey we're not destroyed.

 

[Bomb#20]

I don't agree at all. It might be more clear if we turn it around. Why is anybody ever allowed to keep anything?

...So is there some additional criterion that confiscating private property satisfies, a criterion that only in conjunction with the people voting to do it confers moral rightness on an action? ...

I'm saying that when the state confiscates property from someone they're confiscating something which that person has spent an infinitesimal amount of time and energy creating.

In the first place, that person has usually spent a great deal of time and energy creating something different which she swapped for the private property in question; to seize it on the grounds that "you didn't build that" is cheating her out of what she built and traded away.

And in the second place, property rights are a good thing because dispersing deployment decisions widely is a good thing; granting some public authority a monopoly on them is a bad thing for all the familiar reasons monopolies are bad. Whether the owner built his plough with his own hands or traded it for his sheep or won it in a raffle is immaterial to that consideration.

Most of the value comes from society. Quite likely the same society that confiscates it.

Only in the sense that Sultan Mehmed conquered "the same society" in 1453 that fought off Hannibal in 202 BC. Yes, there's a certain continuity between the society in which Henry II put his time and energy into forcing Thomas Becket to let priests be subjected to secular law and the society in which OWS rioters think "First we'll only come for the 1%" qualifies as a justification for confiscating. But calling those two societies "the same society" doesn't change the fact that when we decide 99% of some 1%er's property is because of the work of others, if we inquire into who those others were whose work created 99% of it, we're going to find a great deal of it was King Henry's work and hardly any of it was the OWSers' work.

In the first place, the "others" who 99% of anything anybody has ever owned is because of the work of are not the same people as the "the people" who'd be voting to confiscate it. Most of the "others" whose work resulted in something someone owns are long dead.

I recognize the argument. I just think it's weak. I think society as a whole should own the rights of dead people. Not individuals. We might let people inherit their parents for sentimental reasons. But I don't think there's much of an argument to be made that it's right and proper to do it. All it does is create and perpetuate huge inequalities in society for no good reason. I think huge income inequalities is problematic in a democracy. And inheritance is to artificially create inequalities. I think it's short sighted and unhelpful.

You don't recognize the argument -- you think I'm talking about the inheritance of stuff. Not at all. You want a hefty inheritance tax, be my guest -- given that we have to tax something, inheritances are a fairer target than most things people want to tax. No, this is about inheritance of knowledge and customs. The chief reason people have so much stuff in modern western countries is because of centuries of dead people putting in the intelligence and effort of figuring out how citizens need to conduct themselves to maintain high levels of productivity and not have their society turn back into the third world pesthole that is H. sapiens' state of nature. That information isn't owned by "society as a whole", as though society has a right to flush it down the toilet when the majority are conned into voting for a Chavez. That information belongs to every individual who's willing to learn the lessons.

If it was "society" that made me rich, well, the way society did it was not by making a lot of stuff and giving it to me for free. The way society did it was by making itself law-abiding and peaceful and non-superstitious and technological and capitalistic, thereby creating an environment in which I was able to produce a lot and other people were able to produce a lot and trade it to me. The dead people who made society that way put vastly more cumulative effort into that legacy than I put into consequently getting rich; I owe them big time for that. But that doesn't mean I owe a dime to the subset of my current fellow citizens who owe those dead people every bit as much as I do but who are betraying those dead people by tearing down their creation and changing society into one that's no longer law-abiding and peaceful and non-superstitious and technological and capitalistic.

Any person who thinks the fact that you own more than he owns is justification for taking your stuff away from you is evidently a person unwilling to learn lessons from all the dead people whose work gave him 99% of everything he ever owned. You do not owe him what you owe those dead people, as though he were those dead people's "rightful heir". If you want to pay your debt to the dead people who made 99% of what you own, pay your debt by not letting that asswipe unbuild what they built.

And in the second place, if I made what you own and you made what I own and we agree to swap, and then I seize your stuff on the grounds that you only have it because of my work, that just makes me a con-man in addition to being a robber. It doesn't confer moral rightness upon my behavior.

I think you've misunderstood my position. I care about fairness. The above is blatantly unfair.

My point exactly. The majority confiscating property for no better reason than because they voted to, or because 99% of anything anybody has ever owned is because of the work of others, is blatantly unfair. You advocated blatantly unfair principles. I know you care about fairness; that's why I'm drawing your attention to how unfair those principles are.

If we can think of any beneficial reason, for society as a whole to confiscate whatever property then that is moral right and proper.

How the hell could a moral claim possibly get more "self-serving mady-upy" than that?!?

It depends who are self-serving.

Why on earth would it depend on that? In degree of "self-serving mady-upy", what the hell is the difference between "King Charles says this benefits King Charles, so it's moral, what's good for the commoners be damned" and "Society as a whole says this benefits society as a whole, so it's moral, what's good for the minority be damned"? In what way is the latter less self-serving? In what way is the latter less made-up?

In a democracy it's the voting collective who votes in ways that serve them, as a collective, the best. And they decide upon what would serve the collective the best.

Usually the collective is best served by individualism and respecting property rights and so on. But not always. It just comes down to what serves the community as a whole the best.

I'm not utilitarian. I don't think the greatest good for the greatest number is a good in itself. But it is the point of democracy IMHO.

Well, why does it "just come down to" that? You and I already agreed democracy is not sacred. So you aren't appealing to the sacredness of democracy; if you also aren't appealing to the greatest good for the greatest number as a good in itself, and you aren't claiming the majority are the Supreme Wisher -- an entity whose wish is others' moral obligation -- then what the bejesus are you appealing to? A circular argument? The collective gets to choose what serves the collective best because it gets to?

Do the people vote to confiscate property because it's good? Or is confiscating property good because the people vote for it?

I see your point. I think it's overly simplistic. The goodness or badness of the confiscation has to be weighed against how it helps or hinders the community. Anything the the people vote for isn't automatically good. But putting the community above the individual isn't automatically bad. My answer is, it depends on the outcome.

So what characteristic of the outcome determines whether putting the community above the individual is bad?

Suppose there's a shortage of nurses, and letting nurses sneak past the guard dogs and climb over the wall into West Germany is going to hinder the community, by degrading the level of care in East German hospitals even further. Does that make it okay to shoot a nurse who's climbing the wall, in order to deter the other nurses from deserting their duties to their patients?

I think that confiscating American-Japanese peoples stuff only because they are American-Japanese is wrong on the grounds that I don't think that would benefit the community as a whole (in which American-Japanese are included). If we want to confiscate a groups property, we need stronger arguments than that. Me, personally I'm always against collective punishments. So this one would always be a no go. Only individuals get their stuff taken, and arguments have to be put forward on each case.

You are implying that in a community consisting of N people, benefiting N-1 people still counts as benefiting the community as a whole but benefiting N-2 people doesn't count, on the grounds that the other 2 people are included in the community. Do you have any idea how illogical that sounds? The other 1 person is included in the community!

"The community as a whole" is something you are evidently defining on an ad hoc basis. You decide on other grounds what it's okay for a majority to do to a minority, and then you define the beneficiaries of an action as "the community as a whole" when you approve, and you define them as "not the community as a whole" when you disapprove.

Clearly your real reason for thinking it's wrong to confiscate American-Japanese people's stuff is because it's blatantly unfair. You say it's because it doesn't benefit the community as a whole. But that's no different from a Christian saying the reason he doesn't murder people is because his God doesn't want him to. His real reason for not murdering is that he's a decent human being. But he feels attached to his moral theory, so it's important to him to give his theory credit, even though his God is on record telling Abraham to murder. Likewise, you feel attached to your moral theory, so it's important to you to give your theory credit, even though your theory is on record saying if the majority vote to confiscate property that makes it moral. Your theory doesn't deserve the credit for you thinking it's wrong to confiscate American-Japanese people's stuff any more than God deserves credit for the Christian not murdering anyone. You deserve the credit for it.

You say that as though Utility is sacred.

Sacred is the wrong word. I think it's the most worthwhile goal. We need some sort of goal for society. Some sort of method for figuring out what actions to take.

Why do we need some sort of goal for society? That just leads to a "The end justifies the means" morality. What's wrong with pluralism? Why shouldn't there be lots of goals, with some people choosing to pursue this goal while others pursue that goal? To have one single goal society as a whole pursues is to make the people who prioritize that goal first-class citizens and make the people who don't prioritize it second-class citizens, beasts of burden for the first-class citizens to use.

We don't need a goal in order to have a method for figuring out what actions to take; there are all sorts of algorithms besides function maximization procedures. For instance, we could make decisions by voting but with the decisions reviewed by a constitutional court. I don't know what function that maximizes, but it results in an environment in which different people are able to pursue their own goals.

I also don't think maximising happiness and pain is what motivates people. Humans are more complex and interesting than that. If utilitarianism was correct we'd have a society now where the goal was to maximise the amount of morphine each person gets.

Well said.

That is not to say that the collective can't be immoral (the tyranny of the majority). We're social creatures. We have an instinct for fairness. It's not cool, for our species, that their exists too great inequalities. In situations like that seizing property can be argued for.

Here's the problem. Apes didn't acquire our instinct for fairness in a vacuum. We acquired it by natural selection of mutations in genes for brain anatomy. That selection took place over a period of ten or twenty million years during which our ancestors were making a living as social hunter-gatherers. So our instincts are well-tuned to know what's fair in a society of hunter-gatherers.

Then, ten thousand years ago, we became farmers.

Now, if we were idiots, then this wouldn't create any moral difficulty. We'd all just instinctively take for granted that what's fair in a society of hunter-gatherers is what's fair, period. Unfortunately for our moral equilibrium, we aren't idiots. At the same time we were evolving a sense of fairness we were evolving intelligence, and our fairness instinct evolved to take this into account and apply intelligence as well as instinct in deciding what's fair. Most of us recognize intuitively that when we ignore circumstances and apply raw instinct and don't think, we make unfair decisions.

Consequently, now we find ourselves facing all manner of moral dilemmas, where half the people have an instinct for fairness that tells them X is fair because it's fair for hunter gatherers, and the other half have an instinct that tells them NOT X is fair because the fact that we're farmers is a relevant circumstance we need to take into account, and for farmers to do X is idiotic, and fairness is not an idiocy-pact. A lot of the great moral conflicts polarizing societies come down to this: one side are thinking like hunter-gatherers and the other side are thinking like farmers.

When you say it's unfair that there exist too great inequalities, you are thinking like a hunter-gatherer. Hunter-gatherer economics is pretty much a zero-sum game. The deer you kill is one less deer available for your fellows to kill. If you take more than you need you're hurting your tribemates. That's why the instinct for hostility to other apes having more than us evolved. But farming is not a zero-sum game. A farmer growing more wheat doesn't cause his neighbor to grow less wheat. Applying zero-sum thinking to farm products is idiotic.

I think it's a false dichotomy. It's not either or.

Well, there aren't a whole lot of third alternatives to "You're allowed to buy newsprint from multiple sellers" and "You're not allowed to buy newsprint from multiple sellers".

There is something in between. In Sweden we have progressive taxation. High income earners pay higher taxes. Is that inherently immoral and unfair in your opinion?

Taxation is confiscating a little bit of everybody's property every month. I think it's great. It pays for all kinds of handy stuff. Tragedy of the commons is avoided.

Huh? You asked me to name non-economic benefits of private property, so I listed a couple. I wasn't arguing against taxation. Of course we have to confiscate a little bit of everybody's property, to pay for the overhead of government. But you can't confiscate a little bit of everybody's property unless they have property. Sweden is not an example of a society doing away with private property rights.

So what term are you claiming I'm fallaciously equating two definitions of?

The fact that Americans often confuse capitalism with democracy doesn't magically make it a single concept.

And? Are you arguing "Americans often confuse capitalism with democracy; you're an American; therefore you're confusing capitalism with democracy"? If you think I equated them, quote me.

Not saying it has to be one or the other -- there are a hundred different possible systems of social organization. Just sayin' even if it isn't communist, the next mass movement that takes power and abolishes private property is going to walk away from its theoretical acceptance of democracy just as fast as the communists did, for pretty much the same reasons.

False dichotomy. The knobs and settings on capitalism are near infinite. The only alternative to unfettered capitalism isn't abolishing private property.

So who the heck said the only alternative to unfettered capitalism is abolishing private property? We were discussing the merits of private property, not the merits of fetters on capitalism. You want some particular fetter, make a case for it. But if you get rid of capitalism instead of just twoodling the knobs and settings, you're going to kill democracy too. That's not equating them. The fact that the two aren't the same thing does not do away with cause and effect.

I think once the robot revolution picks up speed (we're right at the initial stages of it) and most people won't have skills or abilities of value at all in the capitalist system, coupled with greater wealth than ever before. This system will have to change. The free market has no way of dealing with this. The old mantra that everybody should work is already dead today. Only about 40% of all people actually do anything of value to anyone. The rest are dead weight. And we're richer than any of our forefathers.

There are two obvious solutions to that. Either give welfare checks to the 60%. Or give them land. If you give them land, their skills and abilities will be of value to one another -- if none of them have anything to offer the robot users, then none of them will be able to afford the robot products, so they'll buy from one another instead. 40% of the people building robots and using robots and trading with one another and making one another richer than any of their forefathers doesn't stop the other 60% from making stuff and trading with one another and being just as rich as their robotless forefathers.

But that's a thought-experiment, an existence proof. In practice you wouldn't get two parallel economies any more than Norway and Sweden are two parallel economies. The 40% would inevitably find reason to trade with the 60%. "won't have skills or abilities of value at all" is relative to exchange rate; when the exchange rate between roboticist money and 60%er money gets high enough, roboticists will buy stuff from 60%ers even though robots can make it. In the capitalist system, everybody willing and able to work has a comparative advantage at something.

 

[DrZoidberg]

In the first place, that person has usually spent a great deal of time and energy creating something different which she swapped for the private property in question; to seize it on the grounds that "you didn't build that" is cheating her out of what she built and traded away.

Yeah, but how did they acquire the knowledge and tools to create that value. What infrastructure did they use to transport the products? Almost nothing is done by the individual. Virtually all of that value is inherited or "stolen" from people around them.

And in the second place, property rights are a good thing because dispersing deployment decisions widely is a good thing;

That's a completely different subject. You're conflating "property rights" with "capitalism". It's like comparing the virtues of "grapes" in particular with "food" in general.

granting some public authority a monopoly on them is a bad thing for all the familiar reasons monopolies are bad. Whether the owner built his plough with his own hands or traded it for his sheep or won it in a raffle is immaterial to that consideration.

That's an argument from utility. Not ethics or morals. This is just saying, we should do it this way because it is more useful. I'm not arguing against that. But this, doesn't make it wrong for the state to seize property. It just makes it less than optimal.

Most of the value comes from society. Quite likely the same society that confiscates it.

Only in the sense that Sultan Mehmed conquered "the same society" in 1453 that fought off Hannibal in 202 BC. Yes, there's a certain continuity between the society in which Henry II put his time and energy into forcing Thomas Becket to let priests be subjected to secular law and the society in which OWS rioters think "First we'll only come for the 1%" qualifies as a justification for confiscating. But calling those two societies "the same society" doesn't change the fact that when we decide 99% of some 1%er's property is because of the work of others, if we inquire into who those others were whose work created 99% of it, we're going to find a great deal of it was King Henry's work and hardly any of it was the OWSers' work.

I think you're over-reaching now. All we need to establish is that individuals contribute almost nothing of their own wealth. It doesn't matter what label we put on the the non-individual entity, or what power structure we use to represent it. That fact remains.

You don't recognize the argument -- you think I'm talking about the inheritance of stuff. Not at all. You want a hefty inheritance tax, be my guest -- given that we have to tax something, inheritances are a fairer target than most things people want to tax. No, this is about inheritance of knowledge and customs. The chief reason people have so much stuff in modern western countries is because of centuries of dead people putting in the intelligence and effort of figuring out how citizens need to conduct themselves to maintain high levels of productivity and not have their society turn back into the third world pesthole that is H. sapiens' state of nature. That information isn't owned by "society as a whole", as though society has a right to flush it down the toilet when the majority are conned into voting for a Chavez. That information belongs to every individual who's willing to learn the lessons.

If it was "society" that made me rich, well, the way society did it was not by making a lot of stuff and giving it to me for free. The way society did it was by making itself law-abiding and peaceful and non-superstitious and technological and capitalistic, thereby creating an environment in which I was able to produce a lot and other people were able to produce a lot and trade it to me. The dead people who made society that way put vastly more cumulative effort into that legacy than I put into consequently getting rich; I owe them big time for that. But that doesn't mean I owe a dime to the subset of my current fellow citizens who owe those dead people every bit as much as I do but who are betraying those dead people by tearing down their creation and changing society into one that's no longer law-abiding and peaceful and non-superstitious and technological and capitalistic.

Whoa there cowboy. Back up a bit. I did understand that. Most of our wealth comes from collected knowledge; standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that. But, the wealth comes from the exponential effect of a bunch of individuals all doing the right thing. It still ain't the individuals. They are all dependent on the collective all doing the right thing as well.

You can be the best wheel maker in the world, in a shitty little English medieval village. That won't help you get rich if people around you all prefer to carry around their stuff by hand.

We are extremely dependent on others. Even the most hard working person in the world. The word we use for that others, is society. And our form of government represents it.

Any person who thinks the fact that you own more than he owns is justification for taking your stuff away from you is evidently a person unwilling to learn lessons from all the dead people whose work gave him 99% of everything he ever owned. You do not owe him what you owe those dead people, as though he were those dead people's "rightful heir".

I don't think anybody owes anybody anything. Just as little as I think we have a right to "our" stuff.

If you want to pay your debt to the dead people who made 99% of what you own, pay your debt by not letting that asswipe unbuild what they built.

I think that is a backward and possibly self-serving argument. You're putting your right to interpret the wishes and inheritance of our ancestors above that of other people you share a society with. I think that is a weak position to argue from.

My point exactly. The majority confiscating property for no better reason than because they voted to, or because 99% of anything anybody has ever owned is because of the work of others, is blatantly unfair. You advocated blatantly unfair principles. I know you care about fairness; that's why I'm drawing your attention to how unfair those principles are.

But that's not what you're arguing against. You're arguing against... for example, we vote communists into power who seizes everybody's private property. I'd argue that is fair. We all lost the same proportion of our wealth. You seem to argue it is inherently unfair.

Well, why does it "just come down to" that? You and I already agreed democracy is not sacred. So you aren't appealing to the sacredness of democracy; if you also aren't appealing to the greatest good for the greatest number as a good in itself, and you aren't claiming the majority are the Supreme Wisher -- an entity whose wish is others' moral obligation -- then what the bejesus are you appealing to? A circular argument? The collective gets to choose what serves the collective best because it gets to?

Democracy isn't sacred. But neither is natural rights. I think you are just assuming that natural rights are sacred. Am I wrong?

I see your point. I think it's overly simplistic. The goodness or badness of the confiscation has to be weighed against how it helps or hinders the community. Anything the the people vote for isn't automatically good. But putting the community above the individual isn't automatically bad. My answer is, it depends on the outcome.

So what characteristic of the outcome determines whether putting the community above the individual is bad?

Here's where it gets philosophical. Society just has to figure this one out on their own. It's society as a whole that decides.

I still think you have placed the individual rights as paramount, and just assumed they are above collective rights. It's a circular argument IMHO.

Suppose there's a shortage of nurses, and letting nurses sneak past the guard dogs and climb over the wall into West Germany is going to hinder the community, by degrading the level of care in East German hospitals even further. Does that make it okay to shoot a nurse who's climbing the wall, in order to deter the other nurses from deserting their duties to their patients?

There is no scenario in which, Erich Honecker, an unelected (in a popular election) individual, gets to represent the collective. The above is wrong for the same reason bank robbery is wrong.

You are implying that in a community consisting of N people, benefiting N-1 people still counts as benefiting the community as a whole but benefiting N-2 people doesn't count, on the grounds that the other 2 people are included in the community. Do you have any idea how illogical that sounds? The other 1 person is included in the community!

Let's take another example. Similar but critically different. Let's say somebody in the community has Bubonic-AIDS-Herpes and it's contagious as well as deadly as fuck. So the collective decides that it's best to contain them. That was essentially how the containment of Japanese-Americans was framed/argued for. It was blatantly racist. But that's just the thing with opinions and beliefs. They can be wrong. But the fact that we can sometimes be wrong isn't an argument for never doing anything collectively, or never forcing the majority view onto the minority.

"The community as a whole" is something you are evidently defining on an ad hoc basis. You decide on other grounds what it's okay for a majority to do to a minority, and then you define the beneficiaries of an action as "the community as a whole" when you approve, and you define them as "not the community as a whole" when you disapprove.

Clearly your real reason for thinking it's wrong to confiscate American-Japanese people's stuff is because it's blatantly unfair. You say it's because it doesn't benefit the community as a whole. But that's no different from a Christian saying the reason he doesn't murder people is because his God doesn't want him to. His real reason for not murdering is that he's a decent human being. But he feels attached to his moral theory, so it's important to him to give his theory credit, even though his God is on record telling Abraham to murder. Likewise, you feel attached to your moral theory, so it's important to you to give your theory credit, even though your theory is on record saying if the majority vote to confiscate property that makes it moral. Your theory doesn't deserve the credit for you thinking it's wrong to confiscate American-Japanese people's stuff any more than God deserves credit for the Christian not murdering anyone. You deserve the credit for it.

It's nothing Ad Hoc about it. I'm against the detainment of the Japanise-Americans because I don't think it fixes the problem the containment and confiscation was intended to fix (winning WW2). That's a purely functional, non-ethical argument.

Why do we need some sort of goal for society?

Are you high? We have a preposterously interconnected world right now. There's plenty of shit we need to agree on or the world would rapidly go tits up. I'm sure there's a minority out there who are furious that electricity plugs have more than just one pegg. I say, fuck 'em.

I'd say it's pretty critical that society has one or a couple of collective goals to work towards. It's either that or Mad Max IMHO. But we're a social species. I think this will arise even if we don't even try. I think it's instinct. We're incredibly influenced by one another. It's impossible not to IMHO.

That just leads to a "The end justifies the means" morality.

Isn't that the society we are living in now?

What's wrong with pluralism? Why shouldn't there be lots of goals, with some people choosing to pursue this goal while others pursue that goal? To have one single goal society as a whole pursues is to make the people who prioritize that goal first-class citizens and make the people who don't prioritize it second-class citizens, beasts of burden for the first-class citizens to use.

We don't need a goal in order to have a method for figuring out what actions to take; there are all sorts of algorithms besides function maximization procedures. For instance, we could make decisions by voting but with the decisions reviewed by a constitutional court. I don't know what function that maximizes, but it results in an environment in which different people are able to pursue their own goals.

WTF are you talking about? How the hell did you slide into this discussion? How is this connected to anything I've said?

Here's the problem. Apes didn't acquire our instinct for fairness in a vacuum. We acquired it by natural selection of mutations in genes for brain anatomy. That selection took place over a period of ten or twenty million years during which our ancestors were making a living as social hunter-gatherers. So our instincts are well-tuned to know what's fair in a society of hunter-gatherers.

Then, ten thousand years ago, we became farmers.

Now, if we were idiots, then this wouldn't create any moral difficulty. We'd all just instinctively take for granted that what's fair in a society of hunter-gatherers is what's fair, period. Unfortunately for our moral equilibrium, we aren't idiots. At the same time we were evolving a sense of fairness we were evolving intelligence, and our fairness instinct evolved to take this into account and apply intelligence as well as instinct in deciding what's fair. Most of us recognize intuitively that when we ignore circumstances and apply raw instinct and don't think, we make unfair decisions.

Consequently, now we find ourselves facing all manner of moral dilemmas, where half the people have an instinct for fairness that tells them X is fair because it's fair for hunter gatherers, and the other half have an instinct that tells them NOT X is fair because the fact that we're farmers is a relevant circumstance we need to take into account, and for farmers to do X is idiotic, and fairness is not an idiocy-pact. A lot of the great moral conflicts polarizing societies come down to this: one side are thinking like hunter-gatherers and the other side are thinking like farmers.

When you say it's unfair that there exist too great inequalities, you are thinking like a hunter-gatherer. Hunter-gatherer economics is pretty much a zero-sum game. The deer you kill is one less deer available for your fellows to kill. If you take more than you need you're hurting your tribemates. That's why the instinct for hostility to other apes having more than us evolved. But farming is not a zero-sum game. A farmer growing more wheat doesn't cause his neighbor to grow less wheat. Applying zero-sum thinking to farm products is idiotic.

I agree with you 100%. I just think you stopped your argument too early. We still have that hunter-gatherer brains. We are primarily emotionally driven creatures. Our primitive sense of fairness matters.

But you can't confiscate a little bit of everybody's property unless they have property. Sweden is not an example of a society doing away with private property rights.

That wasn't the point. The point was to demonstrate how there are degrees of property rights. There is such a thing as stronger or weaker private property rights.

It's conceivable to have a society where everybody has private property for a limited period, after which all property goes back to the state. I'm not saying it's desirable or practically possible. I guess, my point is that I think you have a limited imagination.

I think once the robot revolution picks up speed (we're right at the initial stages of it) and most people won't have skills or abilities of value at all in the capitalist system, coupled with greater wealth than ever before. This system will have to change. The free market has no way of dealing with this. The old mantra that everybody should work is already dead today. Only about 40% of all people actually do anything of value to anyone. The rest are dead weight. And we're richer than any of our forefathers.

There are two obvious solutions to that. Either give welfare checks to the 60%. Or give them land. If you give them land, their skills and abilities will be of value to one another -- if none of them have anything to offer the robot users, then none of them will be able to afford the robot products, so they'll buy from one another instead. 40% of the people building robots and using robots and trading with one another and making one another richer than any of their forefathers doesn't stop the other 60% from making stuff and trading with one another and being just as rich as their robotless forefathers.

But that's a thought-experiment, an existence proof. In practice you wouldn't get two parallel economies any more than Norway and Sweden are two parallel economies. The 40% would inevitably find reason to trade with the 60%. "won't have skills or abilities of value at all" is relative to exchange rate; when the exchange rate between roboticist money and 60%er money gets high enough, roboticists will buy stuff from 60%ers even though robots can make it. In the capitalist system, everybody willing and able to work has a comparative advantage at something.

What? That is your solution? It's not like we have to speculate on this. This is not some outlandish scenario. This actually happened in the 19'th century on a massive scale. Improved farming methods made the price of produce go through the floor. The farmers had a choice of migrating to cities and work in factories or starve.

So we know that will happen in your scenario. Except that there are no factories for them to migrate to. Your farmers will either starve or become criminals. You know that for a fact. So why even come with the suggestion?

 

[Bomb#20]

Yeah, but how did they acquire the knowledge and tools to create that value. What infrastructure did they use to transport the products? Almost nothing is done by the individual.

People keep making that argument as though allowing the individual to use the road to get her widgets to the market was an act of charity to her by the community, as though the widget maker wasn't paying her share of the cost of the road in taxes all along, right alongside everyone else.

Virtually all of that value is inherited or "stolen" from people around them.

Where by "stolen" you're referring to the individual obtaining "virtually all of that value", which didn't come from the people around her, and which wasn't anything they owned, and her use of which didn't prevent them from using it too. People hostile to property rights use the word "stolen" in weird ways.

And in the second place, property rights are a good thing because dispersing deployment decisions widely is a good thing;

That's a completely different subject. You're conflating "property rights" with "capitalism". It's like comparing the virtues of "grapes" in particular with "food" in general.

Huh? Where the heck are you getting that? How the heck can I be conflating them? I didn't say a bloody thing about capitalism in that exchange. The people voting to confiscate something doesn't magically make it moral, whether the economy is capitalist or not. Property rights are a good thing because dispersing deployment decisions widely is a good thing, whether the economy is capitalist or not. Why are you muddying this up by bringing capitalism into it? What, whether a government stranglehold on all resources is a good thing depends on whether the economy is capitalist?

granting some public authority a monopoly on them is a bad thing for all the familiar reasons monopolies are bad. Whether the owner built his plough with his own hands or traded it for his sheep or won it in a raffle is immaterial to that consideration.

That's an argument from utility. Not ethics or morals. This is just saying, we should do it this way because it is more useful. I'm not arguing against that. But this, doesn't make it wrong for the state to seize property. It just makes it less than optimal.

Huh? How the heck do you propose to evaluate utility or usefulness or optimality without moral considerations? What the heck makes you think "I should be able to buy newsprint from your competitor so that you won't have a veto over everything I print." is merely a "usefulness" argument and isn't based on the moral argument "Censorship is bad"? It should be painfully obvious that banning me from importing newsprint is not useful to me, but is very useful to a despotic government. It doesn't make sense to talk about what's "optimal" without answering the moral question of whose utility ought to be optimized.

Most of the value comes from society. Quite likely the same society that confiscates it.

... if we inquire into who those others were whose work created 99% of it, we're going to find a great deal of it was King Henry's work and hardly any of it was the OWSers' work.

I think you're over-reaching now. All we need to establish is that individuals contribute almost nothing of their own wealth. It doesn't matter what label we put on the the non-individual entity, or what power structure we use to represent it. That fact remains.

Non sequitur. If the fact that you contribute almost nothing of your own wealth were all you needed to establish, then "Quite likely the same society that confiscates it" would be an irrelevant consideration, so you wouldn't have mentioned the sameness of society, and you'd be arguing that it's moral for the Ukrainian Mafia to take your stuff if they vote to.

I recognize the argument. I just think it's weak. I think society as a whole should own the rights of dead people. Not individuals. We might let people inherit their parents for sentimental reasons. But I don't think there's much of an argument to be made that it's right and proper to do it. All it does is create and perpetuate huge inequalities in society for no good reason. I think huge income inequalities is problematic in a democracy. And inheritance is to artificially create inequalities. I think it's short sighted and unhelpful.

You don't recognize the argument -- you think I'm talking about the inheritance of stuff. Not at all. You want a hefty inheritance tax, be my guest -- given that we have to tax something, inheritances are a fairer target than most things people want to tax. No, this is about inheritance of knowledge and customs. The chief reason people have so much stuff in modern western countries is because of centuries of dead people putting in the intelligence and effort of figuring out how citizens need to conduct themselves to maintain high levels of productivity and not have their society turn back into the third world pesthole that is H. sapiens' state of nature. That information isn't owned by "society as a whole", as though society has a right to flush it down the toilet when the majority are conned into voting for a Chavez. That information belongs to every individual who's willing to learn the lessons.

If it was "society" that made me rich, well, the way society did it was not by making a lot of stuff and giving it to me for free. The way society did it was by making itself law-abiding and peaceful and non-superstitious and technological and capitalistic, thereby creating an environment in which I was able to produce a lot and other people were able to produce a lot and trade it to me. The dead people who made society that way put vastly more cumulative effort into that legacy than I put into consequently getting rich; I owe them big time for that. But that doesn't mean I owe a dime to the subset of my current fellow citizens who owe those dead people every bit as much as I do but who are betraying those dead people by tearing down their creation and changing society into one that's no longer law-abiding and peaceful and non-superstitious and technological and capitalistic.

Whoa there cowboy. Back up a bit. I did understand that. Most of our wealth comes from collected knowledge; standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that. But, the wealth comes from the exponential effect of a bunch of individuals all doing the right thing. It still ain't the individuals. They are all dependent on the collective all doing the right thing as well.

Indeed so. And taking stuff away from a person for no better reason than "We decided we want it." is the collective not doing the right thing. That's one of the things the giants we're all standing on the shoulders of figured out that we need to not do. (It's so important they even put it in my country's constitution: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation".) Point being, "We all have 99% of our respective stuff because of the collective knowing better than to grab an individuals' stuff whenever it wants; therefore it's moral for the collective to grab your stuff whenever it wants." is not what I'd call a compelling argument.

We are extremely dependent on others. Even the most hard working person in the world. The word we use for that others, is society. And our form of government represents it.

That doesn't magically make it moral for those others whom we're extremely dependent on to betray one anothers' trust that they'll persist in the hard-learned patterns of behavior that made it possible for people to depend on one another in the first place.

Much of the reason the first world is so much more prosperous than the third world comes down to people trusting one another, and deserving that trust.

I don't think anybody owes anybody anything. Just as little as I think we have a right to "our" stuff.

If you don't think anybody owes anybody anything, then what the heck was the point of all that argumentation to the effect of "You have 99% of it because of us."? If nobody owes anybody anything, then "It's moral for us to take it because we voted to even though you made 100% of it all by yourself without any help from us." is exactly as good an argument as "It's moral for us to take it because we voted to and society gave you 99% of it anyway." Why did you even raise that issue?

If you want to pay your debt to the dead people who made 99% of what you own, pay your debt by not letting that asswipe unbuild what they built.

I think that is a backward and possibly self-serving argument. You're putting your right to interpret the wishes and inheritance of our ancestors above that of other people you share a society with. I think that is a weak position to argue from.

Huh? What the heck are you talking about? Everybody has an equal, unalienable, and non-exclusive right to interpret the wishes and inheritance of anybody he feels like interpreting -- nobody has a duty to think only thoughts that others pick out for him. When I point out that if OWS confiscate Warren Buffett's wealth because they want to and they have the votes to force the matter then they are betraying all of the cultural inheritance from our ancestors that gave them as good lives as they have, my doing so in no way interferes with anybody else's opportunity to offer a different interpretation of his own. I'm not putting my right above theirs. Why would you even imagine such a thing? If other people want to they're perfectly free to claim that western civilization's inheritance from the giants it's standing on the shoulders of is all about the majority being the Supreme Wisher.

The reason "Society made you rich; society voted to; therefore it's moral." isn't a sensible inference isn't because I interpreted our cultural inheritance a certain way; it isn't because of anything about me. It's because my interpretation is correct and the mob rule fans' interpretation is incorrect. Anybody who thinks the first world generated wealth and health and peace and trust by the exercise of mob rule is an incompetent student of history. That interpretation would be dead wrong whether I say anything about it or not.

And in the second place, if I made what you own and you made what I own and we agree to swap, and then I seize your stuff on the grounds that you only have it because of my work, that just makes me a con-man in addition to being a robber. It doesn't confer moral rightness upon my behavior.

I think you've misunderstood my position. I care about fairness. The above is blatantly unfair.

My point exactly. The majority confiscating property for no better reason than because they voted to, or because 99% of anything anybody has ever owned is because of the work of others, is blatantly unfair. You advocated blatantly unfair principles. I know you care about fairness; that's why I'm drawing your attention to how unfair those principles are.

But that's not what you're arguing against. You're arguing against... for example, we vote communists into power who seizes everybody's private property.

Huh? Where are you getting that? I haven't been focusing on communists at all. I have been arguing against any of the principles you've offered being sufficient grounds to justify property confiscation. "We voted to." is insufficient. "You didn't build that." is insufficient. "We're the same society as the one that created 99% of your stuff." is insufficient. Those are unfair principles. If you want to confiscate private property, and you want to claim it's moral and isn't merely naked self-interested power, then you're going to need better arguments than those.

I'd argue that is fair. We all lost the same proportion of our wealth. You seem to argue it is inherently unfair.

Of course it's unfair. Does "fair" mean nothing more than "equal" in your moral universe? What, if Sweden is conquered by Aum Shinrikyo, and they ban Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, atheism, and every other metaphysical opinion currently held by Swedes, will you argue that that's fair because you're all losing the same proportion of your religious freedom?

Well, why does it "just come down to" that? You and I already agreed democracy is not sacred. So you aren't appealing to the sacredness of democracy; if you also aren't appealing to the greatest good for the greatest number as a good in itself, and you aren't claiming the majority are the Supreme Wisher -- an entity whose wish is others' moral obligation -- then what the bejesus are you appealing to? A circular argument? The collective gets to choose what serves the collective best because it gets to?

Democracy isn't sacred. But neither is natural rights. I think you are just assuming that natural rights are sacred. Am I wrong?

Of course you're wrong -- I'm the one who disputed the existence of sacredness, remember? You made moral claims; it's up to you to back them up. When you try to make this about me and my moral assumptions, you're reversing the burden of proof. That's a fallacy. "You haven't shown it's immoral to seize this property; therefore it's moral to seize this property." is not a valid inference. So if that's what you're appealing to, fail.

If that's not what you're appealing to, what are you appealing to? How come "It just comes down to what serves the community as a whole the best."?

So what characteristic of the outcome determines whether putting the community above the individual is bad?

Here's where it gets philosophical. Society just has to figure this one out on their own. It's society as a whole that decides.

I still think you have placed the individual rights as paramount, and just assumed they are above collective rights. It's a circular argument IMHO.

A "right" is just a shorthand for saying there are certain things we ought not to do to someone. When we talk of "animal rights" such as dogs' right not to be tortured, that's just another way to say we ought not to torture a dog; likewise, an "individual right" not to be killed is just another way to say we ought not to kill that individual. So to talk of a "collective right" would just be a way to say you shouldn't do something to a collective, yes? So how the heck do you do something to a collective? A collective is a grammatical fiction. It's a mental model, not a real thing. What is there you can do that counts as doing something to a collective, over and above whatever it is you're doing to each individual whom you think of as part of that collective? Or, if that's not what "collective right" means, what does it mean?

But be that all as it may, you're still trying to make this about me. You're the one making the controversial moral claims -- I don't recall asserting any particular individual right you're disputing. You don't dispute an individual's right not to have to think what others want her to think, do you? So justify your own claims; don't complain I haven't justified my non-claims.

If you're claiming collective rights are above individual rights, suppose society just figures out on its own that getting a man to stick his dick up your ass is an outcome that hinders the community. Does their collective right outrank somebody's individual right to have the orgasm of his choice with a consenting adult?

Suppose there's a shortage of nurses, and letting nurses sneak past the guard dogs and climb over the wall into West Germany is going to hinder the community, by degrading the level of care in East German hospitals even further. Does that make it okay to shoot a nurse who's climbing the wall, in order to deter the other nurses from deserting their duties to their patients?

There is no scenario in which, Erich Honecker, an unelected (in a popular election) individual, gets to represent the collective. The above is wrong for the same reason bank robbery is wrong.

But my question wasn't about your "We voted to" justification; we'd moved on to your "how it helps or hinders the community" justification. Are you proposing that on their own, both "We voted to" and "It hinders the community" are each insufficient justification for putting the collective above the individual, but the two of them combined form a sufficient justification? Suppose some community as a whole votes to ban nurses from emigrating, and votes to use a wall and guard towers and police dogs to keep nurses from deserting their posts. Does that make it okay to shoot a nurse who's climbing the wall?

I think that confiscating American-Japanese peoples stuff only because they are American-Japanese is wrong on the grounds that I don't think that would benefit the community as a whole (in which American-Japanese are included). If we want to confiscate a groups property, we need stronger arguments than that. Me, personally I'm always against collective punishments. So this one would always be a no go. Only individuals get their stuff taken, and arguments have to be put forward on each case.

You are implying that in a community consisting of N people, benefiting N-1 people still counts as benefiting the community as a whole but benefiting N-2 people doesn't count, on the grounds that the other 2 people are included in the community. Do you have any idea how illogical that sounds? The other 1 person is included in the community!

Let's take another example. Similar but critically different. Let's say somebody in the community has Bubonic-AIDS-Herpes... it's best to contain them. That was essentially how the containment of Japanese-Americans was framed/argued for. It was blatantly racist. But that's just the thing with opinions and beliefs. They can be wrong. But the fact that we can sometimes be wrong isn't an argument for never doing anything collectively, or never forcing the majority view onto the minority.

Okay, so you're switching from "It's bad because they're a group and because they're part of the community" to "It's bad because the collective's belief that Japanese-Americans are dangerous is wrong." That's a better argument; but it brings us back to the nurses. Nurses emigrating really is dangerous to those left behind. That opinion isn't wrong. So if that's essentially how the containment of nurses is framed/argued for, does that make containing them by force okay?

Why do we need some sort of goal for society?

Are you high? We have a preposterously interconnected world right now. ... I'd say it's pretty critical that society has one or a couple of collective goals to work towards. It's either that or Mad Max IMHO.

Are you high? What collective goal has U.S. society been able to agree on since we agreed we wanted to win WWII? We can't even agree to buy antirejection drugs for people we already bought new kidneys for while we're wasting 1300 donated kidneys a year! So where are all the road warriors you promised me?

But we're a social species. I think this will arise even if we don't even try. I think it's instinct. We're incredibly influenced by one another. It's impossible not to IMHO.

Since we're a social species what will arise is we'll work out accommodations with one another even though we're working toward disparate and often conflicting goals.

What's wrong with pluralism? Why shouldn't there be lots of goals, with some people choosing to pursue this goal while others pursue that goal? To have one single goal society as a whole pursues is to make the people who prioritize that goal first-class citizens and make the people who don't prioritize it second-class citizens, beasts of burden for the first-class citizens to use.

We don't need a goal in order to have a method for figuring out what actions to take; there are all sorts of algorithms besides function maximization procedures. For instance, we could make decisions by voting but with the decisions reviewed by a constitutional court. I don't know what function that maximizes, but it results in an environment in which different people are able to pursue their own goals.

WTF are you talking about? How the hell did you slide into this discussion? How is this connected to anything I've said?

Um, it's connected because you said we need some sort of goal for society as a method for figuring out what actions to take and you think Utility is the most worthwhile goal. I disagree. I think trying to agree on a utility function and then trying to maximize the chosen function is a poor way for society to figure out what actions to take. When you say things I think are wrong, I tell you why I think they're wrong. Is that something I shouldn't do?

...our instincts are well-tuned to know what's fair in a society of hunter-gatherers. ... half the people have an instinct for fairness that tells them X is fair because it's fair for hunter gatherers, and the other half have an instinct that tells them NOT X is fair because the fact that we're farmers is a relevant circumstance we need to take into account... Hunter-gatherer economics is pretty much a zero-sum game. ... A farmer growing more wheat doesn't cause his neighbor to grow less wheat. Applying zero-sum thinking to farm products is idiotic.

I agree with you 100%. I just think you stopped your argument too early. We still have that hunter-gatherer brains. We are primarily emotionally driven creatures. Our primitive sense of fairness matters.

Well, so does our more advanced sense of fairness. When the two can't be reconciled, I don't see a better solution than to invite people to produce reasons for their moral judgments, and dismiss whichever sense of fairness offers reasons that aren't fact-based. Sometimes the resolution has to be to let whichever sense of fairness has the bigger army get its way; but as solutions go, that one seems "less than optimal".

Sweden is not an example of a society doing away with private property rights.

That wasn't the point. The point was to demonstrate how there are degrees of property rights. There is such a thing as stronger or weaker private property rights.

That's a valid point. But it seems to me, "We can take it if we decide it benefits us and we vote to" doesn't really qualify as "weaker private property rights". It qualifies as "no private property rights".

It's conceivable to have a society where everybody has private property for a limited period, after which all property goes back to the state. I'm not saying it's desirable or practically possible. I guess, my point is that I think you have a limited imagination.

I take it you mean anything you acquire, you lose N years after you acquire it, sort of the way a copyright works. I don't think I said anything that would rule that scenario out. You seem to be trying hard to shoehorn whatever I say into your picture of me as some sort of libertarian absolutist. Not me. That scenario is just a quaint variation on property tax -- no big deal unless N is excessively small.

(Contrariwise, if what you meant was that N years from now, all property no matter when acquired is seized, and the country is turned into a resource deployment monopoly state, well, that would be "no private property rights" again. And for all the reasons I've belabored earlier, that would be a disaster, for everyone in the country except the leaders of the ruling party that imposed the monopoly.)

There are two obvious solutions to that. Either give welfare checks to the 60%. Or give them land. If you give them land, their skills and abilities will be of value to one another -- if none of them have anything to offer the robot users, then none of them will be able to afford the robot products, so they'll buy from one another instead. ...
But that's a thought-experiment, an existence proof. ... The 40% would inevitably find reason to trade with the 60%. ...

What? That is your solution? It's not like we have to speculate on this. This is not some outlandish scenario. This actually happened in the 19'th century on a massive scale. Improved farming methods made the price of produce go through the floor. The farmers had a choice of migrating to cities and work in factories or starve.

So we know that will happen in your scenario. Except that there are no factories for them to migrate to. Your farmers will either starve or become criminals. You know that for a fact. So why even come with the suggestion?

You really ought to know better than to tell people you disagree with that they know you're right. You're an incompetent expert witness on what other people think. If supplying both sides' positions is the sort of debate you prefer, you can always go start your own thread where you can argue against yourself in peace. So why even come with the suggestion?

No, I'm not aware of any case, in the 19th century or any other era, when my scenario actually happened on a massive scale and it had anything like the result you describe. What I do know for a fact actually happened is that the U.S. carried out my scenario on a massive scale in the 19th century, and it had exactly the opposite result from the one you proclaim with such certainty. Its result was a million-odd new family farms, populated by formerly impoverished masses in eastern cities, people fleeing the factories and unemployment for a better life on the land, and usually becoming more prosperous.

I'm also aware of the Highland Clearances, and analogous developments on a massive scale in other European countries, where improved farming methods made the price of produce go through the floor and farmers had a choice of migrating to cities and working in factories or starving, exactly as you describe. I'm guessing, therefore, that that's the history you're talking about, history you're laying at the door of my scenario as a reproach. But the funny thing about an improved farming method is that it has no magical power to cause subsistence farming to stop working. It actually makes it work better. So it wasn't improved farming methods that gave farmers the factory or starve choice. And it wasn't low produce prices that gave them the factory or starve choice -- you can eat your produce instead of selling it. No, it was the landlords that gave farmers the factory or starve choice. They switched on a massive scale from labor-intensive food production to cash crops that due to improved farming methods could be grown with far less labor than before. In Britain what they switched to usually wasn't even food at all; it was wool. The reason farmers had a choice of migrating to cities and working in factories or starving was because they didn't own the land.

Perhaps when I wrote "give them land", you read my words and decided those words meant "have them become tenant farmers on some lord's estate". Contrariwise, perhaps you were talking about some country I never heard about where the rulers actually gave land to poor people on a massive scale in the 19th century and the land grants impoverished them further by some mechanism that has not yet occurred to me. If that's what you were talking about then by all means please educate me about a segment of history I've overlooked. But I'm betting either you decided I didn't really mean "give them land", or else you decided that who owned the Highlands during the Highland Clearances had no impact on who got cleared from the Highlands.

 

[DrZoidberg]

People keep making that argument as though allowing the individual to use the road to get her widgets to the market was an act of charity to her by the community, as though the widget maker wasn't paying her share of the cost of the road in taxes all along, right alongside everyone else.

So the individual benefits from a collective effort and therefore gets to keep all the profit. That makes sense to whose logic? I don't think you've really thought this through.

Virtually all of that value is inherited or "stolen" from people around them.

Where by "stolen" you're referring to the individual obtaining "virtually all of that value", which didn't come from the people around her, and which wasn't anything they owned, and her use of which didn't prevent them from using it too. People hostile to property rights use the word "stolen" in weird ways.

I'm not against property rights. I'm also not against the free market nor capitalism. I think they're great. What I'm against is stupid justifications. It's possible to argue for free market capitalism just fine without resorting to natural rights or other retarded arguments.

And in the second place, property rights are a good thing because dispersing deployment decisions widely is a good thing;

Agreed.

That's an argument from utility. Not ethics or morals. This is just saying, we should do it this way because it is more useful. I'm not arguing against that. But this, doesn't make it wrong for the state to seize property. It just makes it less than optimal.

Huh? How the heck do you propose to evaluate utility or usefulness or optimality without moral considerations? What the heck makes you think "I should be able to buy newsprint from your competitor so that you won't have a veto over everything I print." is merely a "usefulness" argument and isn't based on the moral argument "Censorship is bad"? It should be painfully obvious that banning me from importing newsprint is not useful to me, but is very useful to a despotic government. It doesn't make sense to talk about what's "optimal" without answering the moral question of whose utility ought to be optimized.

The best method we know so far is via proxy, the democratic election. It's far from perfect. But it seems to beat all the other methods.

Still doesn't make it wrong for the government to seize property.

Non sequitur. If the fact that you contribute almost nothing of your own wealth were all you needed to establish, then "Quite likely the same society that confiscates it" would be an irrelevant consideration, so you wouldn't have mentioned the sameness of society, and you'd be arguing that it's moral for the Ukrainian Mafia to take your stuff if they vote to.

On the topic of non sequitur.

Indeed so. And taking stuff away from a person for no better reason than "We decided we want it." is the collective not doing the right thing. That's one of the things the giants we're all standing on the shoulders of figured out that we need to not do. (It's so important they even put it in my country's constitution: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation".) Point being, "We all have 99% of our respective stuff because of the collective knowing better than to grab an individuals' stuff whenever it wants; therefore it's moral for the collective to grab your stuff whenever it wants." is not what I'd call a compelling argument.

Congratulations. Now you are arguing from utility. Not natural rights. I agree. The state seizing property is rarely helpful. We should probably avoid doing so as much as possible. But not because it's wrong. But because it often turns to shit and makes everybody equally poor.

That doesn't magically make it moral for those others whom we're extremely dependent on to betray one anothers' trust that they'll persist in the hard-learned patterns of behavior that made it possible for people to depend on one another in the first place.

Much of the reason the first world is so much more prosperous than the third world comes down to people trusting one another, and deserving that trust.

Lol... "trust". Now you went into loony territory again.

My point exactly. The majority confiscating property for no better reason than because they voted to, or because 99% of anything anybody has ever owned is because of the work of others, is blatantly unfair. You advocated blatantly unfair principles. I know you care about fairness; that's why I'm drawing your attention to how unfair those principles are.

Ehe... but you introduced a farcical example where Person A gets both the products of Person A and B. WTF is that supposed to prove or argue for? You might as well have ended it with "...therefor all property is theft". It wouldn't have been any less illogical.

Of course it's unfair. Does "fair" mean nothing more than "equal" in your moral universe? What, if Sweden is conquered by Aum Shinrikyo, and they ban Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, atheism, and every other metaphysical opinion currently held by Swedes, will you argue that that's fair because you're all losing the same proportion of your religious freedom?

Perhaps your most crazy and irrelevant metaphor yet.

No, it doesn't Fair means equal.

Well, why does it "just come down to" that? You and I already agreed democracy is not sacred. So you aren't appealing to the sacredness of democracy; if you also aren't appealing to the greatest good for the greatest number as a good in itself, and you aren't claiming the majority are the Supreme Wisher -- an entity whose wish is others' moral obligation -- then what the bejesus are you appealing to? A circular argument? The collective gets to choose what serves the collective best because it gets to?

Yes, that is my argument. I think it's possible to see society itself as one entity, deciding for itself what is best for it with it's hive mind. I can also see individuals, who do the same exercise on the individual level.

So how the heck do you do something to a collective? A collective is a grammatical fiction. It's a mental model, not a real thing. What is there you can do that counts as doing something to a collective, over and above whatever it is you're doing to each individual whom you think of as part of that collective? Or, if that's not what "collective right" means, what does it mean?

I disagree. Humans identify with groups greater than themselves all the time. Call it a tribe, if you will. That's the collective. We're a social species. Organizing ourselves into collectives is what we do. We're not naturally suited for being solely independent. We have all manner of instincts that kick in in order to propel us into various collectives. That is an argument from biology.

But be that all as it may, you're still trying to make this about me. You're the one making the controversial moral claims -- I don't recall asserting any particular individual right you're disputing. You don't dispute an individual's right not to have to think what others want her to think, do you? So justify your own claims; don't complain I haven't justified my non-claims.

I think your argument is circular. I also suspect that the degree of controversiality may differ around the world. In more collectively minded societies I don't think my opinions are controversial in the least.

A side note, the Swedish (or rather Scandinavian) language has a whole set of, untranslatable, words that only relate to collectives. "Det kan man inte göra". Which is a completely normal Swedish sentence heard every day. Means something along the lines "the collective does not allow it" or "this is not possible to people in our collective". This means Scandinavians are trained to think in collective terms from childhood. So I think this just comes more naturally to us and might explain why I think it's obvious, and you think it's absurd.

If you're claiming collective rights are above individual rights, suppose society just figures out on its own that getting a man to stick his dick up your ass is an outcome that hinders the community. Does their collective right outrank somebody's individual right to have the orgasm of his choice with a consenting adult?

Assuming we're all considered equal, the collective is literally everybody. Of course collective rights outrank individual rights.

The collective gets to ban whatever behaviors it deems unwanted or dangerous. That's what laws are. We may not like some of those laws. But hey, that's life. The collective has also banned murder and theft. Are you going to argue against those collective decisions?

I'm not saying collective decisions are infallible or always better somehow. I'm just saying they outrank individual decisions.

Suppose some community as a whole votes to ban nurses from emigrating, and votes to use a wall and guard towers and police dogs to keep nurses from deserting their posts. Does that make it okay to shoot a nurse who's climbing the wall?

You mean like we're doing now to Syrian refugee's, but in reverse? Most people seem fine about the process by which these laws were put in place. That's pretty telling. This is the democratic process. Sometimes it fucking sucks. But the collective has a right to put whatever measures in place it deems necessary and which it thinks will protect and help the collective.

Okay, so you're switching from "It's bad because they're a group and because they're part of the community" to "It's bad because the collective's belief that Japanese-Americans are dangerous is wrong." That's a better argument; but it brings us back to the nurses. Nurses emigrating really is dangerous to those left behind. That opinion isn't wrong. So if that's essentially how the containment of nurses is framed/argued for, does that make containing them by force okay?

Could it be that you've put me in a box labelled "everything the collective decides is the right thing to do"? Please put me in the box labelled "the collective has a right to take decisions that rule the members of that same collective"

Why do we need some sort of goal for society?

Are you high? We have a preposterously interconnected world right now. ... I'd say it's pretty critical that society has one or a couple of collective goals to work towards. It's either that or Mad Max IMHO.

Are you high? What collective goal has U.S. society been able to agree on since we agreed we wanted to win WWII? We can't even agree to buy antirejection drugs for people we already bought new kidneys for while we're wasting 1300 donated kidneys a year! So where are all the road warriors you promised me?

NATO? Obamacare? Invading Iraq? All the fucking presidential elections? Gay marriage? NAFTA? Whatever tax changes were made since? Everything the American government ever does?

And then there's stuff that Americans collectively do spontaneously without having to involve the government. Like the Internet and using the smart phones.

It's quite a long list. I think I've made my point. Everybody doesn't have to agree for something to be a collective decisions. Just enough have to agree.

But we're a social species. I think this will arise even if we don't even try. I think it's instinct. We're incredibly influenced by one another. It's impossible not to IMHO.

Since we're a social species what will arise is we'll work out accommodations with one another even though we're working toward disparate and often conflicting goals.

And what do we call those accommodations? Those are collective decisions. You only need two people to make a collective. The more we add the more power it has and the less say each individual has.