There’s no such thing as a person who survives alone
November 17, 2024 1:08 AM Subscribe
This belief that ideas literally originate in a single person’s mind, and that they should be paid by the rest of humanity for the rest of time is fucking ridiculous. Ideas do not reside inside self-contained people - they reside in a network of interdependent and interconnected people - but the fact that Bezos, or Musk, or whoever, was an early-mover in articulating a particular idea means they get locked in as somewhat arbitrary figureheads, and the fact that they’re billionaires simply reflects the legal reality of share ownership. They are products of our system, not creators of our system. from The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires by Brett Scott
Ideas do not reside inside self-contained people - they reside in a network of interdependent and interconnected people
Open source software embodies this idea to the fullest - so many brilliant minds have come together to produce software we use or benefit from daily whether we realise it or not - Apache, MySQL, Linux, VLC, Blender, etc. Just smart people coming together to build something for the community.
And the corollary to this is the radical anti-IP position: that everything digital can and should be duplicated and shared freely, and even more so with AI now, remixed and forked and upgraded and improved, as long as it remains free for everyone. Why should Rowling be a billionaire, would the world be a better place if the authors of commonly used open source software soaked up billions of dollars of royalties from the economy as well? The world would be poorer for it.
The enduring popularity of 4chan speaks to this also - the lack of individualism taken to its extreme. If I start a conversation with you, and you reply, and then I reply again, there's no way to tell if I'm the same person you were talking with earlier, or someone new. I could argue for one point of view, then a minute later argue for the other side. No upvotes, no favourites, no identities, no credit given or taken. Individuals don't hold positions or views: the community does, collectively.
posted by xdvesper at 3:02 AM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]
Open source software embodies this idea to the fullest - so many brilliant minds have come together to produce software we use or benefit from daily whether we realise it or not - Apache, MySQL, Linux, VLC, Blender, etc. Just smart people coming together to build something for the community.
And the corollary to this is the radical anti-IP position: that everything digital can and should be duplicated and shared freely, and even more so with AI now, remixed and forked and upgraded and improved, as long as it remains free for everyone. Why should Rowling be a billionaire, would the world be a better place if the authors of commonly used open source software soaked up billions of dollars of royalties from the economy as well? The world would be poorer for it.
The enduring popularity of 4chan speaks to this also - the lack of individualism taken to its extreme. If I start a conversation with you, and you reply, and then I reply again, there's no way to tell if I'm the same person you were talking with earlier, or someone new. I could argue for one point of view, then a minute later argue for the other side. No upvotes, no favourites, no identities, no credit given or taken. Individuals don't hold positions or views: the community does, collectively.
posted by xdvesper at 3:02 AM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]
“This belief that ideas literally originate in a single person’s mind, and that they should be paid by the rest of humanity for the rest of time is fucking ridiculous.”
An economics textbook in one sentence. Thanks for the post - good article.
posted by whatevernot at 3:38 AM on November 17, 2024 [12 favorites]
An economics textbook in one sentence. Thanks for the post - good article.
posted by whatevernot at 3:38 AM on November 17, 2024 [12 favorites]
Billionaires are not success stories but the opposite.
posted by nofundy at 4:25 AM on November 17, 2024 [10 favorites]
posted by nofundy at 4:25 AM on November 17, 2024 [10 favorites]
peoples history is another description of an alternate approach (g)
posted by HearHere at 4:55 AM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]
posted by HearHere at 4:55 AM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]
This post still ascribes too much of natural ability to the Great Men. Ask a Marxist (or indeed, most social anarchists) and they will tell you that what distinguishes the entrepreneur capitalist from the worker first and foremost is their relationship to capital (that is, owning it, or having access to those who own it). Having a "personality" that "instigates the process" is tangential at best, and having an "existing support structure" is more than helpful, it is the necessary precondition to shackle others to your enterprise.
As long as the socialist theoretical tradition is relegated to the fringes of progressive thought, bloggers will continue to reinvent it in a flawed, less useful form.
posted by jy4m at 7:00 AM on November 17, 2024 [16 favorites]
As long as the socialist theoretical tradition is relegated to the fringes of progressive thought, bloggers will continue to reinvent it in a flawed, less useful form.
posted by jy4m at 7:00 AM on November 17, 2024 [16 favorites]
Billionaires are not success stories but the opposite.
From The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (Volume VI, page 258):
From The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (Volume VI, page 258):
UNCALCULATING ZEALposted by rochrobbb at 7:01 AM on November 17, 2024 [7 favorites]
A man-eating tiger was ravaging the Kingdom of Damnasia, and the King, greatly concerned for the lives and limbs of his subjects, promised his daughter Zodroulra to any man who would kill the animal. After some days Camaraladdin appeared before the King and demanded the reward.
"But where is the tiger?" the King asked.
"May jackasses sing above my uncle's grave" replied Camaraladdin, "if I dared go within a league of him!"
"Wretch!" cried the King, unsheathing his consoler-under-disappoint; "how care you claim my daughter when you have done nothing to earn her?"
"Thou art wiser, O King, than Solyman the Great, and thy servant is as dust in the tomb of thy dog, yet thou errest. I did not, it is true, kill the tiger, but behold! I have brought thee the scalp of a man who had accumulated five millions pieces of gold and was after more."
The King drew his consoler-under-disappoint, and flicking off Camaraladdin's head said:
"Learn, caitiff, the inexpediency of uncalculating zeal. If the millionaire had been left alone he would have devoured the tiger."
"the radical anti-IP position" shouldn't be so radical...
Speculative microeconomics for tomorrow's economy (2000)
posted by kliuless at 7:07 AM on November 17, 2024 [16 favorites]
Speculative microeconomics for tomorrow's economy (2000)
Governments and societies that bet on the market system become more materially prosperous and technologically powerful. The lesson usually drawn from this economic success story is that in the overwhelming majority of cases the best thing the government can do for the economy is to set the background rules - define property rights, set up honest courts, perhaps rearrange the distribution of income, impose minor taxes and subsidies to compensate for well-defined and narrowly-specified "market failures" - but otherwise the government should leave the market system alone. The main argument for the market system is the dual role played by prices. On the one hand, prices serve to ration demand: anyone unwilling to pay the market price does not get the good. On the other hand, price serves to elicit production: any organization that can make a good, or provide a service, for less than its market price has a powerful financial incentive to do so. What is produced goes to those who value it the most. What is produced is made by the organizations that can make it the cheapest. And what is produced is whatever the ultimate users value the most. The data processing and data communications revolutions shake the foundations of the standard case for the market. In a world in which a large chunk of the goods valued by users are information goods that can be cheaply replicated, it is not socially optimal to charge a price to ration demand. In a world in which cheap replication produces enormous economies of scale, the producers that survive and profit are not those that can produce at the least cost or produce the goods that users value the most; instead, the producers that flourish are those that established their positions first. In a world in which the value chain is only tangentially related to ultimate value to users - in which producers earn money by selling eyeballs to advertisers, say - there is no certainty that what is produced will be what users value the most. The market system may well prove to be tougher than its traditional defenders have thought, and to have more subtle and powerful advantages than those that defenders of the invisible hand have usually listed. At the very least, however, defenders will need new arguments. And at the most, we will need to develop a new economics to discern new answers to the old problem of economic organization. [/em added]the new economics should have been based on the provision of public goods; delong & froomkin:
"Technological" Prerequisites of the Market Economya quarter century later, we now know a new enclosure movement co-opted public commons(-based peer production) handing us a neo-feudal rentier economy funneling ever-increasing wealth to our new techbro-fascist oligarchic overlords. it's their world, we're just sharecroppers in it (but resistance isn't futile! ;)
The ongoing revolution in data processing and data communications technology may well be starting to undermine those basic features of property and exchange that make the invisible hand a powerful social mechanism for organizing production and distribution. The case for the market system has always rested on three implicit pillars, three features of the way that property rights and exchange worked:
Call the first feature excludability: the ability of sellers to force consumers to become buyers, and thus to pay for whatever goods and services they use. [think air or national defense]
Call the second feature rivalry: a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society's resources as producing enough for one million people to use. [your enjoyment of a fireworks display -- or a ripped mp3 -- doesn't diminish another's]
Call the third feature transparency: the ability of individuals to see clearly what they need and what is for sale, so that they truly know just what they wish to buy.
All three of these pillars fit the economy of Adam Smith's day relatively well...
That the absence of excludability, rivalry or transparency is bad for the functioning invisible hand is not news [16]. The analysis of transparency failure has made up an entire subfield of economics for decades: "imperfect information." Non-rivalry has been the basis of the theory of government programs and public goods, as well as of natural monopolies. The solution has been to try to find a regulatory regime that will mimic the decisions that the competitive market ought to make, or to accept that the "second best" public provision of the good by the government is the best that can be done.
Analysis of the impact of the lack of excludability is the core of the economic analysis of research and development. It has led to the conclusion that the best course is to try to work around non-excludability by mimicking what a well-functioning market system would have done. Use the law to expand "property," or use tax-and-subsidy schemes to promote actions with broad benefits.
But the focus of analysis has traditionally been on overcoming "frictions". How can we transform this situation in which the requirements of laissez-faire fail to hold into a situation in which the invisible hand works tolerably well? As long as it works well throughout most of the economy, this is a very sensible analytical and policy strategy. A limited number of government programs and legal doctrines will be needed to closely mimic what the invisible hand would do if it could function properly in a few distinct areas of the economy (such as the regional natural monopolies implicit in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century railroad, or government subsidies granted to basic research).
But what happens when the friction becomes the machine?
What will happen in the future if problems of non-excludability, of non-rivalry, of non-transparency come to apply to a large range of the economy? What happens if they come to occupy as central a place in business decision making as inventory control or production operations management does today? In the natural sciences, perturbation-theory approaches breakdown when the deviations of initial conditions from those necessary for the simple solution become large. Does something similar happen in political economy? Is examining the way the market system handles a few small episodes of "market failure" a good guide for understanding the way it will handle many large ones?
We do not know.
posted by kliuless at 7:07 AM on November 17, 2024 [16 favorites]
Private Property is theft.
There's a reason our society requires multiple overlapping levels of violence to maintain it.
posted by Reyturner at 8:46 AM on November 17, 2024 [7 favorites]
There's a reason our society requires multiple overlapping levels of violence to maintain it.
posted by Reyturner at 8:46 AM on November 17, 2024 [7 favorites]
What a silly slogan. Property springs from violence-backed territorial insticts. Common conceptions of what and to whom certain freedoms of access are properly deprived, will vary over time and across cultures. If you know of a better way, show us. The problems of collective organization, trust and ecology are not trivial.
To the original article: The 'Soupervisor' theory of 'greatness' is a reasonable first-order description of the economy sans money, although not terribly prescriptive by itself. I prefer a more attention-driven approach.
posted by grokus at 12:38 PM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]
To the original article: The 'Soupervisor' theory of 'greatness' is a reasonable first-order description of the economy sans money, although not terribly prescriptive by itself. I prefer a more attention-driven approach.
posted by grokus at 12:38 PM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]
Nobody deserves to be a billionaire. Let them be rich and have more money than most. Heck, even up to half a billion. But a billion, while others go hungry, sick, and unhoused--that's just wrong. Give them adulation and fame. Make their name a household word. Acknowledge people that do good in our world.
posted by BlueHorse at 1:49 PM on November 17, 2024 [5 favorites]
posted by BlueHorse at 1:49 PM on November 17, 2024 [5 favorites]
Private Property is theft.
To the extent that the concept of theft could not exist in a milieu where the concept of private property didn't also exist, this is true.
Like most slogans, though, this one impedes more understanding than it facilitates. The clear implication is that private property is a bad idea. I don't think it is, in and of itself, but like most ideas it can be misapplied in ways that do more harm than good.
I think the same thing about theft, for what it's worth.
When considering slogans of this kind in order to come to a view about the kinds of utopias worth working toward, it seems to me that the principle best kept at front of mind is harm reduction. I think people are pretty good at acting for our own benefit both individually and to some extent collectively, but I think we struggle to keep track of the side effects of doing so, and that collective action is really our only defence against having those bring us undone.
Private property, on the face of it, is an idea that's supportable on the basis of harm reduction. It reflects a set of social norms that say: everybody is entitled to treat a certain amount of stuff as belonging to them, which simply means that they get to say how it's used and that nobody else gets to fuck it up and/or fuck off with it.
I don't see anything wrong with that principle as a principle, whether you label it "private property" or not. If you disagree, try labelling it "bodily autonomy" or "the good scissors" instead and see how it sits with you.
I definitely see something horribly wrong with elevating it to the status of The One Principle To Rule Them All, though. That, to my way of thinking, is a horrible mistake because it ignores another vital harm reduction principle: the idea of the commons, which says there is a certain amount of stuff that everybody is entitled to make free use of provided only that they do so in a way that doesn't make it harder for others to do likewise and preferably makes it easier.
If "the commons" is too abstract, try thinking of this one as leaving the kitchen slightly cleaner than it was before you cooked in it.
To a sketchy but still quite useful first approximation, I see all of politics as a process of coming to a dynamic, collective decision about which stuff is best treated as private property and which stuff is best treated as a commons.
What worries me the most about today's politics is the extent to which it's dominated by people who have so much private property that they've completely lost sight of the commons as an idea and/or forgotten that making use of a commons, unlike using private property, comes with an obligation not to fuck it up as opposed to mere self-interest in not doing so, and have likewise lost sight of the importance of maintaining a distinction between the ideas of private property and stolen goods.
Musk, Bezos, Putin, TFG, Murdoch et al live in a world where what is thine is mine, and all mine is mine. Which is a very convenient moral foundation for them because it means it's only stealing when somebody else does it.
So the utopia I would like to work towards is one where there is at least as much social support for limits on private property as there is for private property itself, exactly so that nobody ends up in that position.
posted by flabdablet at 3:43 PM on November 17, 2024 [9 favorites]
To the extent that the concept of theft could not exist in a milieu where the concept of private property didn't also exist, this is true.
Like most slogans, though, this one impedes more understanding than it facilitates. The clear implication is that private property is a bad idea. I don't think it is, in and of itself, but like most ideas it can be misapplied in ways that do more harm than good.
I think the same thing about theft, for what it's worth.
When considering slogans of this kind in order to come to a view about the kinds of utopias worth working toward, it seems to me that the principle best kept at front of mind is harm reduction. I think people are pretty good at acting for our own benefit both individually and to some extent collectively, but I think we struggle to keep track of the side effects of doing so, and that collective action is really our only defence against having those bring us undone.
Private property, on the face of it, is an idea that's supportable on the basis of harm reduction. It reflects a set of social norms that say: everybody is entitled to treat a certain amount of stuff as belonging to them, which simply means that they get to say how it's used and that nobody else gets to fuck it up and/or fuck off with it.
I don't see anything wrong with that principle as a principle, whether you label it "private property" or not. If you disagree, try labelling it "bodily autonomy" or "the good scissors" instead and see how it sits with you.
I definitely see something horribly wrong with elevating it to the status of The One Principle To Rule Them All, though. That, to my way of thinking, is a horrible mistake because it ignores another vital harm reduction principle: the idea of the commons, which says there is a certain amount of stuff that everybody is entitled to make free use of provided only that they do so in a way that doesn't make it harder for others to do likewise and preferably makes it easier.
If "the commons" is too abstract, try thinking of this one as leaving the kitchen slightly cleaner than it was before you cooked in it.
To a sketchy but still quite useful first approximation, I see all of politics as a process of coming to a dynamic, collective decision about which stuff is best treated as private property and which stuff is best treated as a commons.
What worries me the most about today's politics is the extent to which it's dominated by people who have so much private property that they've completely lost sight of the commons as an idea and/or forgotten that making use of a commons, unlike using private property, comes with an obligation not to fuck it up as opposed to mere self-interest in not doing so, and have likewise lost sight of the importance of maintaining a distinction between the ideas of private property and stolen goods.
Musk, Bezos, Putin, TFG, Murdoch et al live in a world where what is thine is mine, and all mine is mine. Which is a very convenient moral foundation for them because it means it's only stealing when somebody else does it.
So the utopia I would like to work towards is one where there is at least as much social support for limits on private property as there is for private property itself, exactly so that nobody ends up in that position.
posted by flabdablet at 3:43 PM on November 17, 2024 [9 favorites]
I was just having this thought myself - that the human subconscious, given the same general inputs (education, culture, history, news, articles & current thinking etc) will cough out similar permutations and conclusions. No one is unique.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:55 PM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:55 PM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]
If you know of a better way, show us.
More and more a fan of Georgism, myself.
posted by mstokes650 at 5:32 PM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]
More and more a fan of Georgism, myself.
posted by mstokes650 at 5:32 PM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]
Let's debate whether property is theft after the revolution
I hear fish are debating the wetness of water
posted by ginger.beef at 5:49 PM on November 17, 2024 [3 favorites]
I hear fish are debating the wetness of water
posted by ginger.beef at 5:49 PM on November 17, 2024 [3 favorites]
My main beef with Georgism is that I think treating unimproved real estate as the only taxable asset is far too restrictive. It's also not explicitly about setting limits on the maximum wealth of any given individual or family in order to limit the malign influence that concentrations of wealth inevitably bring to bear on politics, and George does a lot of handwaving to avoid acknowledging the Stone Soup effect that the linked article is about, talking instead about the "natural" justice of entitlement to the fruits of one's own efforts.
In any system that allows for private ownership of productive assets, there is inevitably going to exist some level of asset ownership where simply owning those assets is at least as viable a way to generate an income as the sale of skills and labour. Private ownership of productive assets just inherently comes with an inbuilt positive feedback, where those who own more assets automatically get more income, which they can and do use to buy up more assets. If the system doesn't also include rules that create an opposing negative feedback that acts to put some kind of ceiling on the amount of assets that any one person or family can own, then it's just going to be unstable.
The reason I favour taxing assets directly rather than taxing the income they generate is purely practical: it's just easier to do that. Assets are visible, and if their owners expect society to protect that ownership then they need to assert it. This makes asset ownership relatively easy to trace; it's way harder to obfuscate or disguise asset ownership than it is to obfuscate flows of income. The State could easily respond to the failure of an asset's owner to pay the taxes due on it simply by ceasing to protect that ownership and instead reassigning it to the public, thereby capturing all of the productive returns it generates. Not only that, but there are fewer assets than income flows, if only because most assets generate multiple income streams.
If you want a fairly detailed assets tax proposal to think about and/or argue for or against, there's one available at Steve's Tax Reform.
posted by flabdablet at 7:53 PM on November 17, 2024 [3 favorites]
In any system that allows for private ownership of productive assets, there is inevitably going to exist some level of asset ownership where simply owning those assets is at least as viable a way to generate an income as the sale of skills and labour. Private ownership of productive assets just inherently comes with an inbuilt positive feedback, where those who own more assets automatically get more income, which they can and do use to buy up more assets. If the system doesn't also include rules that create an opposing negative feedback that acts to put some kind of ceiling on the amount of assets that any one person or family can own, then it's just going to be unstable.
The reason I favour taxing assets directly rather than taxing the income they generate is purely practical: it's just easier to do that. Assets are visible, and if their owners expect society to protect that ownership then they need to assert it. This makes asset ownership relatively easy to trace; it's way harder to obfuscate or disguise asset ownership than it is to obfuscate flows of income. The State could easily respond to the failure of an asset's owner to pay the taxes due on it simply by ceasing to protect that ownership and instead reassigning it to the public, thereby capturing all of the productive returns it generates. Not only that, but there are fewer assets than income flows, if only because most assets generate multiple income streams.
If you want a fairly detailed assets tax proposal to think about and/or argue for or against, there's one available at Steve's Tax Reform.
posted by flabdablet at 7:53 PM on November 17, 2024 [3 favorites]
The version of the story in the text misses the poignancy of the original - the villagers' contributions are rubbish and scraps - the butcher provides some bones, the ostler some leftover chaff and oats, the innkeeper some rinds of cheese, the baker some breadcrumbs and burnt bread, the householders dried vegetables - it is a time of famine.
So given the lavish resources that these Great Men have access to, I have even less admiration for their outcomes.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:59 PM on November 17, 2024 [5 favorites]
So given the lavish resources that these Great Men have access to, I have even less admiration for their outcomes.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:59 PM on November 17, 2024 [5 favorites]
everybody is entitled to treat a certain amount of stuff as belonging to them, which simply means that they get to say how it's used and that nobody else gets to fuck it up and/or fuck off with it.
this seems a little bit like it opens the way for arguments that elide the distinction between (1) personal possessions, or personal entitlements to the use of things that can actually be identified as primarily the fruits of one's own labour, and (2) private ownership/control of large-scale means of production, or of obviously common resources. like, the "property is theft" discussion isn't really about (1), and most socialists of any stripe do not in fact intend to collectivise anyone's sock drawer.
AFAIK when proudhon says "property is theft", he doesn't think my exclusive claim on the use-value of my socks is theft, either --- the "property" in "property is theft" is propriété, private control of productive property; the hierarchical social relationship that, for instance, the state functions to uphold and manage. the property that is theft is instead the situation where some person or legal person lays claim to the sock factory, exploits the workers in the sock factory by deriving profits from their work, externalises part of the actual cost of running a sock factory by e.g. dumping sock dye in shared waterways, makes sure the state gives them adequately preferential treatment compared to the workers, etc.
that distinction gets complicated somewhat in practice but it's worth harping on as an approximation.
(i don't think this is a quibble with your overall point, flabdablet --- that one thing just invited some elaboration, to me. i think i probably agree entirely about taxing assets directly. at least i'm intrigued to read what Steve has to say, since i know very little about proposals like that.)
posted by busted_crayons at 4:12 AM on November 18, 2024 [3 favorites]
this seems a little bit like it opens the way for arguments that elide the distinction between (1) personal possessions, or personal entitlements to the use of things that can actually be identified as primarily the fruits of one's own labour, and (2) private ownership/control of large-scale means of production, or of obviously common resources. like, the "property is theft" discussion isn't really about (1), and most socialists of any stripe do not in fact intend to collectivise anyone's sock drawer.
AFAIK when proudhon says "property is theft", he doesn't think my exclusive claim on the use-value of my socks is theft, either --- the "property" in "property is theft" is propriété, private control of productive property; the hierarchical social relationship that, for instance, the state functions to uphold and manage. the property that is theft is instead the situation where some person or legal person lays claim to the sock factory, exploits the workers in the sock factory by deriving profits from their work, externalises part of the actual cost of running a sock factory by e.g. dumping sock dye in shared waterways, makes sure the state gives them adequately preferential treatment compared to the workers, etc.
that distinction gets complicated somewhat in practice but it's worth harping on as an approximation.
(i don't think this is a quibble with your overall point, flabdablet --- that one thing just invited some elaboration, to me. i think i probably agree entirely about taxing assets directly. at least i'm intrigued to read what Steve has to say, since i know very little about proposals like that.)
posted by busted_crayons at 4:12 AM on November 18, 2024 [3 favorites]
the "property is theft" discussion isn't really about [personal possessions], and most socialists of any stripe do not in fact intend to collectivise anyone's sock drawer.
Quite. The point I'm making is that private property is a notion that can encompass everything from bodily autonomy to total enclosure of the commons, which makes doctrinaire pronouncements on its in-principle unsoundness unhelpful.
The boundary between personal possessions and productive assets is also somewhat slippery. How would we classify, say, a farm that's been in the hands of the same family for four hundred years, during which time that family has built the skills and knowledge required to work the land not merely sustainably but regeneratively, to the point where it now requires almost no effort to make a return off compared to before they started? Does that classification change if most of the physical labour involved was provided by employees and/or contractors?
I think it's much harder to get consensus on that kind of distinction than it would be to say OK, here's a maximum total value of assets that we as a society are prepared to defend the private ownership of regardless of how justifiable might be anybody's claim on them as fruits of personal labour, because private ownership of assets beyond that level amounts to a degree of power concentration that's socially corrosive. Any such maximum value would, I think, be well clear of the fuzzy boundary separating what are clearly personal possessions from what are clearly assets owned primarily to generate an income from.
externalises part of the actual cost of running a sock factory by e.g. dumping sock dye in shared waterways
In general I would be happier if governments paid far more attention to protecting the commons than any of them do at present as well as enacting tax policy that made assets beyond a total ownership ceiling uneconomic to own.
posted by flabdablet at 5:12 AM on November 18, 2024 [3 favorites]
Quite. The point I'm making is that private property is a notion that can encompass everything from bodily autonomy to total enclosure of the commons, which makes doctrinaire pronouncements on its in-principle unsoundness unhelpful.
The boundary between personal possessions and productive assets is also somewhat slippery. How would we classify, say, a farm that's been in the hands of the same family for four hundred years, during which time that family has built the skills and knowledge required to work the land not merely sustainably but regeneratively, to the point where it now requires almost no effort to make a return off compared to before they started? Does that classification change if most of the physical labour involved was provided by employees and/or contractors?
I think it's much harder to get consensus on that kind of distinction than it would be to say OK, here's a maximum total value of assets that we as a society are prepared to defend the private ownership of regardless of how justifiable might be anybody's claim on them as fruits of personal labour, because private ownership of assets beyond that level amounts to a degree of power concentration that's socially corrosive. Any such maximum value would, I think, be well clear of the fuzzy boundary separating what are clearly personal possessions from what are clearly assets owned primarily to generate an income from.
externalises part of the actual cost of running a sock factory by e.g. dumping sock dye in shared waterways
In general I would be happier if governments paid far more attention to protecting the commons than any of them do at present as well as enacting tax policy that made assets beyond a total ownership ceiling uneconomic to own.
posted by flabdablet at 5:12 AM on November 18, 2024 [3 favorites]
elinor ostrom won a nobel prize in 'protecting the commons':
- give everyone entitled to use them a say in running them;
- set clear boundaries to keep out those who are not entitled;
- appoint monitors who are trusted by users; and
- have straightforward mechanisms to resolve conflicts.
or just democracy...
-Good Enough Ancestor
-The Collective Intelligence Project
posted by kliuless at 7:26 AM on November 19, 2024 [1 favorite]
-Good Enough Ancestor
-The Collective Intelligence Project
posted by kliuless at 7:26 AM on November 19, 2024 [1 favorite]
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