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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Of course property rights are ideology. Anything to do with society and how it's organized is ideological.

I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons).

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I mean, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for saying that there are loads of great alternatives besides choosing between property rights and the tragedy of the commons.

https://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/OstromSJ...

Ostrom's work is parochial. Her real-life examples center on small populations adjacent to large natural resources with access negotiated via long-standing community mores. That simply doesn't apply to the high-density populations urban environment where most of humanity lives, and where community ties have less sway. In these situations where most interactions are transactional a robust and fair regime of property rights is probably the ideal solution. With property rights the transaction costs are borne by the property owner up front, while in the community-based the transaction costs are encoded in tradition and personal relationships.

I think you are nailing down a part of the equation that shouldn't be.

What about other ways of organization for our societies? Transitions are possible.

No country has absolute property rights, and in fact many have massive carveouts.

E.g freedom to roam in the Nordic countries is based on the idea that it is unthinkable that we should allow people's access to nature to be monopolised.

>I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons)

I don't thinl it is all or nothing. Private property is overall a very good idea and principle, and Piketty says that too. But when someone sees property it as inalienable right, at any level, is a problem.

For example, if one person talks about a tax based on wealth, two people can have a healthy disagreement, and discuss how to implement.

But when someone does not event want to consider it... because it would supposedly bring us back to communism dark ages, that is basic ideology in action, not rational thinking.

I think that the idea of private property as an inalienable right is rooted in the enlightenment and on the same level as human rights.

It is to protect individuals against spoliation by the state or powerful, and even to assert an even more basic right to own property at all. It obviously does not mean that property cannot be taken away from its owner but that this must follow a fair and lawful process.

The Enlightenment never really worked this through. In fact modern economics hijacks a lot of humanist rhetoric (including the idea of rationality and human rights) and glues it rather awkwardly onto concepts that are actually derived from monarchy - specifically individual sovereignty, and a kind of individualised version of divine right which elevates unlimited individual economic freedom-to-profit as the highest possible good.

It's actually a bit of a mess, conceptually and practically.

Property is really not a simple concept. Most people think of it as "Stuff I own" which reduces the argument to "I don't want the government stealing my house or my furniture," which sounds trivially obvious.

In fact all claims on property are complex - see also IP, stocks, and so on - and personal ownership is always a trade-off between individual benefits and socialised/externalised costs. This doesn't just apply to extreme situations like a war economy, or impounding the proceeds of crime - it's inherent in the practice itself.

You won't find much about that in orthodox economics.

Taxes are derived from monarchy as well.

Exactly. The difference between private (capital what you make money off) and personal (what make physical use in life) property is interesting. I propose to make the threshold between these two very crisp, expressed in a currency amount, say 20 million US.

Also the folk against the eternal protection of priv prop is not all authoritarian commies. You find them a lot on the left, all the way to the democratic socialists (not to be mistaken for socdems).

That's a drastic oversimplification. Most alternatives which have been tried were either both with extrememe ideological prejudice and in wildly different social and technological enviornments.

Malthus does not stand up to scrutiny.

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