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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if this is a socialist lament about landlords or a libertarian complaint about governments.

Maybe it's an existential comment about the fleeting existence of life.

That was actually the first way I squinted at it, and it doesn't have to be existential - the lack of ownership in the fourth dimension is stated well in most religions. But for some reason I doubt they meant it that way.

I think it's just acknowledging the reality that property is a social construct, one that's created by the social contract.

Well, Rousseau himself would say property is theft in not exactly those words

From his discourse on inequality

> The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "this is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!"

Ultimately it comes down to force. The person with the pointiest sticks will likely be able to enforce their view about ownership over others.

Taken quite literally, property is armed theft from the commons I guess. Unfortunately, it's tricky to do otherwise in a loosely organized swarm of barely tribal actors, because any peaceful society based on shared ownership will be prone to exploitation by malicious actors. It's basically a very large prisoner's dilemma: the global optimum would be to abolish private property, but as long as there are (enough) people around to exploit the situation for their own benefit (and to the massive detriment of everyone else), we have to stick to a sub-optimal system where everyone is worse off than the optimum.

> Ultimately it comes down to force. The person with the pointiest sticks will likely be able to enforce their view about ownership over others.

This is a common but simplistic view that ignored e.g. concerns about popular legitimacy and support that often lead to the downfall of strongman regimes. Many people think they can enforce their views of ownership over others, but find that it's not quite that simple when they try to put it into practice. That's why I mentioned the social contract.

How would the global optimum be to abolish private property when you just stated that without it we live in a swarm of barely tribal actors?

The alternative to large-scale force is small-scale theft. Which is not so small-scale when you multiply it across every village and province. Ever been in the middle of a full social breakdown? Or a riot? Anyone who's seen what actual anarchy looks like would beg for some sort of order, even if it has to be imposed by force. It requires a very sheltered understanding of how the world actually works to think that anything good will come from unleashing chaos.

> the global optimum would be to abolish private property

The Soviet Union had this I believe, at least with buildings, and it didn't necessarily work out optimally.

Certainly, and to be clear I'm not arguing for communism as a realistic system. It would be ideal in an ideal world without greed and selfishness. As long as those exist, we need to have a system that functions when the individual actors place their own interests far above the interests of others.

I like to think of it biomimetically. Organisms and ecosystems have both competition and collaboration at every level of organization.

If I were to design a government from scratch I think it would actually be relatively easy to know what's best nationalized and what's best privatized. Nationalize the things that you do not want to be driven by the profit incentive because they need to be fair and accessible to all (mass transit, healthcare, utilities, communication networks, science), and privatize everything else (entertainment, retail, food, services).

> privatize everything else [including] food

yet:

> Nationalize the things that [...] need to be fair and accessible to all

Should food be accessible to all?

Or is food production privatized because market economies more accurately meet consumer demand?

Food is tricky. The food supply is one of the highest national security concerns IMO. Free market proponents love to go about saying that growing food should be left to countries and regions who do it well (due to climate and infrastructure), but if your country cannot grow enough food to supply it's own citizens' basic calorie needs, you are literally living on borrowed time. If the food supply is cut off for any reason, things go down very-very rapidly and the government has days, if not hours to sort things out before things descend into chaos.

At the same time, governments do not have a good track record of running the food/ags industry. I guess a system where the government heavily subsidizes it and incentivises domestic production, but lets farmers do their thing is probably as good as we can do?

Good point. I learned this from Silo!

I say the government needs to ensure no one starves (food stamps, soup kitchens, etc. depending on the situation), and all food is safe to eat (it amazes me how well governments do this in most countries today), but otherwise production and distribution should be competitive.

Countries that allow markets to control food prices have a far better track record of not starving, spiraling into hyperinflation, and losing wars than do countries which attempt to regulate food prices.

> Free market proponents love to go about saying that growing food should be left to countries and regions who do it well (due to climate and infrastructure),

I think this is globalism rather than free market.

I agreed with your first statement about competition and collaboration both being necessary. But if you extend that over time you see that those states in nature exist in a state of endless conflict, not in parallel. So in the realm of governing economies (democratically or otherwise), one of the most unfortunate but profitable outcomes of the human desire to oscillate between competition and collaboration is to be something like Argentina: Nationalize those things you want to be fair and accessible every 10 years and then privatize them again every other 10 years. This way, each new generation can lean capitalist or communist and make a killing by raiding whatever wealth was built by the previous generation in the name of fixing the system. Because after all, neither system is real. Both are just ways to paper over the fact that each new generation of young people are animals who kill their parents.

8-0

Wow, he sure can write! Proudhon literally wrote "property is theft" (see my other comments).

I'm aware, I was quoting Rousseau because the person I was replying to mentioned the social contract which was an area of particular concern for Rousseau. I would recommend reading Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality if you're interested, it's very accessible.

Thanks, I will!

Maybe a deeper truth that is harder to put into words but which feeds into both of them. Something captured in much higher dimensional concept space that, when forced into our 3D world (and our <whatever>D political discussion space), looks like a sphere in one projection and a cube in the other, but which is neither.

I tend to think is neither of those, but meant very literally. For that reason I like it and I think it's an interesting subject.

What is ownership after all? The universe does not seem to have any form of ownership embedded in it's fundamental laws. If ownership is a human construct, then it is only meaningful insofar as a group of humans agrees on it.

I can stroll up to the White House and declare that I own it, but I'll struggle to convince a sufficient number of other people that this is true. If I can't assert my ownership, then I don't really own it, do I? It doesn't matter whether it is just, or fair (again - purely human constructs), ownership only matters if it can be enforced.

Being a human construct, it is also by definition temporary. It is only valid as long as humans are around to enforce it, and humans are fleeting. Humanity might endure, but there's no reason to think we are going to be around for eternity.

So it looks like ownership is not only temporary, but it is also fickle. People routinely disagree on ownership and are willing to kill- or be-killed for asserting their claims.

It looks like neither the communists, nor the liberatarians are in the right. Things will be owned by whoever has more pointy sticks :D

It's not a human construct. If you have ever spent time around a cat, you can understand ownership completely without any legal constructs. What we as humans are somewhat proud of, or the definition of civilization, is that we spend most of our time trying to create systems to define boundaries and property rights without resorting to violence. Those systems can be fair and well-distributed or unfair and hereditary, or somewhere in-between; they inevitably hand over the violence to some arbiter or government (whether market-driven or communist dictatorship, it's the same in terms of a structure enforcing who gets what, even if the incentives and dynamics are skewed); but the point is that we code them into law so that any arbitrary cat can't just post up inside another cat's borders and terrorize the house.

The point of PROPERTY writ large isn't the piracy or acts of violence that people here make it out to be. Property doesn't arise from the law. Legal frameworks arise from the existence of property. And legal frameworks are an unadorned good in a world without them, because normal, domestic, and peaceful life does not exist where laws don't exist.

> Things will be owned by whoever has more pointy sticks :D

That sounds like the feudal or socialist systems. Isn't one of the points of modern democracies that we have the pointy sticks for outside invaders, and a legal system that replaces the system of internal-facing pointy sticks with an economic system and a justice system?

No. All systems of law, regardless of their "democratic" nature, are based on the principle of the state's monopoly on violence, and that violence is always directed towards the citizenry.

No matter how civil your society may seem, resistance to the state will eventually mean you get shot or beaten with truncheons.

Exactly. Democratic and highly civilized countries still enforce property rights with pointy sticks. They maintain their claim on their territory against outside invaders with the army, and internally they enforce the laws of ownership using the police.

Property is theft from the state

A curious assertion, considering that the protection of private property and enforcement of contracts is one of the foundational reasons for the existence of most modern states.

Stop me if I missed the sarcasm.

This was intended to be a wry comment referencing a communist idea that has always tickled my brain. Somehow I had it in my head that Marx said this (probably because of another joke-- "why did Karl Marx only drink herbal tea? Because proper tea is theft").

Checking my facts now, I see it was actually Proudhon, not Marx (although Marx did discuss the idea here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_..., but seems to say it has a self-reference problem, and seems to delight in insulting Proudhon).

I think the "from the state" part is an accidental addition either of my own or from whoever explained the "proper tea" joke to me the first time. I just thought it always referenced the extreme philosophy that all property should be communal and therefore private property was theft from everyone, or equivalently from "the state".

Hah! I love the proper tea joke. Hadn't heard that one.

Extreme philosophy or not, I reject the idea that "everyone"=="the state". Most (all?) states which confiscate property in the name of "everyone" don't distribute it fairly anyway, so it's all a bit of a sham. Even if it wasn't, I still don't fancy having the 7 or 8 drunks I know at the local bar showing up to sleep on my floor, shower in my toilet and claiming it in the name of everyone, or the state, or whatever. Screw those people.

Drinking tea is in itself an act of theft - he drank that tea and now no-one else can drink it.

what's the difference?

I read it as a libertarian complaint about governments.

i.e. own real estate? Try not paying the property tax on it, and see who really owns it. :)

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