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Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

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You don't want that.

Worker rights are a type of human right. If you just have property rights and no human rights, and have everything dictated by the ability to satisfy a market participant's desire to wealth, you're going to have a lot of horrible things justified by that desire to create wealth.

Murder-for-hire, for example, is a very, very profitable venture. You have a person with a $500 firearm and a magazine with $10 worth of ammunition in it, and get a return of many thousands of dollars on the first instance of service.

>Murder-for-hire

Not if a person's life is considered their property. If the concept of property is re-defined to include non-tangible concepts, like time, health, wellbeing, etc. then it probably defeats a lot of arguments against "we should only have property rights and not worker's rights"

I'd like to know what fundamentally distinguishes property rights such that successful attempts to re-define them produces a significantly different outcome.

If you look at who enforces property rights vs. who enforces workers rights, a re-definition of property would absolutely radical. Like, imagine if local cops had a framework for enforcing OSHA-style labor rules on the basis of worker injuries constituting a property rights violation of the employee. Imagine if your boss didn't pressure you to work overtime because it could result in them being arrested. Imagine if the time required for you to wait at the DMV was a potential violation of the 4th amendment. The world would be so different lol.

I am more likely to hear my cat greet me tonight in perfect English than society is to redefine property rights in the way you propose.

There's money in disrespecting rights, no matter how you define them.

> If you just have property rights and no human rights, and have everything dictated by the ability to satisfy a market participant's desire to wealth, you're going to have a lot of horrible things justified by that desire to create wealth.

I don't see how you'd have a "lot of horrible things." Doesn't the market system optimize for the maximum good, so if the market system produces a thing, isn't that thing good by definition?

> Doesn't the market system optimize for the maximum good, so if the market system produces a thing, isn't that thing good by definition?

The market system does not optimize for the maximum good outside of economic theory.

> If you just have property rights and no human rights

"Property rights" is a human right. It's in the UN declaration of human rights (Article 17): https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

And we're throwing out the rest of them and replacing all of them with human rights, in this instance.

Did someone just reveal their second HN account? Two identical comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43963303

They're not quite identical - they swap "workers rights" and "property rights" as well as a few other words. Either it's one person trying to be clever on two accounts or the newer post is someone different trying to be clever in response to the original comment.

Ah, you're right, when I saw the two top-level comments, I didn't read them each word for word.

Odd that the second one is a top-level comment, though, rather than a reply.

i thought it was better in the other direction

Now, the real question is - two accounts from the same person, or from a third party pretending to be a lot of accounts?

Would such a strategy produce a significantly different outcome when property rights can encompass non-tangible concepts like time, ideas, digital goods, data, attention, and "value"?

Yeah, workers can be property too amirite? /s

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