Hacker News Reader

Here's a justification for private property. How will there ever be an orchard otherwise? Orchards don't just burst spontaneously into existence.

Imagine that no one 'fought the natives for it'. Instead the land was a vacant waste with no one living there and nothing growing there. Over the years through hard work, dedication and sacrifice the land was amended and the trees grew creating the orchard. The only thing the farmer asked for in return was to sell his surplus. Lowering the cost of apples to all.

Then some jackass jumps off a train and expects it all handed to him for free or he'll attack the farmer.

I can understand the idea of not wanting to participate in a capitalist system, but I can't understand what makes someone 'evil' just because they've created something that you haven't.

A nice turnaround, but in the story, the land wasn't a vacant waste, it was acquired by force. The story isn't "Oh, you moved into emptiness and created something, so I'll fight you", it was "you fought the people here before, so I'll continue with your method of ownership".

Similarly, the wobbly wasn't demanding an apple, but enjoying the shade. Was the farmer selling shade? Lowering the cost of shade to all?

The idea of a one-sided "fuck off, this is MY land" seems to be a new-world Anglo thing - back in Europe a lot of countries have a form of right to roam that sits in conflict with property rights. While there is certainly a 'my land!' aspect, there's also the competing philosophical idea that people are free to travel over it or use it recreationally

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Right_to_roam_i...

It wasn't acquired by force by the farmer, it was acquired by force by the great grandfather.

Either way, you disprove your own point. The farmer has a more legitimate claim because he worked for it, he didn't attack someone for it like the guy who showed up wants to.

My point was that the parent post was misrepresenting the original story. I'm not sure how that's disproved by what you're saying.

Also in Europe we had common land, and while you can argue about the tragedy of the commons, enclosure destroyed many peoples only source of livelihood.

> Imagine that no one 'fought the natives for it'. Instead the land was a vacant waste with no one living there and nothing growing there.

Dear Randian, These statements imply that you consider the native people "no one" and native vegetation rather than industrial crops "a vacant waste". I think those are rude presumptions.

It's more than rude: you should see what Ayn Rand had to say about the native Americans.

    > Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right 
    > to take over this continent.
    > 
    > http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

It is pretty disgusting.

I like this rhetorical technique: completely alter the story then craft an argument based on your version of the story.

In the less artificial world (where orchards are not usually created out of barren moonscapes)- it's always a little odd - and self-serving - the degree to which people think improving land magically cancels all previous taint of expropriation.

> Instead the land was a vacant waste with no one living there and nothing growing there.

Funny that is the childish misconception I had as a child about America before settlers came here. Just an empty lush land, as gift of God, waiting to embrace its new owners.

Preach, brother. SF didn't spring magically into existence either -- it was built once, then destroyed in a quake, and then built again.

I think that things don't have to stop at the orchard. Years ago, there used to be a big flophouse on Columbus Ave, full of trash and indigents. Transients. Beat "poets", the sort of people glorified by City Lights books.

And then they tore it down and built the TransAmerica pyramid! Now that's progress.

I don't see why you need a broad intellectual foundation here. Property is granted by governments. Why? Because it's a useful abstraction. Where did the government get the property? It claimed it and enforced its claim by force.

So I guess my answer to the story would be: fine, you can fight the owner for it, but the real owner isn't me, it's the United States government. If you are so inclined to fight the government, fine, but don't be surprised when people who find the abstraction useful and productive, or even simply find the other mechanisms of the government productive, decide to fight back.

I imagine the wobbly will quite happily let the farmer go and get a representative of the US government for him to fight. Likely he will have naturally moved on before such a representative responds to 'someone is enjoying my shade against my will!'

I agree that people can commit crimes without getting caught much of the time?

I'm not sure if you have a point.

It's a sad world we live in when "sitting in the shade" is called a crime - and imply that it's bad people aren't getting 'caught' for such trivial things.

I mean, if we're talking about absurdity of points, you are saying that a single travelling poor man sitting in the shade is something that is worthy of invoking the power of the federal government to combat.

"sitting in the shade" is not the crime; trespass is the crime.

The concept of private property is useful enough on the whole that governments are willing to enforce it, and leave discretion for right-of-access to the owner of said property. This allows the property owner to assess people in terms of risk they pose to said property and either grant or deny access.

If said farmer has had problems with transients damaging his property in the past, he will certainly appreciate the right to deny access, with the power of the government backing the decision.

Surely then, this would be the province of the local law enforcement, not something worth summoning in the Feds for.

The only person to mention the federal government was you.

but the real owner isn't me, it's the United States government - Locke1689, 5 hours ago

I am not an American, but I've been online for nearly 20 years now, and I've seen a lot of US politics pass under the bridge. I've never seen anything that goes contrary to the notion that 'the United States government' is 'the federal government [of the US]'. The two terms are used interchangably in online discourse in my experience.

If I am wrong in this, can you please provide me with some links to explain how 'the federal government' of the US is a different entity to the 'the United States government'. I'd be very interested to read them, because it would be a very curious oddity in the way politics are described over there. Does 'the federal government' operate at a higher or lower level than 'the United States government', or do they operate in parallel? It's an intriguing concept.

The fact that you're arguing over the synonymous/non-synonymous semantics of two phrases, rather than actually refuting locke's main point, says a great deal about your argument.

Can you please point out Locke's 'main' point, because it seems he's danced around a few topics to me.

If you're talking about the parent of my last comment, it should be abundantly clear that I'm saying 'no, you did', which is directly refuting his point, with a quote, no less. The rest was a bit of poetic license called 'taking the piss'.

What the hell? I hope you're not an American -- if civics and government class has so failed our students i would be extremely disappointed.

The government of the united States is exactly that, ranging from the lowest town council member to the President. You do understand the concept of sets and subsets, right? The federal government is a subset of the government. That's why it has that additional qualifier.

Yeah, I don't buy your attempt at a 'save'.

That's OK, I don't buy your attempt to be seen as educated on the topic.

Your post is basically, "I don't really know anything, but I sure do read a lot of blogs." If you're actually interested in US govt. & politics open a first year textbook. The Constitution (and amendments) quite clearly describe the subdivision of governmental powers into 4 different areas: the legislative, the executive, the judicial, and the states.

Nice rebuttal: "Oh, it'll say it in this physical resource that you won't have access to".

Looking through google for 'the United States Government', most of the results refer to the three branches, but describe other powers as falling to the states as a different entity, if they're described at all. Certainly if you look at news sources for terms like "called on the United States government", they're all federal-style issues, not state - state issues tend to be specified as such.

You may also want to change the leading paragraph of the Wikipedia article, since it's peddling the "I don't really know anything" viewpoint, given how powerful WP is as a source.

So, as I asked, do you have any reliable, definitive resources I can actually access, or are you content to just call me uneducated with a lazy, hand-wavy dismissal? I'm happy to be proven wrong, but not in the lazy way you're going about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism#United_States

'James Madison asserted that the states and national government "are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, constituted with different powers."'

Well, at least the farmer didn't just shoot him and invoke the castle doctrine.

> Property is granted by governments. Why? Because it's a useful abstraction.

This is where that 'broad intellectual foundation' comes in. You may think that it is, sure, but why? Not everyone does, and there's a whole lot of philosophical discussion on this very topic. Our conception of 'private property' has only been around ~200 years, and humanity's been around just a bit more than that.

I'm a pragmatist. I find the philosophical 'discussion' on the metaphysical "purpose" of private property to be uninteresting and mostly worthless.

I am, however, perfectly willing to entertain many possible critiques, if they are shown to be practical and better than the alternatives. Feudal property law, for example, I don't find to be nearly as flexible or efficient (which was around for quite a while, as well). It's no accident that our notions of property came into greater strength with the industrial revolution. If you look at the states with both strong public and private property systems, like the Scandinavians, you'll find that our system has also been far from static.

Speaking as someone with a minor in philosophy, I have to agree with Paul Graham[1] that unfocused philosophy based on general principles (like "what is 'property?'") is terribly useless. If you want to make a difference, innovate.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Graham's critique is remarkably like the one Karl Marx had of "metaphysical" philosophy, in favor of praxis-oriented philosophy. ;-)

From the end of his Theses on Feuerbach: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it".

Thank you for making my point even better than I would.

I never said I disagreed with Marx's critique! However, I would note that goal and result are not necessarily the same.

I would say Marx succeeded in producing a lot of interesting practical results which could actually be implemented. On the other hand, some of his stuff smacks more of religion than it does of praxis. His "law of value," for example, seems very unfalsifiable, in a sense. He speaks of the approach to true value when supply and demand equilibriate, but his conditions of equilibrium are often either poorly defined or simply tautological (e.g., the true value of a good is when it meshes with the law of value, thus the law of value is the true value of commodities).

Indeed, many of Marx's ideas have been through the crucible. Some, like a command economy, have mostly been burned to disintegration. Others, like the provision of health care to anyone who needs it, financed by the people according to their ability, seems to have had huge success among most of the civilized world.

All in all, I don't have problems with Marx's approach, just the idea that rehashing ideas from a century ago in pretty much identical ways counts as innovation.

So you think private property was invented in 1813?

I guess the War of 1812 was more important than anyone could have dreamed at the time?

You really need to read more. Like... a lot more.

... yes, I meant exactly 200 years, to the letter. Obviously. The tilde, which is generally taken to mean 'approximate', was absolutely superflous. In a thread about John Locke's conception of property and its effects on modern day states, I plant the turning point at 1813. You got me.

(the ~200 figure comes from the Inclosure acts, which, as Wikipedia says, "the majority were passed between 1750 and 1860". Even that is obviously a rough time period, and only one of many significant historical events. Even if we take Locke's birthday, 29 August 1632, as the birth of private property in the current sense, that's still roughly 380 years ago, which is still pretty new as far as human history goes.)

Property isn't a philosophical or legal concept. It's a practical aspect of human psychology that has always existed. If you've ever watched two kids fight over an ice cream cone you've witnessed private property in action. People aren't emotionless robots or hyper-rational homo economi. If you can't be bothered to learn even a little bit about humanity, your political philosophies will be every bit as disastrous as Bolshevism (and Castroism, and whatever the hell North Korea does).

Even if we just want to talk about private property as a legal institution, we can go back at least to the code of Hammurabi, and probably further if I could be bothered to do the research, which I can't. Even during the middle ages there was an active merchant class. And arguably feudalism is just the extension of the property concept to encompass ownership of people.

Property has not always existed and it's not a fundamental "aspect of human psychology". If you said possession, I'd probably agree with you but you could say the same thing about sharing and cooperation.

While I am on your side in the sense that we both agree that private property exists and is necessary, I think it's very dangerous to assume that property only exists when there is a government to enforce it. Furthermore, you seem to assume that only governments can own property and that the 'delegate' the ownership to citizens as it were - a point I take offense with, I am the owner of all my property, any government be damned.

Government grants private property by agreeing to defend your exclusive use of it, and by dictating the conditions under which it will maintain or terminate that exclusive use.

If you find that you have the ability to defend your exclusive use of something, you're either appealing to a sovereign, or you have become a sovereign. To be a sovereign, you need a very large stick.

Because some people might not know: Wobbly=member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a union opposed to capitalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World . They're over a century old, and are still active.

>The point being that a lot of these conceptions about who belongs and who doesn't are based on private property, but that there fundamentally isn't any real justification for private property. Even John Locke's attempts to justify it break down.

Its negation breaks down too, computer-hoarder.

"Even John Locke's attempts to justify it break down."

How so? It's a perfectly reasonable explanation of how to avoid an Hobbesian free-for-all.

This would be really significant if philosophy had any bearing on real life.

Oliver, is that you?