15 Sep 12
Originally posted by normbenignReal human history indicates that private property reduced freedom.
Nothing wrong with cooperation and collective effort if it occurs voluntarily. Recent human history that is verifiable, demonstrates that collective property rights lead to enormous amounts of brutal force being applied, and wasted resources.
There is nothing voluntary about Obamacare. It is several thousand pages of rules, and created bureaucracies, that will dictate who gets limited resources, and how others may be denied.
The system you desire would dictate who lives and who dies purely on their relative affluence. Surely such a system would be an abomination which is why every democratic society has rejected it.
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16 Sep 12
Originally posted by no1marauderProperty itself is the purpose of government. The first surpluses following the introduction of agriculture required protection. Almost everything government does is about the protection of surplus wealth.
Real human history indicates that private property reduced freedom.
The system you desire would dictate who lives and who dies purely on their relative affluence. Surely such a system would be an abomination which is why every democratic society has rejected it.
16 Sep 12
Originally posted by KunsooNot just surplus wealth. The first governments were empires enforced by the sceptre, which represents the mace - the first weapon designed to kill people.
Property itself is the purpose of government. The first surpluses following the introduction of agriculture required protection. Almost everything government does is about the protection of surplus wealth.
16 Sep 12
Originally posted by no1marauderNo legislation can make every treatment affordable to every person. The free market is the most equitable means of serving the most people with the best commodities and services. Scarcity and high prices are notices to producers of opportunity and of the need to increase supply, while conserving the current scarce resource.
Stop dodging. What "voluntary agreement" can the parents of a child that will die without treatments they cannot afford make?
Your alternatives a false set of choices. Under any system some will not receive services. It is quite likely almost predictable that the longer a state run system goes on the more services will be denied or rationed.
You will remember that insurance is an invention to protect against unaffordable risks by risk sharing. It was never intended that insurance either private or government should pay for every day predictable expenses.
What you ignore is that denying a child treatment doesn't enrich anyone, or make anyone happy. A grocer who charges $10 a loaf for even very fine bread, will not sell very much of it. On the other hand it was not uncommon when I was growing up that the bakery my father worked for gave away day old bread to poor families, this without any government program.
16 Sep 12
Originally posted by no1marauderTotal hogwash. We know because the greatest advances in living standards have come since the recognition of private property. Without it, agriculture would hardly make sense, and humans would not have moved ahead from hunter gatherer tribes, which subsisted in good times, and starved in bad.
Real human history indicates that private property reduced freedom.
The system you desire would dictate who lives and who dies purely on their relative affluence. Surely such a system would be an abomination which is why every democratic society has rejected it.
Why would any rational person clear land, cultivate it, if roving bands of gatherers could freely harvest his crops?
Specialization is the result of productive farming where only a small portion of labor is required to feed a society, freeing the rest to other productive efforts.
What is an abomination is for you to say that good motives make otherwise criminal acts of force and coercion right and moral. If I were to say, I will engage in armed robberies, and all the proceeds will go to treat dying children, so my robberies are not criminal, you would laugh off my claim, but you support democratic authorization of similar theft by force, due to the purity of the motives regardless of whether the theft will actually achieve its goal or not.
17 Sep 12
Originally posted by normbenignAre you going to answer the question or not:
No legislation can make every treatment affordable to every person. The free market is the most equitable means of serving the most people with the best commodities and services. Scarcity and high prices are notices to producers of opportunity and of the need to increase supply, while conserving the current scarce resource.
Your alternatives a false ...[text shortened]... ather worked for gave away day old bread to poor families, this without any government program.
What "voluntary agreements" can the parents of a two year old who has a heart condition that cannot afford the treatment necessary to alleviate it enter into to prevent her from dying?
The free market is hardly equitable in the medical service areas. Demand is inelastic and realistically providers can charge whatever they want. A doctor needs the income from the heart transplant a lot less than the patient needs the heart transplant. Your religion just doesn't work in every case.
17 Sep 12
Originally posted by KunsooWhat does that have to do with "private property"? That concept was virtually unknown to the first people who formed villages. Surplus wealth can and was generated by collective ownership of the land.
Property itself is the purpose of government. The first surpluses following the introduction of agriculture required protection. Almost everything government does is about the protection of surplus wealth.
17 Sep 12
2 edits
Originally posted by normbenignI have refuted your first paragraph by links and articles many times on this board. Agriculture did, and does, make plenty of sense with communal ownership of land and that was the standard type in early villages. In fact, private ownership of land was unknown in most ancient empires. The evidence indicates that hunter gatherers lived better than the average worker in capitalist industrial states until at least the late 1800s when progressive reforms were implemented that allowed workers to share in the accumulated wealth (reforms you bitterly criticize).
Total hogwash. We know because the greatest advances in living standards have come since the recognition of private property. Without it, agriculture would hardly make sense, and humans would not have moved ahead from hunter gatherer tribes, which subsisted in good times, and starved in bad.
Why would any rational person clear land, cultivate it, if ...[text shortened]... the purity of the motives regardless of whether the theft will actually achieve its goal or not.
As I have pointed out many times, the wealth in an economy is generated because of societal rules that are put in place. Your constant claim that taxation agreed upon by a democratic majority (another economic societal rule) is "theft" is a laughable one. It is no more "theft" than societal rules recognizing private property in the first place.
EDIT: I used this article as the topic of a prior thread but it remains an excellent one:
Many experts in the history of property seem to agree that “private property is a recent
innovation” that did not exist in the earliest states.
248
Taxation developed simultaneously with the
transfer of land from collective property to private property:
249
very much the opposite of the
story property rights advocates tell in which collectives assert control over land that was 38
originally private. Trigger argues that although private land cannot always be ruled out, there is
“no evidence that such land existed in most early civilizations.”
250
He goes on to rule out private
ownership in five of the seven early civilizations in his study (the Aztecs, the Maya, the Yoruba,
the Inca, and the Shang (of China). “That leaves Mesopotamia and Egypt as early civilizations in
which some land might have been privately owned.” In Mesopotamia, private land was a late
development. Maisels finds that land in prehistoric and early-historic Mesopotamia was owned
either by temples, clans, or collectives.
251
Land was held collectively prior to the third
millennium BC, when “increasing amounts of land fell under the control of temples or palaces,
but some of it appears to have become the property of individual creditors.” “It is less certain that
private land existed in the Old Kingdom of Egypt.”
252
Nevertheless, it goes too far to say that
kings owned all the land in their territory. Kings often claimed ownership of all lands, but in
practice their actual hold over land was weaker than full ownership.
253
Something truly recognizable as an individual private title to land emerges only later in
civilizations such as Rome and late medieval northern Europe, but it does not arise everywhere.
Chinese civilization, for example, never evolved a strong sense of either private property or
individual legal rights.
254
Apparently in some societies the classes that had been government
officials in early states gradually came to be seen as the holders of separate ownership power.
This happened in a limited way in Rome and in a more extensive way in early modern Western
Europe. In England for example, private titles in land developed from titles that William I
bestowed on his lords.
http://www.usbig.net/papers/206-Widerquist-Stone%20Age--Oct-09.pdf
Governments created private property; they weren't created to protect private property.
17 Sep 12
Originally posted by normbenignI don't think you understand what private property is. Private property is a legal concept in which land is owned by someone other than the farmer.
Total hogwash. We know because the greatest advances in living standards have come since the recognition of private property. Without it, agriculture would hardly make sense, and humans would not have moved ahead from hunter gatherer tribes, which subsisted in good times, and starved in bad.
Why would any rational person clear land, cultivate it, if ...[text shortened]... the purity of the motives regardless of whether the theft will actually achieve its goal or not.
17 Sep 12
Originally posted by no1marauderI've read all your links and articles and they remain unconvincing for reasons that I have articulated in the past.
I have refuted your first paragraph by links and articles many times on this board. Agriculture did, and does, make plenty of sense with communal ownership of land and that was the standard type in early villages. In fact, private ownership of land was unknown in most ancient empires. The evidence indicates that hunter gatherers lived better than the ave ...[text shortened]... Governments created private property; they weren't created to protect private property.
How do we know the living conditions of primitive hunter\gatherer societies or rather tribes. No on denies the effectiveness of cooperation, and without it humans would have had difficulty surviving at all. What none of this shows is that coerced collectivism ever was beneficial to individual humans.
In the recent past, individual property, and individual freedom is the consistent predictor of prosperity and rising living standards. Your precious progressive reforms were just examples of spending other people's money, which would not have been there to be spent without private property rights.
17 Sep 12
Originally posted by AThousandYoung"Private property is a legal concept in which land is owned by someone other than the farmer."
I don't think you understand what private property is. Private property is a legal concept in which land is owned by someone other than the farmer.
And what if the private property isn't farm land? Private property could be anything unused and undeveloped, which is developed for use by human effort.