Workable Socialism

[DMC]

17 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The point I clearly failed to make is the concept of property and land ownership has evolved over time. I don't recall reading many views that said that everyone can own things like land. I always took older lit to imply that it was for the noble class. 

Well, of course the concept has evolved (and btw yes, Plato and Aristotle were considering everyone owning land - one rejected it and one supported it).  Every concept has evolved.  From government to democracy to socialism.  I don't see what relevance that really has, other than to historians.

12 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

If I got sent 300 year in the future and found out that somebody owned a planet, that would freak me out, even with my being familiar with the concept of people owning large amounts of land and a society that encourages the selling of it.

Yeah sorry I just don't see your point.  Someone owns a planet in the future.  Does that mean property right have changed?  Certainly, especially if it's this planet.  But I don't see how it changes the concept, and I don't see how that makes it "new."  You talk about things fundamentally changing "a few hundred years ago."  Locke wrote a little more than three hundred years ago, and everything he says about property you can apply to today as long as you get over the racism and sexism.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well, of course the concept has evolved (and btw yes, Plato and Aristotle were considering everyone owning land - one rejected it and one supported it).  Every concept has evolved.  From government to democracy to socialism.  I don't see what relevance that really has, other than to historians.

Interesting, I was under the impression most philosophers at the time thought it was a bad idea. Will have to do some , but first, I .

Either way, I was talking about the evolution of property rights and how an evolution of thought could make Americans more open to socialism.

[Martell Spy]

12 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

It's not subjective though.  You can set limits, like you mentioned before, on the ratio of base-worker to executive pay.  You can have a death tax that actually works. 

Yes, we can set an estate tax. Which means that leaving your assets for your heirs isn't truly a right. We can't take someone's TV, car, or bank account while they are alive, not without a reason. We can't throw them in jail, or exile them to Siberia. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

I was talking about the evolution of property rights and how an evolution of thought could make Americans more open to socialism.

Ah.  Well yeah they're certainly becoming more and more open to socialism.  And is a process, or evolution.  So, yeah.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

21 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

It's not subjective though.  You can set limits, like you mentioned before, on the ratio of base-worker to executive pay.  You can have a death tax that actually works. 

Perhaps 

[Martell Spy]

3 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Interesting, I was under the impression most philosophers at the time thought through it was a bad idea. Will have to do some , but first, I .

Either way, I was talking about the evolution of property rights and how an evolution of thought could make Americans more open to socialism.

Patents are a fairly new form of ownership. Especially as practiced aggressively in the U.S. in things like software and Pharma.  It's one of the big ways the wealthy prop themselves up.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Patents are a fairly new form of ownership. Especially as practiced aggressively in the U.S. in things like software and Pharma.  It's one of the big ways the wealthy prop themselves up.

Are you attacking all intellectual property?  Should GRRM not be able to earn money based upon his copyright?

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

Are you certain? The idea of owning land at all almost certainly wouldn't have occurred to anyone prior to agriculture. And even until recently the vast majority of land wasn't privately owned, if you could truly even call some of that private ownership. Similarly these nomadic per-agricultural people may have "owned" things, but if modern hunter gatherer's are anything to go by that's only in the sense that they're the ones using it at that moment. Even with all that though, the definition of property shifted pretty significantly with the introduction of capitalism. Which means the modern view on property is only a few hundred years old.

That's untrue.  Maybe not ownership in the modern sense of legal contracts, deeds, rights and so on.

However, many wars and battles were fought among non-agricultural peoples over territorial dominance, hunting and grazing rights, long before.

We see the same behavior among many hominid and other species too -- my territory and I chase you out of it or fight you to the death.

Nevertheless, there is so much to be said that a person's home is her castle.  We all, including the beasts of the field and forest, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, NEED a place of our own where we feel we are safe.

This can go too far, when a very few people own it all and insist the rest of us don't have the right of personal dominion over personal space -- indeed, are denied personal space all together.  Anyone who has any sense at all when it comes to raising animals has to understand that animals of all kinds NEED a personal safe space.  Or else they stop laying eggs, they stop breeding, they -- just stop.

 

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

5 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Yes, we can set an estate tax. Which means that leaving your assets for your heirs isn't truly a right. We can't take someone's TV, car, or bank account while they are alive, not without a reason. We can't throw them in jail, or exile them to Siberia. 

Sure, I was responding to Scot's absence of evidence argument.  And again, there are places in the world today with very different ideas on property rights than the US right now.  A few decades old and changing but some accessible stuff is the Yanomamu and related tribes in Venezuela and Brazil.  It's a completely different paradigm.  Anyway, point being, there are small steps we can take to make a society much more equal in terms of resources and access to them, and make it less easy for a few individuals to create fake scarcity hoarding eassebtials and wealth from everyone else.

[TrueMetis]

48 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I’m completely aware that they do exist.  They exist in a world that has had a concept of property for several millennia.  We cannot, on that basis, say with certainty that the hunter gatherer societies that evolved ideas of property would have been identical to hunter gatherer societies that exist today.

I think we can. Hunter-Gatherer societies today, even having existed in a world with the concept of property for several millennia, though in many cases only the last several hundred years in their part of the world, do not think of things like land as property. That makes no goddamn sense if pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies had the concept of owning land. If those pre-argicultural societies did have the concept either the descendants of lost the concept somehow, which only makes sense if it's a useless idea for nomadic people that only came up for a little bit as a thought experiment, or it was isolated to a handful of groups in which case what I said is true, I just need to add an asterisk to point out some exceptions apply.

37 minutes ago, DMC said:

Yeah sorry I just don't see your point.  Someone owns a planet in the future.  Does that mean property right have changed?  Certainly, especially if it's this planet.  But I don't see how it changes the concept, and I don't see how that makes it "new."  You talk about things fundamentally changing "a few hundred years ago."  Locke wrote a little more than three hundred years ago, and everything he says about property you can apply to today as long as you get over the racism and sexism.

Should have been more specific on the timeline. Locke is post that fundamental change, (well some of it was still going on when he was alive, but largely) one of the big parts of was the agricultural revolution which included enclosure, where land went from largely common land, to largely private land. Which I suppose is an interesting look when compared to the Greeks, who would have had more private landownership than many feudal societies.

18 minutes ago, Zorral said:

That's untrue.  Maybe not ownership in the modern sense of legal contracts, deeds, rights and so on.

However, many wars and battles were fought among non-agricultural peoples over territorial dominance, hunting and grazing rights, long before.

We see the same behavior among many hominid and other species too -- my territory and I chase you out of it or fight you to the death.

Nevertheless, there is so much to be said that a person's home is her castle.  We all, including the beasts of the field and forest, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, NEED a place of our own where we feel we are safe.

This can go too far, when a very few people own it all and insist the rest of us don't have the right of personal dominion over personal space -- indeed, are denied personal space all together.  Anyone who has any sense at all when it comes to raising animals has to understand that animals of all kinds NEED a personal safe space.  Or else they stop laying eggs, they stop breeding, they -- just stop.

 

 

Claiming right to a given territory is not the same as ownership. Like you make this point by pointing out that animals do the same things. A lion does not own the land it claims as it's territory.

To quote Larry

1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

Even the most basic, whitewashed history of treaties between colonizers and the native tribes of the Americas should make it clear that ideas on property were very different than what your talking about.

 If Native tribes had considered their right to their territory a form of ownership, those treaties would have gone a very different way.

[Martell Spy]

19 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Sure, I was responding to Scot's absence of evidence argument.  And again, there are places in the world today with very different ideas on property rights than the US right now.  A few decades old and changing but some accessible stuff is the Yanomamu and related tribes in Venezuela and Brazil.  It's a completely different paradigm.  Anyway, point being, there are small steps we can take to make a society much more equal in terms of resources and access to them, and make it less easy for a few individuals to create fake scarcity hoarding eassebtials and wealth from everyone else.

Yeah, someone earlier claimed that it is a right to leave wealth to your heirs. Sorry, I just piggybacked on your response since you mentioned the estate tax. 

[Martell Spy]

23 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Are you attacking all intellectual property?  Should GRRM not be able to earn money based upon his copyright?

I also mentioned aggressive use of patents. In the negotiations for TPP one of the things that came up was the U.S. was demanding longer drug patent expiration times. I think the U.S. should lighten up about this issue, and shorten domestic patent times as well. 

This is a Workable Socialism thread, however, so I suppose all patents are under review for their viability.

[Jace, Extat]

29 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Are you attacking all intellectual property?  Should GRRM not be able to earn money based upon his copyright?

Scott, I think that's a bit unfair and indicative of your stubbornness on this topic. There's a very clear moral distinction between someone creating something (especially for entertainment) and profiting off their idea, vs a conglomerate owned/managed by already wealthy people purposefully and willfully creating solutions to (and then holding them hostage) health or societal ills to extract obscene profits from the rest of us.

I don't think anyone reasonable is arguing against ownership and profit, but patents get horribly abused in this country. I mean, of course creative people should be rewarded for their creativity. But at some point the government (being presumably representative of the people, I know that's not actually the case) should protect its people from being exploited.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

I also mentioned aggressive use of patents. In the negotiations for TPP one of the things that came up was the U.S. was demanding longer drug patent expiration times. I think the U.S. should lighten up about this issue, and shorten domestic patent times as well. 

This is a Workable Socialism thread, however, so I suppose all patents are under review for their viability.

Agreed. 

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, TrueMetis said:

I think we can. Hunter-Gatherer societies today, even having existed in a world with the concept of property for several millennia, though in many cases only the last several hundred years in their part of the world, do not think of things like land as property. That makes no goddamn sense if pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies had the concept of owning land. If those pre-argicultural societies did have the concept either the descendants of lost the concept somehow, which only makes sense if it's a useless idea for nomadic people that only came up for a little bit as a thought experiment, or it was isolated to a handful of groups in which case what I said is true, I just need to add an asterisk to point out some exceptions apply.

Should have been more specific on the timeline. Locke is post that fundamental change, (well some of it was still going on when he was alive, but largely) one of the big parts of was the agricultural revolution which included enclosure, where land went from largely common land, to largely private land. Which I suppose is an interesting look when compared to the Greeks, who would have had more private landownership than many feudal societies.

Claiming right to a given territory is not the same as ownership. Like you make this point by pointing out that animals do the same things. A lion does not own the land it claims as it's territory.

To quote Larry

 If Native tribes had considered their right to their territory a form of ownership, those treaties would have gone a very different way.

So ... you say that native americans and animals losing their habitats and territories is their own fault, because they didn't file deeds of property?

You missed the point entirely, which is it's not merely deeds that makes for ownership.  Or how essential to sheer existence having even a hole in the ground is.

[TrueMetis]

Just now, Zorral said:

So ... you say that native americans and animals losing their habitats and territories is their own fault, because they didn't file deeds of property?

You missed the point entirely, which is it's not merely deeds that makes for ownership.  Or how essential to sheer existence having even a hole in the ground is.

I realize that Metis is not commonly a commonly recognized group outside of Canada, and as such I'm not going to swear at you for this incredibly insulting accusation.

And that's about all I can write in regards to this at the moment, as I am actually shaking with rage. I will take this up tomorrow when I don't feel like putting my fist through the screen of my computer.

[Rippounet]

14 minutes ago, Zorral said:

You missed the point entirely, which is it's not merely deeds that makes for ownership.  Or how essential to sheer existence having even a hole in the ground is.

But isn't that precisely where the difference lies ? Private property as a concept allows one to own land they don't occupy and even profit from the fact. Wouldn't it make sense to link ownership with personal usage? Not only would you not entirely abolish the concept but you'd even have a useful means of determining death taxes (you inherit what you can use). 

[all swedes are racist]

10 hours ago, Br16 said:

The heirs had ancestors who took the risk and established a business. They had vision, and put down time, effort, and capital and it grew. It could have gone south and if it did, their homes would look like a field hands. But it didn't, and if the successful ancestors wanted to pass down the fruit of their success and risk taking, they have that right.

actually it was effort of the workers that made it successsful

[Br16]

9 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Oh I’m deadly serious. And your mentality is what is allow this rot to become worse.  

If you're deadly serious about this:

10 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Funny, my dad is a lazy ex coke and heroin addict, and yet he’s rich AF. I just got a $10,000 check from him I need to deposit. I get one every few months.....I was born into three country clubs, and trust me, they’re all laughing at you.

Then why complain? Just enjoy what you have, it's not rot to you. Your (I presume) quarterly allowance was given to you as a voluntary gift, so its your money, and that's all that matters. You can't revoke someone's property rights just because of bad attitude.

If you are indeed wealthy but feel bad, just give 10% of each allowance to a charity of your choice.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, TrueMetis said:

I realize that Metis is not commonly a commonly recognized group outside of Canada, and as such I'm not going to swear at you for this incredibly insulting accusation.

And that's about all I can write in regards to this at the moment, as I am actually shaking with rage. I will take this up tomorrow when I don't feel like putting my fist through the screen of my computer.

Why are you furious with what I posted, when what I posted recognizes and says so, the claims of First Peoples and animals, fish, fowl and trees to the places they inhabit?  How did I insult you? I stated there are claims to locations and places that are valid that don't depend on filing  deed of property in a European legally-derived court, etc.