Subject:
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Re: The nature of property (was: Idiots, Part Deux)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 14 Feb 2003 18:08:24 GMT
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Viewed:
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1004 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks writes:
> Not a right to support (at least in any but the vaguest of senses) just a
> right to a place. In what I understand of libertopia, it would be
> theoretically possible for one person to buy up all the land and not allow
> anyone else to be there. Then what?
The issue quickly becomes conflict of rights. One expects that in
Libertopia, it is believed that nobody has the right to kill another person.
But by (in theory) buying up all space (air, land, sea, outer, inner, etc),
one effectively is forced into making other people's physical bodies take up
NO space, hence killing them. At what point how does the right to property
measure up to the right to life?
Then again, in Libertopia, one expects that when one *buys* land, one buys
it *from* someone. Hence, if you were dumb enough to sell the space you
physically occupy to someone else, leaving you with nothing, tough beans to
you. At least, such would be a capitalist view, I would think.
> It is my assertion that if people have a right to exist,
> they must have a right to exist _somewhere_. That leads to land (or any kind
> of space) not being a typical good, at the very least. I think I think that
> land should be a commons, tragedy or not.
An excellent communistic ideal, but realistically flawed, sadly. One is left
with the fact that humans like control over as much as possible; and as
such, we like to be able to control whether or not *other* people walk on
land X, so that we can use land X for our own purposes, controlling it,
effectively. Inevitably, given that land would be treated as a commons, a
social system would develop leading to property rights. Just human nature, I
would say.
Essentially, there comes a point when one's want for social justice/charity
is overcome by one's own sense of personal desire. And because that balance
point is different for everyone, I don't know if we'll ever get a 'perfect'
system, short of fantasy.
DaveE
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