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RE: Limits of Ownership

in #philosophy7 years ago

great post, i have been thinking about this a lot. Also great connection to intellectual property, something I have not seen this way so far.

I mostly agree with your point of view. Self-ownership and owning your labour. Then for objects where the value is dominated by the value of labour you can also own them. All air, water, land, crude resources should be unowned as nobody worked to create them.

Then the problem is how to implement this in a free way without applying force? Can we argue that we act in self-defence? Can we set up a world where bare resources are managed by fair open protocols? How do we reward people that realise that a certain material will be valuable in a few years and start mining it now? So many open questions.

But the idea that every human has an inalienable right to use a reasonable amount of land and resources is a strong statement. It provides a type of UBI and a way to be self-employed by working that land for everyone. It solves many problems that we are facing.

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Well, if people can realize the wrong of it, force can be used to reset things right. Just like when slavery was wrong, force was used to stop it. Expecting people who have gotten things from a corrupted way of life to just stop is not going to happen in short time, force often needs to be used. Things never got corrected from centuries of ill gotten land gains. A correction needs to happen. Voluntarily it will take forever yo get people to give up land to put things right, they just care about whats theirs and want to keep it no matter how it was obtained long ago.

I basically agree and we all know how wrong the current situation is. I am just scared that a forced redistribution may lead us to situations as bad as the consequences of communism. Before applying force one needs to be very sure that one is not messing up. But humans are imperfect and things often start with a clear goal and then quickly move in a very different direction.

For this reason I would very much prefer a voluntary solution. I cannot see one now, but a few years ago I also did not believe bitcoin would be possible. There is a lot of potential and I may just not be able to find the correct path yet.