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You are honestly arguing that the concept of private property is a mistake?

Serious question. How do you envision things working when everything is communal? What motivates productivity and overcomes the tragedy of the commons?


Yes. Many have argued the same. If you wish to be informed, I recommend doing some reading. In particular, there is a difference between personal property and private property, and that difference is expounded in great detail in the literature.

Are you saying selfishness motivates productivity today? I think you would be hard-pressed to justify that claim.

Are you saying that we do not experience tragedy of the commons today? In today's economy, everyone having the same access to unregulated markets can be seen as a tragedy: this turns people into either suckers or grifters, and nothing in between. Sounds pretty fucked up to me.

I see a tragedy of the commons in the ubiquity of the belief that "I own this" and "I don't own that". Everyone believes this to the point it is an ideological underpinning of contemporary society. But it is not true a priori, so I am not really seeing how you justify it in the first place, especially without empirical counterfactuals. And obviously it has some serious drawbacks, such as people dying needlessly. Those people could contribute to your wellbeing but they are dead and can no longer do that. A tragedy, indeed.


Think about LVT as the occupier paying the community for the right to exclude them from a common resource. The price of that exclusion is set by the community. The occupier gets most of the benefits of private property rights without actually having private property.

This concept can be extended to all natural resources (and in some cases already is to some extent). The radio spectrum, mineral resources, etc.

I find this to be an attractive concept because I am philosophically opposed to the current situation where a new life is born into a world where all resources are already 'claimed'. That new life has just as much right to the world's resources as any other that already exists. This doesn't mean that someone can't make use of more resources than anybody else. They just have to do it in a justifiable way.




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