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Did the founding fathers believe in anarchy?

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Stranger replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 11:16 AM

Brainpolice:

To say that I "own" something that I essentially have no decision-making power over is a joke. If anything, the only historical examples of any geniune sense of "communal ownership" have been small tribes, not modern democracies.

I did not say that you owned it. That would be proprietary.

In small tribes, individual tribe members have no ownership of the land or capital of the tribe. Often the tribe will also share its land with other tribes of the same kin. The result of such a foundation is the inability to accumulate any sort of productive capital and the domination of the weaker tribes by the strongest.

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are these tribes without heriarchies?, or tribes where the chieftain is the defacto owner of this property that 'the tribe' owns ?

Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid

Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring

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Stranger replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 11:21 AM

nirgrahamUK:

stranger, im shocked to hear you say those things? 

is all state property communal propoerty. can a citizen pick a tank from the local army base to drive off in? can he decide what time of night he will stay in the public library? I wonder if you think citizens each own an equal portion of all state property equal to 1/300million-th size? that would be absurd also . the fact of the matter is that you cant sell you portion. i.e. you dont own your portion. 

The same is true of any commons, whether it is a state or a fishery. Everyone will seek to exploit it maximally until it has been fully consumed, and those who will be most successful at this exploitation will be those who were most powerful - there is no reason to expect equal distribution of exploitation.

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in reality any commons you come across where it is forbidden to homestead, is defacto owned by whoever is forbidding the homesteading. it is their property, and the tragedy is their fault....

Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid

Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring

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wilderness replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 11:25 AM

see it's this "commons" thrown in there by Stranger that makes me wonder if you are actually talking about a civil society.  The continual use of state will only cloud what's being said at this point in which reason will need to do a lot of patching up with continual holes noted for more unnecessary patch work if a more clear concept was used to begin with in avoidance of such long reasoning that the longer it tends to be, the more room for error increases, as the government works - committees overseeing committees with the governmental need to have another committee over see those committees and eventually another... you, Stranger, might get the point.

"Do not put out the fire of the spirit." 1The 5:19
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Angurse replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 11:26 AM

nirgrahamUK:
are these tribes without heriarchies?, or tribes where the chieftain is the defacto owner of this property that 'the tribe' owns ?

Generally, the chief was the de facto owner, there might be some exceptions though.

"I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality."
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Stranger replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 12:21 PM

nirgrahamUK:

in reality any commons you come across where it is forbidden to homestead, is defacto owned by whoever is forbidding the homesteading. it is their property, and the tragedy is their fault....

They can forbid you to appropriate without having themselves the right to appropriate.

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Stranger:
They can forbid you to appropriate without having themselves the right to appropriate.

only if they want to be ridiculous. (anyhow, technically they did appropriate it, or else they could not claim to determine its proper use, i.e. that whatever passer by can exploit it without claiming exclusive rights to a portion of it)

Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid

Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring

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Stranger replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 1:42 PM

nirgrahamUK:

Stranger:
They can forbid you to appropriate without having themselves the right to appropriate.

only if they want to be ridiculous. (anyhow, technically they did appropriate it, or else they could not claim to determine its proper use, i.e. that whatever passer by can exploit it without claiming exclusive rights to a portion of it)

Appropriation does not mean the right to exploit but the right to deny exploitation. Clearly someone can, for example, exploit the atmosphere by expelling pollutants without being able to deny you the same. Someone can fish the oceans without being able to deny other fishing fleets the same. That doesn't mean they are appropriating the capital, only that they are appropriating parts of it within their power.

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so they are appropriating parts of it within their power. and this is highlighted by their insistence that no other party be excluded from 'using' the property they have appropriated. hence they did appropriate. you seem to have agreed with me. 

Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid

Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring

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Stranger replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 2:06 PM

nirgrahamUK:

so they are appropriating parts of it within their power. and this is highlighted by their insistence that no other party be excluded from 'using' the property they have appropriated. hence they did appropriate. you seem to have agreed with me. 

I am only restating the principle that in a commons it is in everyone's best interest to appropriate and remove as much of the resources as possible before others do so, because the commons themselves cannot be appropriated.

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the only scenario under which a property is not able to be homesteaded is if it has already been homesteaded. in all your examples it is evident that this is the case. and he who insists that others might use the property and yet not come to homestead it, is at least asserting his prior ownership to the property. whether this be true or false. perhaps someone else homesteded it, or no one homesteaded it, and the claimant that holds it cant be homesteaded is merely wrong, i.e. incorrect. if he is not wrong, and he is correct that it can;'t be homesteaded, the reason must be that it already is owned.

 

anyone claiming that some property can not be homesteaded does so with no logical force, if they concurrently deny their own ownership of the property, they are in so doing insisting on its virgin, unownedness, its ripeness for homesteading. it would be a contradiction to have unowned property that was a candidate for property hood, that was unownable by arbitrary decree....

Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid

Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring

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Stranger replied on Sun, Aug 16 2009 2:15 PM

I have no idea what you're talking about anymore.

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its like this Stranger, at least this is how i see it.

talking of commons, is only talking of use, its a very mutualist notion. it completely dodges the issue of its ownership, of its propertyhood.

I can own something privately, and give people permission to exploit it, in that case i socialised their costs, and i can expect them to muck it up. i have only myself to blame that i turned my private propery into a commons. i.e something that is used in common. it is not owned in common.

now if you comes along and say, "i enjoy exploiting this, but i dont want others to exploit it, im going to homestead it, hey everybody, this is mine now."

and i say, "no you can't do that, you are forbidden to homestead it."

either

1) i am correct that you cannot  and the reason is that i own it, and i therefore have a right to stop you from owning it

2) I am incorrect that cannot homestead it. my assertion was hot air. i have no right in the matter of whether you can homestead it or not,  how could i? , unless I owned the property in question

 

 

Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid

Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring

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Absolutely not. The founding fathers were aristocratic statesmen that started a revolution in response to taxation. Those very same "revolutionaries" crushed farmer uprising and taxed the population of the new United States to death.

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Laughing Man:

Stranger:
Capitalism is not dependent on the state if the state is capitalistic. That would be an impossible redundancy.

Well the state doesn't legitimately own anything. And capitalism is based on private property, therefore the state is not in any manner capitalistic.

How is this legitimacy determined?

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Wolves of Paris:
How is this legitimacy determined?

In obtaining property, there is Lockean homesteading principles. In exchange of property, voluntary non-aggressive trade.

'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael

 

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