Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Ownership exists because many (most?) things are rivalrous - if I have it, you can't, and vice versa - and finite. Even things which are not rivalrous or finite are generally produced with such things (e.g. software may be functionally free to reproduce, but producing it in the first place took real labor effort and material resources). Different ownership schemes are different ways of determining who gets to decide to use/have/dispose of various rivalrous things.
You can't escape from this. A communal ownership arrangement is still an ownership arrangement. If the question is "why private property?" the short answer is that private property with regulation has so far proven to be preferable to alternatives in most cases.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership: ...Capitalism is psychopathy with a makeover.
This is a word game, intent on framing things as negatively as possible by drawing a dubious analogy. There's a fair point about how original title is often rooted in a claim asserted by violence, but there's an equally fair counterpoint of "so what are we going to do about it?" Someone is getting final say over the disposition of stuff. That's not a distinctive feature of capitalism - the State (or Community or whatever entity you imagine) asserting their right to dispose of resources is no less arbitrary - so the real question is what gets us the best outcomes (or at least better outcomes)?
To the extent that you pursue any one of those goals, you sacrifice the other two. And that's being charitable and assuming there are actual benefits and these policies don't just make America poorer and weaker. Raising enough revenue to replace income taxes requires extraordinarily high tariffs without a decrease in imports (good luck). Trading partners are not going to accept radically asymmetric tariff arrangements, so if you're conceding tariffs as part of trade negotiations, you're effectively dropping the tariffs and any attendant hypothetical benefits (i.e. returning to something approximating the status quo after torching a bunch of good will).
I suppose one could reconcile tariffs-as-industrial-policy with tariffs-as-tax-policy if one supposes that the economic boom from ISI policy will be so massive that even with massive hikes in taxes on imports, people will still consume enough imports to generate a substantial amount of revenue. This is a) not credible b) under Trumpian trade theory, a bad thing.
Frankly, the most honest pitch would be that this is just right-wing degrowth policy - arguing that poverty is an acceptable tradeoff for certain intangible benefits (for left-wingers, it's environmental protection and anti-capitalism; for Trumpists it is the reestablishment/reaffirmation of certain social hierarchies). The Trump administration seems to willing to make this case, though I don't know that they realize that's the case they're making.
The problem is that this is an iterated game, which the Trump administration seems to forget. After decades of acquiescing to US preferences on a range of subjects, suddenly the US comes to you and says "You've been taking advantage of us. Give us more." Worse, their demands are irrational or incoherent - their primary grievance seems to be that their consumers buy more stuff from your producers than your consumers do from their producers. The 'deal' they're offering is that you should give American good privileged status in your domestic markets while they tariff your products at home and that you should cut off your biggest trading partner.
Not only is this a shit deal, you're also going to ask yourself "what about next time?" (and, if you're someone depending on US security guarantees, "do I believe they'll actually show up if the shit hits the fan?") The US is a valuable market, but it's not so valuable that you can't live without it. Especially if they plan to shake you down on the regular and you're starting to doubt they can be counted on in a pinch.
Were they?
Has Trump ever done anything to make you think 4D chess theories are plausible and not cope? Trump had an anti-China trade deal on his desk during his first term. He vetoed it.
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