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Notes -
What if our fundamentals are exactly backwards?
New to The Motte, looking for constructive, critical discussion.
Here's an example of what I mean by a "fundamental":
Every economic system that has seemed credible to most people since the dawn of civilization has revolved around the legal establishment and safeguarding of property through the concept of ownership.
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definitional characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
This has been such a consistently universal view that very few people question it. Even fewer have thought through a cogent alternative. Most people go slack-jawed at the suggestion that an alternative is possible.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership:
Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?
/images/17459352527399495.webp
I think the question of which economic system is “right” should relate to function and results, which necessarily involves understanding evolutionary instincts (perhaps more than anything else) and metrics of national wellbeing. Our evolutionary nature enjoys both ownership and sharing. It requires incentive and status signaling to do things. It works best with peer competition for status.
So the question of ownership should be a question of degree, not “what is it” or “is it good”; ownership is our evolved desire and understanding that a thing is ours, which we crave knowing, and this concept is simply implemented differently in different economic systems. The healthiest and most dominant people have even more of this instinct, it would seem. A big problem with “capitalism” in my mind is: if we are giving people resources in excess of what is required to incentivize them, then it’s wasted resources. If Bezos would do all the same Amazon stuff at only 20% of earnings, then it’s wasteful to allow Bezos to keep the leftover 80%. Because all the wealth of billionaires in America combined is the lifetime earnings of something like 1.25 million median Americans; more when factoring in billionaire lifetime earnings and not just current wealth; there are better uses for it than expensive properties and cosmetics and ex wives and so on. Like, fuck, imagine being able to allocate one million people toward a project? And the project is necessarily better than the prodigal billionaire? It’s crazy all the resources we waste based on the modern fiction that people “deserve” what “they” made. I want utopia, not capitalist purity spiraling.
That question is completely off-topic to my statements and my invitation.
And to the rest of your comment, you're thinking wholly within the paradigm in which rights have been predicated as principled deprivation. I'm asking for an alternative to that predication. So, although there's some good stuff there, your comment is nonresponsive to my post.
If its not about whats right, then in what sense do you want an alternative? In a purely conceptual sense, denying any ownership rights is an alternative.
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