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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
Only if you've stopped stealing from other people.
If ownership is deprivation of others, then that deprivation is theft. After all, to deprive is to deny someone the possession or use of something. If this is supposed to be an immoral characteristic ('paranoid,' 'not sharing,' 'psychopathy), then the moral state is for it to not be deprived. The immoral deprivation of personal or even public goods is understood to be theft.
However, you are posting here. On the internet. A medium that requires a computer of some sort that could be not-deprived to someone else. Moreover, you repeatedly responded to others. This entails further use of time depriving the device to others. It also implies a surplus of time, and thus material resources you are depriving others of, that enable the hobby rather than sharing like a non-paranoid should. These resources are deprived from benefiting other possible beneficiaries and potential users by virtue (or sin) of your use. Your use and expected ability to use is demonstrating a de facto, even if not de jure, ownership.
It's generally understood that it is fair to judge people by their own standards, even if it's not fair to do so by your own. So be it. A priest who declares any who disagrees with their message is damned to hell will be a damned priest by their own hypocrisies. A revolutionary who declares it an act of cowardliness to not participate in a protest is a coward for not participating. You are someone who deprives others by exercising ownership and mutually exclusive use of limited resources.
Why should anyone brainstorm alternative ownership with a thief in the middle of a robbery?
LOL, Strawman City here, looks like -- and in Strawman City, everything you say is true by definition. Great! The only problem is that nothing that happens in Strawman City affects anyone but you, cuz you're the only one there. Sorry, just too many baseless assumptions and leaps of illogic for me to engage much. No, physical possession is not theft. No, physical possession does not entail deprivation. No, "paranoid", "not sharing", and "psychopathy" have zip-all to do with morality. No, I'm not engaging in a hobby. Before trying to construct a polemical trap, make sure you've got facts to work with. But speaking of ironies and hypocrisies, what about the fact that you know squat about me but pretend to know?
I'd generally agree that these aren't moral concepts. Given that they are neither moral nor immoral, and that this system of "psychopathy with a makeover" that makes sense to "paranoid" people "who don't understand the concept of sharing" keeps leading to stable societies with people leading prosperous lives, when instability and poverty has been the norm for most lives anywhere, I have to conclude that "psychopathy" and "paranoia" and "not sharing" are really cool things that I want more of, for the purpose of my own benefit from living in a stable and prosperous society and from the good feelings I get from believing that I support a system that benefit more people in general. Why would I want to come up with an alternative?
So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty? Or do you simply not consider people stuck in poverty to be people?
More than what? The USA benefits more people on average than which countries? Compared to which periods in history?
Trick questions, actually, because there's a fundamental flaw in your argument no matter how you'd answer them: better-than-worse does not substitute for as-good-as-better. Those are two mutually exclusive orientations. Yours is the former. No matter how much better than others an example might be, it says nothing about how good it realistically could be. When brought up as a barrier to improvement, better-than-worse is perverse. Confucius points this out in terms of intelligence: If you're always the smartest person in the room, you keep choosing the wrong room.
And that doesn't even touch on a much more important aspect which most people are functionally oblivious to. I'll pose it with a question: given all you know about this world, compared to what you'd really like the world to be, is this one the world you want?
Most people have become so tacitly cynical, it simply doesn't occur to them that what they want even matters anymore.
I probably implied it in that comment, and in this comment, I'm explicitly stating it, yes, that a minority of people in societies that have private property live in poverty.
For a current-time example, I'd say the USA compares favorably against North Korea, though perhaps South Korea vs North Korea would be a better example, as USA is only one specific and rather idiosyncratic example of a society that has private property rights, and South Korea is probably more similar to North Korea than USA is.
Well, the problem here is that you also say nothing about how good it realistically could be. So, how good could it realistically be? I'm all ears. As of yet, you've described the current system with words like "psychopathic" done by "paranoid" people, which I agree with you are completely morally neutral. As such, I have no desire to overthrow this non-immoral system which keeps giving us very good results, unless there's some other system in store for something even better to replace it. So what are those other ideas?
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Yes, that is clearly the case. I’m not sure how you could think otherwise, the vast majority of people on planet Earth are not living in poverty. That’s even more so the case for developed countries. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
Sure, "poverty". Let's talk living wage. Do you know how many adults in the US earn less than a living wage? Over 60%. But you're OK with that, if you even knew it. Only 40% of adults make more than bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive. That is a human poverty line, not the inhuman line of about half that much (which is actually the extreme poverty line.)
Anyone can be an Olympian if you lower the bar to 2", man. Get real.
That is simply untrue. 11% of Americans live under the poverty line, and even making less than the poverty line is a far cry from “The minimum of what it takes to stay alive.” About 2,000 people died of malnutrition (not even starvation, just malnutrition) in the US in 2022. That’s .0006% of the population who may have lacked the bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive. A far cry from 60%. You know the median American makes $40,000 a year, right?
Iirc the vast majority of malnutrition deaths in the US occur among the elderly, and it's less that they are deprived of access to food, and more that they have physical difficulty with eating.
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