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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
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.
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)?
I call it adversariality. It's a mental pathology, and a lot of people can't manage to think about things in any other way. To them, it's not "realistic". Well, that just shows the narrowness and lacks in their experience. Love and mutualism and cooperation are very real, and over the span of homo sapiens' history, it's by far the majority report. Even these last 10-15K years, although our "history" gives the opposite impression, quantitatively, the vast majority of human experience in person-hours has been at least mutualistic and cooperative, if not friendly, if not loving.
Your last paragraph is a characterization that does not engage with the idea. It's a tactic. You made a couple of fair points, but nothing that detracts from the obvious parallels.
Yes, the real question is what gets/gives us the best outcomes. How are you going to determine that without trying alternatives? And how are you going to try alternatives when a guy can't even get you to explore them?
That, uh, doesn't address any of the points. The existence of ownership doesn't preclude cooperation. Coining a new term doesn't do anything about basic physical realities like "if I eat that apple, you can't."
Please, put something forward. I'm not going to think your thoughts for you, especially since they're apparently inscrutable. All you've said so far said "property is a mental disorder" on repeat.
What points did I leave out? I didn't take yours point-by-point, but I can. My point was that you couched your points in an adversarial framing, as if "rivalry" is the only way to frame our interactions. Of course, that's not even close to true.
No one here said it did.
What "new term"?
There's a difference between using/consuming the same thing at the same time, on one hand, and one person declaring their right to prevent any and all others from using/consuming it at any particular time or at all times. They're not the same. I'm talking about the latter. "If I eat the apple, you can't" is just physics. What's true and relevant to one isn't necessarily true or relevant about the other.
Nor am I going to think your thoughts for you. I invited collaboration on an alternative to "deprive-first, ask questions later or not at all" ownership. No shame in coming up dry. I came up dry for a long time. My thoughts aren't inscrutable, but neither are they subject to demand on command, lol. A couple of people have touched on sharing as the alternative. Most have given reasons why alternatives aren't workable. A couple have strongly claimed that no alternatives are available. For me, this is a revisit to a topic I broached years ago. I know the kinds of responses I got then, and now I know something about the kinds of responses I got this time. The differences are informative. A shift is in progress.
Besides, I didn't want to influence the responses by making a suggestion of my own. I'm happy to do so at this point, though:
What about provision as an alternative to deprivation? What would that look like?
Indeed. What would that look like? Any ideas? Given that you seem to sometimes use not-quite-standard language, I think a whole lot can be cleared up if you just describe what you think your use of this language looks like.
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