Truth to Power wrote:the producer's ownership of the fruits of his labor doesn't deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have
Jim4120 wrote:I feel like this is a false premise from which you were arguing.
But it's clearly true. The product would not exist but for the producer's effort to bring it into existence, so his ownership of it could not possibly deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have.
All of the things that we use to make something inherently begin with using natural resources to produce them. So, the act of producing does in fact deprive someone else of something - the natural resources used to create what it is that is produced.
No. It only deprives them if they are consequently deprived – i.e., if they are disadvantaged by being excluded from using a scarce resource they would otherwise have been at liberty to use. Resources are not always scarce, their use is not always exclusive, and others don't always want to use them.
Example: i use a tree to build a boat. Now that tree is no longer there for others to use for their own means.
No. There are two cases: 1) no one else wanted to use the resources at the time they were removed from nature, in which case no one was deprived of anything; or 2) someone else did want to use them, but was forcibly excluded from doing so, in which case compensation is owed to those excluded by those who excluded them. But the latter is not a case of ownership of the product by its producer depriving them. It is a case of forcible exclusion from use of the resource depriving them.
And note that there can be no retroactive deprivation. If someone comes along and says, "You previously used up resources that I would have liked to use now," they are asking the logically impossible: that they be at liberty to use a resource which no longer exists, i.e., that time be reversed. There can never be any such thing as a right to the logically impossible.
Truth to Power wrote:No, the human liberty to use land that has not been appropriated as property is a fact of objective physical reality: everyone is physically at liberty to use it; no one else will stop them.
If there's only a certain amount of land available, and all of it is being used by someone, whether or not it's owned, and someone else decides to use that land, they cannot, because it is already being used.
No. That is only true if the user
excludes them, effectively appropriating the land as his private property. Non-exclusive use was normal for millions of years – it is still normal in hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding societies -- until greedy, evil parasites figured out that they could enslave others by wrongly claiming to own land as producers rightly own the fruits of their labor.
This can lead to conflict, and possibly, somebody stopping someone else from using land they were previously using. So to say that "no one else will stop them" is not inherently true.
It is true as long as no one excludes others. That is the key act that appropriates the land as private property. What you are describing is just effective appropriation of land as private property by excluding others from using it.
Truth to Power wrote:If you have been paying attention, you will note that this parable very accurately describes what actually happened when slaves were "emancipated" in the Civil War:
If you say that the landowner is inherently wrong in this situation, it seems to me that you have to extend that same logic to all means of production.
No, because the capital goods' owner affords people access to opportunity they would not otherwise have had, while the landowner
deprives them of opportunity they
would otherwise have had.
Capitalists and socialists just have to refuse to know that fact in order to preserve their false and evil beliefs.
In your ship-building example, it is the capital of those not building the ship that you say is responsible for said ship being built.
No. Capital is just a tool, and is never responsible for anything. Those who
caused the ship to be built rather than not built rightly own it. If they owned the capital, and risked it to build the ship as entrepreneurs, so be it. If they were workers who borrowed the capital consensually (presumably making compensation through interest or a share of the profits), fine, they own it. The relevant labor is the labor of the entrepreneur in
arranging for the ship to be produced, i.e., to exist rather than not exist. Whether he is a capital owner, a laborer, both, or neither is irrelevant to his resulting property right in what he brought into existence.
So, you argue that land should not be owned, because those who produce on the land should own what they produce,
No, that is not the reason. The reason land cannot rightly be owned is that owning it inherently abrogates the rights of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use it.
but then turn around 180 degrees and say that those who build the ship do not own the ship, because they did not pay for its construction.
No. It's not a question of
paying for construction, but the labor of arranging for the required production factors to be devoted to the ship's construction. Even if someone borrows all the money to build a ship, and hires the labor, and buys all the materials on credit, they still own the ship even though they did none of the construction labor and provided none of the capital because they were the ones who caused the ship to exist. The people who did the building traded their contributions for wages, and the people who paid for the tools, etc. have presumably done so in exchange for getting their money back plus interest later, or a share of the profits. The owner is the one who brought the factors together to create the product.
Isn't this the exact opposite of the argument you made against landowning? By that logic the shipbuilder is in essence "exploiting" the worker for his own benefit, without physically producing anything themselves, which, if I understand your argument, was the whole problem you had with landowning.
No. The capital owner is contributing capital to the production process and thus earns a share of the product. The landowner is contributing nothing to production, and thus earns no share of it. I'm not sure what is so hard to understand about that, but I know that apologists for landowner privilege somehow prevent their brains from understanding it.
Truth to Power wrote:The workers are paid for their contributions out of the value of the property right the rightful owner obtains by bringing the ships into existence.
And you said that everyone should be entitled to own the "fruits of their labor," yet you dismiss this notion here, as the owner of the capital is now the one that owns the ship, and not those that physically labored to make it a reality.
They were paid wages for their rightful shares of ownership: the value they contributed to the final product. The capital owner might have done likewise with his contribution, trading his ownership share for interest on his money, or a share of the profits, or he might be the owner, if he was the one who performed the labor of arranging for the ship to be built.
Truth to Power wrote:But it can elicit labor, effecting production that would not otherwise have occurred. In such cases, it is the investor who causes the product to be produced, not the laborer.
Only because the investor has something that the laborers want, in this case capital, so that they can use that for themselves.
So it's a consensual trade, and no one's rights are abrogated. By contrast, the landowner only gets a portion of production by forcibly removing others' rights to liberty, and demanding they pay him for use of what would otherwise have been available to use.
The incentive in this case, then, is not the betterment of society, but the betterment of oneself by the obtainment of capital, which is only beneficial if society places a benefit on owning capital.
No. Contributing capital is beneficial because it increases production. Owning land is not beneficial because the land was already there with no help from the landowner or any previous landowner. You know this.
Truth to Power wrote:The only thing stopping you or anyone else from building a factory or a shipyard is that you need land to put it on. The supply of land, by contrast, is fixed.
That, and the supply of natural resources necessary to build the factory or shipyard, which is also fixed.
Yes. All natural resources are subsumed in the economic term, "land," so we can say you need land both to build it and to put it on. If you exclude others who want to use them from using natural resources, whether raw materials you remove from nature or a location you can inherently never remove from nature, you are abrogating their rights and must rightly make just compensation.
Truth to Power wrote:There is no crop without seed, either. That doesn't mean the farmer is not uniquely responsible for production of the crop.
SueDeNîmes wrote:But participation of other people does.
Truth to Power wrote:No, it does not, when those other people are not the active cause that made the product exist rather than not exist.
But that crop would also not exist without the labor of the other people involved, either.
Yes, and they already traded their property right shares in the crop for their wages.
The one providing the seed does not produce a crop without labor, just as those with labor do not produce a crop without seed. It is a mutually beneficial relationship in which you have placed more value on the one providing the seed than those providing the labor.
No, I haven't. It's not clear who contributed more value or will consequently get more benefit. The seed is bought from a seed house, the labor is bought from workers, the equipment is bought from machinery makers, the fertilizer is bought from a chemical manufacturer, all of whom are contributing things needed for the crop. The entrepreneur who performs the labor of bringing all those factors to bear on the land, arranging for the crop to be grown, and therefore owns it, could even end up losing money – many millions of them have, you know. The only one involved who is NOT contributing anything is the landowner, because unlike everything else needed to grow the crop, the land was already there, ready to use, with no help from him or any previous landowner.
Truth to Power wrote:When a factory worker's labor turns a 50%-complete product into a 51%-complete product, his property right is in the 1% he has added, not the 100% complete product. It is that sliver of property right that he exchanges for his wages.
So if some group of people are able to produce something (say a crop) from a piece of land, and another group does not have the skills to do so, but does have the skills to produce something else beneficial to the ones producing the crop, then why do the ones who can produce on the land not have more of a right to use that particular piece of land than the one who can not, to the benefit of all involved?
Firstly because it's only someone's opinion that the first group will be more productive, and we can't know in advance who will make the best use of a resource; but mainly because people who may have less potential to use their rights to full advantage do not thereby lose any portion of those rights. The fact that I am better able to think and to express myself than you does not give me more of a right to freedom of thought and expression than you. We may decide as a matter of reasonable policy that whoever bids the most for use of the land is likely to use it most productively, though there is no guarantee. But more importantly, those who do not bid as much as the high bidder have no grounds for complaint, because they were not willing to compensate the high bidder as much for being excluded as the high bidder is willing to compensate them.
Are they not exchanging their rights to use that land for the price of the good sold to help better produce off of that land (perhaps in this case, the price being a portion of the crop produced)?
It is very unclear to me what you are trying to say, here. Who is trading what for what? The ones who use the land are not exchanging their rights to use it, they are the ones who ARE using it. And how does the price of the crop become a portion of the crop?
Scarcity of resources is what drives society to come up with a value for all things available to be used for production (including land), because not everyone can have access to everything they need to survive all of the time.
Wrong. In a hunter-gatherer economy, they do, because no one excludes anyone else from access to natural resources. They just have to do the work to sustain themselves using the resources nature provides.
There's simply not enough to go around.
And when that is the case, those who get to use the resources owe just compensation to those whom they exclude from using them.
This value leads to a trade system as a means by which to distribute the use of natural resources that are scarce.
But private property in land is a “trade” system in which everyone has already been robbed of what they had to trade -- their liberty to use the resources nature provided for all – and nature has been “distributed” to some at the expense of all the rest. No one traded away their rights to use land. Their rights were simply removed by force, without compensation.
Another alternative to the trade system to control resources is through physical power, by which a person or group of people wield physical power over others, and get them to do their will.
That is the system of private property in land. The state, on the landowner's behalf, wields physical power over the landless, to make them the slaves of the landowner, who forces them to work for his benefit while he does nothing. He is a pure taker, a pure parasite, a pure thief, a pure enslaver, pure evil.
This power is able to acquire goods and resources not normally available to that person, who doesn't necessarily have the skills to produce it themselves.
I.e., the landowner takes from the producer, producing nothing himself. Right.
Eventually, this ability to control resources was turned into a money system, by creating a standard of value (money).
No. Money arose as a medium of exchange and its fundamental use is as a medium of exchange. It is because value is what a thing can be exchanged for that the medium of exchange is the most natural standard and measure of value. The function of money as a standard of value is derivative of its function as the medium of exchange.
But, those originally with the physical power to force others to turn over their goods and services to them, could control a larger portion of the available resources, goods, and services (and ultimately money) than those without it. This control gave them the means to force others into servitude.
No, that's not what happened, as history and anthropology prove. First, society developed property rights in the fruits of one's labor, and the physically strong had to respect that or find themselves up against the group in a fight they could not win. Then slavery emerged from inter-societal conflict: captured enemies were taken as property and forced into servitude, as a solution to the twin problems of labor shortage resulting from warfare and what to do with captives. Only later, as a result of the emergence of settled agriculture, did property in land emerge, giving the landowners the means to force others into servitude.
Then, people determined a way in which they can create money without providing anything of inherent value to society, in essence creating from money, which was derived from the system that was created, and that can be used to wield power over those who have less of what is now valuable in society, money, because it has become a conference of power, rather than a representation of the value of a trade, which is how it began.
Could you try saying that in English?
The monetary system used in all advanced countries is debt money, which is created by commercial banksters when they lend. Contrary to some claims, it is not created ex nihilo – that is fiat money – but is created from the borrower's legal obligation to repay it. Because repayment of debt destroys debt money, someone has to undertake more debt or the money supply will contract, producing a deflationary collapse. If firms and households won't (as since the GFC), government has to. You are correct that the bankster is not providing anything of value to society, but simply using his money creation privilege to extort interest income from the productive and society at large.
It allows them to have power over others when they do not necessarily have the physical capabilities to do it.
All privilege has that effect, not just landowner privilege and bankster privilege. The fact you are trying to evade is that ownership of capital is
not a privilege, because it violates no one's rights and confers no power to do so. No one is made worse off by it than they would otherwise have been. Everyone else IS made worse off than they would otherwise have been by landowner privilege, bankster privilege, IP monopoly privilege, union privilege, etc.
So, ultimately, it is those with more power exploiting those who have less that leads to the situation which you described, whether that be physical or financial power, and I would say the latter has more inherent value as a conference of power, since you can buy the services of those that have the physical might to protect that which you own (whether rightly or not), by conferring them part of your power through the transference of money.
That is a very confused idea of economic relations, because you have deleted from your mind the difference between the power to provide others with more than they would otherwise have and the power to deprive others of what they would otherwise have had. It is only the latter power that can exploit and enslave.
You can argue that this system is flawed or wrong (and it is probably at least one of the two), but I don't see how you can claim that anyone has an inherent right to the use of resources that are scarce.
Everyone has an inherent right to the use of all natural resources, because that is what liberty means. Scarcity just means that those who deprive others of scarce resources must rightly make just compensation to them for doing so.
Because there is only so much of said resources that are available to be used, someone is going to get left out, and this is how we, as a society, have chosen to deal with that problem.
Of course. Just as slavery was a way that we as a society chose to deal with a different problem. Slavery was better than just slaughtering defeated captives, and landowning was better than just ignoring property rights in fixed improvements. But now we have better solutions to those problems.
- By annatar1914
- By Godstud