Tax wrote:So if you don't want private property feel free to give yours away but what gives you the right to force others to give it away?
There is a major difference between private property and personal property. Private property refers to the means of production for a particular society, i.e. the social tools, machinery, technology, and resources used to produce necessary goods and services. Personal property has to do with what is yours and yours alone and does not require society to operate and sustain. But regardless, this shows exactly why we will never get along on this issue. The socialist looks at private property from the perspective of its social side. The Liberal views it solely from the side of individual ownership.
When you look at it solely from the latter perspective, of course, the logical conclusion is to view the abolition of private property as a violation of those individual rights.
But if you look at it from the former perspective (from the social side), those individual rights are nothing but the product of society and the social divisions of power that make up that particular system of rights that allow the means of production, which requires society to make productive, to become merely an individual guarantee for those who have the capital to own it. Just like the state, this system of private property is wrapped up in power and domination of those who control those social means.
Thus, from this perspective, your question, Tax, "What gives you the right to force others to give it away?" is therefore looked at no different than an apologist of the state who says, "What gives you the right to take away our right to govern as elected officials?" The answer is obvious: the state is not ours and never was in the first place. It and it's laws, while having everything to do with us, are something that is decided upon outside of our communities--those decisions have nothing to do with us. We have no rights to the state, those rights concern only you who are in power. Similarly the rights you reference to your capital have only to do with you. We have no rights to
your capital, and that is the very problem we see, because your capital depends upon
our productive labor. While your capital, it's production and consumption, has everything to do with us, the decisions made about it have nothing to do with us. But you would never understand that as an owner of capital who believes in your right to own this social product just like the elected official who believes in his/her right to govern over us. It's therefore ridiculous for us to talk about what right we have to your capital, because we have no right to capital at all. Your "right to capital" is something that was decided, in fact, by the state. You become
privileged to that right once you become lucky enough to purchase it.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as banknotes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
--William James