JCC Should Private Property Be Allowed?

That's exactly what the government does anyway! "Native America called, they want their continent back."

 

And what happened to those people was horrific. That's the kind of abuse government is capable of when they don't recognize the property rights of people. That is kind of the point, actually. They simply took what they wanted, for what they thought of as a greater good. See how that works?

 

So when western capitalist societies are selfish, it's because of "reinforced social conventions," but we're meant to take an altruistic society completely at face value as conclusively disproving any concept of inherent human selfishness? I never claimed it was impossible to override human nature. We do it all the time. That's what conditioning, indoctrination, and education are for. But the lengths required to force everyone into such an unthinkingly altruistic form that the system is not abused are not lengths I'd be willing to go to.

 

But the point behind it is that--how can land belong to a person, or be bought and sold? Does it have an intrinsic value when it's not producing anything?

 

And you think it's strange that the political compass paints you in the far left?

Seriously though, what kind of model do you lean towards then? If private property is heavily restricted, would the state take over production and distribution outright, or would you be in favor of some kind of free-market socialism?

 

No, we're not meant to take that at face value. I don't see where you even read into that. What we are meant to take is that both are learned behaviors and if selfishness is learned, we can learn to be altruistic as well.

 

The only thing that keeps a system honest, are clearly defined restraints on it's power. An individual can be altruistic, even a group. But a system cannot be, because over time all different types of people will enter into that system. The boundaries will always be tested. You either allow that testing, or you don't. People should fear power, in all it's forms when it's not in your own hands.

Odd that the nature of power is being discussed on a website dedicated to a film series about the fall of a democratic government and the rise of a tyrannical dictator. Where do you think a guy like Sidious would fall on the issue of personal property?

 

I... don't know. It's such a wild-eyed fantasy right now that the details don't particularly matter. Probably state-oriented.

And I consider myself a social democrat, which is traditionally a center-left (perhaps I'm at the fringe of it) political affiliation.

 

We can learn to be altruistic. But can we learn to always be altruistic all the time? To never put ourselves first? To never band together to elevate ourselves over those we personally dislike? To never respond out of petty spite? A world without divisions? I don't really disagree with what you're saying, but I think you underestimate the degree of altruism necessary for your ideal world to exist.

 

Yes, I would say that it does.

 

Darth Guy, I realize you've said that you're sketchy on the details--and that's fine--but I can't help but point out the basically 100% failure rate of the state-oriented model, so the notion strikes me as a bit odd. Is there some degree of nuance there in that framework that I'm missing?

Star Trek?

 

I'd like to ask a somewhat related question, if property were to be disallowed, what would become of my own?

 

What does 100% failure rate mean? The USSR and its satellites and the PRC? I really don't think their problems were caused by that.

 

What were they caused by then? The USSR's situation is a little more complex I think, but the PRC's problems were almost entirely due to the total state ownership of the factors of production and collectivization of farming. The People's Republic of Korea isn't exactly a success story. Again , I realize that there are difference between these countries and their frameworks, but there's enough in common between them to be fairly comparative.

 

*snark* Who ever said that being altruistic all the time was a necessity for what we're advocating? Our current selfishness-oriented society seems to have survived occasional bouts of altruism just fine. *snark*

 

I know a lot more about the USSR than the PRC. And yes, they were very complex. The state emerged out of a devastating civil war with foreign-supported reactionaries (commonality with the PRC on that one). It inherited a lot from the Tsarist Russian Empire-- Russian-centric view despite being ostensibly all-inclusive, deeply corrupt bureaucracy, massive secret police force, system of Siberian prisons-- hell, even the anti-Semitism. If, say, the United States suddenly had a socialist economic system, it would probably inherit the tradition of relatively non-corrupt government bureaucracy. Stalin very much acted like a Tsar, and I think Peter or Catherine could've been worse if they have been in the same position. I'd say he, along with Hitler (causing demographic devastation, triggering the creation of USSR satellite states, setting the stage for the Cold War), probably share the majority of the responsibility for the USSR's downfall.

Like I said, I know less about the PRC, but I know that Mao was a horribly incompetent administrator. His pet projects like making inexperienced farmers produce worthless steel contributed to the deaths of literally millions. Most of his supposed body count was just blundering on his part. I absolutely don't think the power of the state should be concentrated so much in the hands of one person.

This post is structured oddly. I'm too lazy to revise.

 

i find the language of property "rights" slightly disingenuous when a vast majority of the world's population is impoverished and disenfranchised. but i guess they should all just pull themselves up by those bootstraps and grab their slice of the means of production! also i find the notion of private property to be fairly short-sighted. yes, it might be the most viable and functional system right now and it's probable that things might even stay that way for the next few centuries. but i truly feel that if we expect humanity to still be thriving as a species in thousands of years that we will have to evolve to a point where altruism and shared property are the norm.

 

Darth Guy, is it fair to summarize what you're saying about China as "It's not so much that state-socialism was the problem, but that all of the power of such a system was basically put in the hands of one incompetent guy." ?

In any case, I would find it difficult to not at least put most of the blame for the PRC's problems on state-socialism. The turn around in their agrarian sector, for instance, was entirely due to moving away from the state-socialist model to the market-socialism model.

 

Ehh, large countries like Russia, China, and India had problems with cyclical famines until about the 1960's. It didn't really matter what governments they had, although "The Great Leap Forward" probably impeded China's progress in that regard.

 

I'll ask again, to those opposed to the concept of private property, what should be done with the property already under ownership? Should that ownership be stripped?

 

So you think it's just a coincidence then that when the provinces of Sichuan and Anhui went rogue and the villages essentially privatized farming on their own that agricultural output tripled in one season? Or that when Deng Xiaoping gave approval for others provinces to do the same and implemented the Household Responsibility System that agricultural output in China as a whole went up over 100% in a couple of years? Famines aside (and no I'm not denying their importance or anything), it was the first time that Anhui, for instance, was feeding itself in decades. The fundamental change behind all of this was a move away from communal farming and to a market-socialist model.

 

I couldn't say. I'd have to know more about it.

But does state ownership necessarily equal communal farming? I wasn't extolling the virtues of the PRC model or anything. I did essentially call Mao a pudgy idiot.

 

You're digressing. My post wasn't at all about the degree of altruism needed for my ideal society, but on whether altruism and selfishness are human nature or social constructs.

 

Not necessarily, no. That's why I mentioned the free-market socialist model. It still has state ownership, but economic activity is more free and guided by market signals and less restricted interaction. Participants are given more freedom to partake in voluntary exchanges and manage some of their own capital. In the case of the Household Responsibility System, agricultural workers technically didn't own the land, and were still required to meet a government quota, but could they sell the surplus on the free market (well they did have price controls on a lot of things). Instead of complete central planning, they were given a lot more freedom to organize economic activity however they wanted.