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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

The only reason that wealth exists is because of history and society.

That is a bit extreme. You can hoard basic goods (wheat, lumber, livestock) or build infrastructure (house, barn, pipes) for your own use in the future, without involving state or society.

Society can more or less work without private property but a free society can not. We tend to think of the State as an abstract law infrastructure, but it is not. Who does make, apply, execute the laws?

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It's not extreme at all. All of civilization has only existed for 10k years. Most of the time our species has spent on earth, there was no wealth, there was no hoarding of basic goods, and there was no infrastructure. Hunter-gatherer tribes did not accumulate wealth.

If you carefully save from your subsistence farm in the good years you might save a couple of tons of wheat to get you through the bad ones. Congratulations, you've just saved $300.

But you're right, our other freedoms do imply a certain amount of control over a certain amount property. The right to self-determination, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of association et cetera would be hard to guarantee without a little bit of freedom of property.

As I mentioned, capitalism is a pretty good means to accomplish our goals. It's not an end in itself or a fundamental right, IMO.

Capitalism and private property are not the same thing. Capitalism is Karl Marx's definition of an economic system where the means of production are private property.

Private property is a more broad concept that means of production. You can put some goods out of market by law (a dam, roads, airports) so society will work better, but that isn't the same as preventing individuals from having their own private wealth.

Private property is based on the concept of rule of law. If the State can arbitrarily disposses you of goods you earned through fair trade, you are not really free.

The list of fundamental rights that are widely agreed upon are:[1]

  - Right to self-determination
  - Right to liberty
  - Right to due process of law
  - Right to freedom of movement
  - Right to freedom of thought
  - Right to freedom of religion
  - Right to freedom of expression
  - Right to peaceful assembly
  - Right to freedom of association

If the state can arbitrarily dispossess you of all of your goods you don't have some of the above rights. However, the vast majority of most citizens' property and wealth is not necessary to exercise the above rights.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_rights

You can't have self-determination if you can't keep (at least a good part of) the fruits of your work.

Wikipedia is a fine source of knowledge, but I would take a look at what happens in every actual nation in Earth. If you can't work hard and save a portion of what you earn, you are living in a tirany that also disregards the rest of human rights.

It was once widely agreed upon that slaves had no rights. Just because something is widely agreed upon doesn't make it right. I would argue that the proceeds of the private trades you engage in are fully yours by right, and that no reasonable case can be made to the contrary.

To suggest that it is not a right is to imply that it is okay for a government to demand that two private parties divulge information about a private trade they engaged in, and throw the two parties in prison if they refuse to divulge this information, or if they refuse to hand over a share of the value they received in this private trade.

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