Hacker News Reader

Comment by zrm | Hacker News Reader

Property is not based on consensus. Even if millions of people think Jeff Bezos has too much money, with nowhere near consensus that he should have it, a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff.

The DNS really does operate on consensus. There is nobody forcing everybody to do it a particular way. We get real consensus because everybody has a strong interest in not creating global namespace conflicts through forks. But that doesn't mean you can't make a change to fix a mistake, it only means you need to get enough support behind it for it to become the consensus position.

View on HN

However, a sufficiently large mob can easily take everything Bezos has, no matter what any court says.

Property is absolutely based on consensus, property beyond anything you control with your direct person is very much one of those polite fictions society collectively agrees to, like money and laws.

If the large majority of people, for whatever reason, decided to stop agreeing, such fictions would cease to exist.

A thing doesn't exist by consensus just because a consensus against it could destroy it, because a consensus against pretty much anything could destroy it. What makes it exist by consensus is that a rough consensus in favor of it is required to sustain it.

This isn't true of things like property rights which could be sustained even with only minority support provided the minority had a sufficient military advantage.

It is true of DNS because consensus is inherently required to prevent it from fragmenting and ceasing to exist as a single global namespace.

It's true, property exists exclusively as something someone enforces with violence directly or indirectly.

If tomorrow somehow everyone's memory got wiped so they could no longer remember say, Mt. Rushmore, It would continue to exist.

If the same thing happened with Bezos's wealth, it would cease existing, or at least the concept of him owning it would cease existing.

That's the difference. Ownership of property is entirely within people's minds.

If tomorrow somehow everyone's memory got wiped so they could no longer remember how to make Pad Thai then it would cease to exist as well (unless someone independently reinvents it). That doesn't mean Pad Thai exists by consensus.

If so much as one person still remembers and can prove it to everyone else, or it's documented somewhere on paper, then it would still exist. Likewise all Bezos would need is that documentation. Which is really how it works in practice. There are only a handful of people and documents concerned with exactly what someone owns. The large majority of people have no idea who owns an arbitrary piece of land or share of stock. The information comes from an authority, not a consensus.

Whereas if we're talking about the concept of property rights in general rather than specific ownership records then we're back to them being enforced by a government which it is in principle possible for them to do via superior force independent of popular support.

If everyone agrees that Jeff Bezos has too much money and that we should make an exception to normal property laws and strip him of his assets, that's exactly what would happen!

But most people don't think that. They wish they had as much money as him, maybe they think society is unfair to allow someone to have so much money. But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who supports arbitrarily stripping someone of their (current) property.

I agree, even the current political elites aren't so daft as to say if 80% of the population is vehemently opposed to any US citizen having say more than 1 billion dollars in wealth, the Congress can surely enact taxes to insure that happens. Lucky for Bezos there is only a (large) minority that would like to see that happen so his Billions are currently safe.

> But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who supports arbitrarily stripping someone of their (current) property.

Isn’t that what the Warren wealth tax is?

> a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff

the ruling will be enforced if there is a consensus that it is a just ruling

> the ruling will be enforced if there is a consensus that it is a just ruling

The Supreme Court regularly makes rulings that are contrary to popular opinion. I see no evidence that the rulings are not being enforced despite the lack of consensus that they were just. They also regularly make rulings that align with the slight popular majority but the popular opinion is still about evenly split with no clear consensus one way or the other, and those rulings are enforced as well.

Following unpopular laws is itself a consensus, one where abandoning the rule of law altogether is seen as more harmful than enforcing one unpopular ruling.

How is it a consensus when people on the losing side often respond with violence, riots or protests? Lacking effective means to overthrow the government hardly implies agreement.

You've now defined "consensus" as "anything you don't stage an armed rebellion over" ... which doesn't seem like a useful definition at all.

I'm not seeing anyone staging an armed rebellion over this definition...

The current Supreme Court is hard right and currently under Executive Mandate, I wouldn't put anything past them if their overlords demand something of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com