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Comment by jaldhar | Hacker News Reader

As a society, the moment you allow for freedom of Religion, you take over responsibility for everyone’s practice of religion.

As a society, the moment you allow the right to bear arms, you are responsible for providing everyone who wants one with a gun.

The “commons” are waste land until they are improved by human effort. (I’m assuming you are not a nomadic hunter/gatherer.). That is the ultimate basis for property rights. It’s true I didn’t build that but neither did those homeless moms. What they are doing is theft.

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Your counter-examples (thanks for providing them, by the way) don't quite work. Sure, they work grammatically, but not contextually. Both the right to bear arms and the right to religlious freedom are immaterial rights. There's not necessity to bear arms for my survival, there's no necessity for religlious freedom for my survival. There's however the necessity of food and shelter for my survival. As soon as you take these away by assuming property rights, you take on the burden of supporting everyone that might have used said assumed property for their own survival.

Since we all started out as nomadic hunter/gatherers, this assumption of the "commons" being a wasteland does not quite hold, don't you think?

Yes, we all started out as hunter/gatherers millennia ago. We are not now. We have been mostly improving the wastelands ever since. (I say mostly because occasionally we re-waste them again but thankfully less and less often these days.)

I'm not sure that I would consider i.e. cutting down the amazon rain forest and turning them into pastures for cattle or fields for mono cultures as an improvement of wasteland.

Pretty much the same happened to the European rain forest and is currently happening to east-Asian rain forests. What we've been doing is changing the environment to suit our needs as agriculturalists, but that's not an objective improvement from wasteland to garden-of-Eden.

Indeed; exactly with this transformation from "wasteland" (as you would maybe call it) to predatively exploited ecosystem (as I would call it) we (as agriculturalists) have infringed on the rights of all hunter/gatherers that have been there before. We've set up enclosures to limited their ability to travel from hunting ground to hunting ground, we've slaughtered their prey animals (i.e. bisons), all the while claiming that their are uncivilized and barbaric and that this is all for their best.

The Amazon has 50,000 species of beetles which is good for beetles I guess but what makes it wasteland or not is what it does for humans. There as well we can discuss whether cattle or biodiversity is a better improvement but that is a different topic.

The Amazon (and similar environments) has been supporting human life for millennia. Even if you discount beetles (as I wouldn't, since beetles are awesome), calling it a wasteland does not seem very appropriate to me.

Waste as used in e.g. the Domesday Book literally means “land not under [human] cultivation.”

That's an interesting definition I knew not about. Thanks for sharing!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wasteland

In the previous discussion, I was mainly focused on the 'barren' and 'barely inhabitable' aspects. If your sentiment was about cultivation; yeah, you're probably right. Hunter/gatherer societies usually do very little cultivation.

(There's some indication that the Amazonas river fronts were heavily cultivated in pre-columbian times, as the presence of terra preta implies, though)

In that case however we'll run into the discussion about 'improving the land', since arguably cutting down woods to make room for agriculturalists is not improving the land for hunter/gatherers.

At the most you’ve established that homeless moms need to live somewhere. It is not necessary to live in a particular house in L.A. for survival.

If I've established that, I'm already very happy we've had this exchange.

Now we can bicker about the details. :D

Sure. It is possible to be against theft and for compassion at the same time.

However I am not in CA and it seems “society” over there has decided its not interested in housing homeless moms.

If society is unwilling to take responsibility, then society has no right to expect obedience.

Just a while ago weren’t you arguing that social needs trump individual rights. (I.e. the right to property.) If society through its chosen spokesmen decides homeless moms don’t need to be provided housing (they are still free to find it in some legal way.) why can it not compel their obedience?

I don't think I argue from social needs. I solely argue from individual needs and rights; the need of the individual to food and shelter; the right to existence; the appropriation of the common good for individual property. Please let me know if I diverge from that at any point, since "social needs" are highly subjective, whereas the individual needs usually aren't.

https://i.imgur.com/322zDhK.jpg

Addendum;

Sure, society can always compel and force somebody to obedience. That's why a society usually tries to monopolize the exertion of power through law enforcement. That might even give society the power to expel a homeless mother along with her children from a house that's been empty for 35 years.

My argument is not about ability but about morality.

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