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Comment by 0x262d | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it turns out that property rights come into conflict with human rights a lot, and this is why property rights should not be fundamental.

The people in responses saying owners "should" be able to do anything with stuff they own - well, the owners of property certainly think so. What about the majority of the population? I expect people's opinions about this will change rapidly, in a radical left direction, when the COVID eviction and foreclosure wave hits the US.

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I have a good friend who is a Law Professor and we had a pub conversation about the concept of "property ownership" a few years ago.

It was really mind blowing- I had never really thought about how abstract the notion of property ownership actually is, especially when you factor in inheritance. We should definitely be more critical of political systems that seek to justify concentrating property in the hands of the few.

It's a pretty crazy thing. An interesting question for libertarians is where did private property originate? Like, taking libertarian assumptions, once you own it, hypothetically you can expand your property profitably. But how did the first resources and land, which before private property were all used more or less collectively, become privately owned?

Right? Its pretty crazy. And extrapolating further, you can show that the concept of private property is what necessitates tax, since the modern state is in large part an apparatus for enforcing the concept of private property. Therefore libertarian complaints about taxation quickly fall apart under close scrutiny.

> and this is why property rights should not be fundamental.

No thank you, sir. I was born in a country, where that was the case.

This system has failed in my country and in many others like mine. Let us hope we never try this again.

The question I posed, with 2 very clear answers, is: should property rights or human rights be supreme? I know what I would say in the common case of a poor person being evicted.

Alternatively, the problem with property rights is that some humans don't have property, not that some humans do have property.

The resolute defenders of property rights would argue that this infringes on the rights of those who already own the things including virtually all land.

But there are other issues with this like the massive, inescapable trend towards centralization of ownership under capitalism.

Humans not having property seems to be the premise on which this whole society is built. Why else wod people work at eg Walmart? Because they really like greeting people and stacking shelves?

A big issue with property rights is that one person using their property can harm other users indirectly. As such, it makes a lot of sense to curb property rights.

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