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Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately it comes down to force. The person with the pointiest sticks will likely be able to enforce their view about ownership over others.

Taken quite literally, property is armed theft from the commons I guess. Unfortunately, it's tricky to do otherwise in a loosely organized swarm of barely tribal actors, because any peaceful society based on shared ownership will be prone to exploitation by malicious actors. It's basically a very large prisoner's dilemma: the global optimum would be to abolish private property, but as long as there are (enough) people around to exploit the situation for their own benefit (and to the massive detriment of everyone else), we have to stick to a sub-optimal system where everyone is worse off than the optimum.

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> Ultimately it comes down to force. The person with the pointiest sticks will likely be able to enforce their view about ownership over others.

This is a common but simplistic view that ignored e.g. concerns about popular legitimacy and support that often lead to the downfall of strongman regimes. Many people think they can enforce their views of ownership over others, but find that it's not quite that simple when they try to put it into practice. That's why I mentioned the social contract.

How would the global optimum be to abolish private property when you just stated that without it we live in a swarm of barely tribal actors?

The alternative to large-scale force is small-scale theft. Which is not so small-scale when you multiply it across every village and province. Ever been in the middle of a full social breakdown? Or a riot? Anyone who's seen what actual anarchy looks like would beg for some sort of order, even if it has to be imposed by force. It requires a very sheltered understanding of how the world actually works to think that anything good will come from unleashing chaos.

> the global optimum would be to abolish private property

The Soviet Union had this I believe, at least with buildings, and it didn't necessarily work out optimally.

Certainly, and to be clear I'm not arguing for communism as a realistic system. It would be ideal in an ideal world without greed and selfishness. As long as those exist, we need to have a system that functions when the individual actors place their own interests far above the interests of others.

I like to think of it biomimetically. Organisms and ecosystems have both competition and collaboration at every level of organization.

If I were to design a government from scratch I think it would actually be relatively easy to know what's best nationalized and what's best privatized. Nationalize the things that you do not want to be driven by the profit incentive because they need to be fair and accessible to all (mass transit, healthcare, utilities, communication networks, science), and privatize everything else (entertainment, retail, food, services).

> privatize everything else [including] food

yet:

> Nationalize the things that [...] need to be fair and accessible to all

Should food be accessible to all?

Or is food production privatized because market economies more accurately meet consumer demand?

Food is tricky. The food supply is one of the highest national security concerns IMO. Free market proponents love to go about saying that growing food should be left to countries and regions who do it well (due to climate and infrastructure), but if your country cannot grow enough food to supply it's own citizens' basic calorie needs, you are literally living on borrowed time. If the food supply is cut off for any reason, things go down very-very rapidly and the government has days, if not hours to sort things out before things descend into chaos.

At the same time, governments do not have a good track record of running the food/ags industry. I guess a system where the government heavily subsidizes it and incentivises domestic production, but lets farmers do their thing is probably as good as we can do?

> Free market proponents love to go about saying that growing food should be left to countries and regions who do it well (due to climate and infrastructure),

I think this is globalism rather than free market.

Countries that allow markets to control food prices have a far better track record of not starving, spiraling into hyperinflation, and losing wars than do countries which attempt to regulate food prices.

Good point. I learned this from Silo!

I say the government needs to ensure no one starves (food stamps, soup kitchens, etc. depending on the situation), and all food is safe to eat (it amazes me how well governments do this in most countries today), but otherwise production and distribution should be competitive.

I agreed with your first statement about competition and collaboration both being necessary. But if you extend that over time you see that those states in nature exist in a state of endless conflict, not in parallel. So in the realm of governing economies (democratically or otherwise), one of the most unfortunate but profitable outcomes of the human desire to oscillate between competition and collaboration is to be something like Argentina: Nationalize those things you want to be fair and accessible every 10 years and then privatize them again every other 10 years. This way, each new generation can lean capitalist or communist and make a killing by raiding whatever wealth was built by the previous generation in the name of fixing the system. Because after all, neither system is real. Both are just ways to paper over the fact that each new generation of young people are animals who kill their parents.

8-0

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