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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

Abolition of property rights is usually down through coercive means by some agent of the state, hence it is top-down.

"Human thriving" can be defined any number of ways, including wealth, health, liberty (positive or negative), freedom, happiness, environmental factors, etc. Most capitalists define thriving as improvement in some or all of these areas. You are correct that a vague definition of "thriving" can be self-serving, but it is hard to find any factor which socialist countries have made more progress in than less socialist countries. Even a socialist country (i.e. China or India) which frees its markets and creates property rights sees a substantial gain in the rate of improvement of the lives of its citizens in almost every aspect.

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> Abolition of property rights is usually down through coercive means by some agent of the state, hence it is top-down.

No it's not? Property rights themselves can only be enforced through some agent of the state, hence they are top down. Abolition of private property means abolition of the state.

I mentioned this in another post in this thread, but take the example of a house you rent from a landlord. Under capitalism, it's not your house, even though you use it. It's the landlord's, because ultimately the landlord can use the coercive power of the state to remove you if you stop paying rent. If you abolish the state, then it simply becomes your house, and the landlord can no longer claim ownership over that which they do not use.

> If you abolish the state, then it simply becomes your house, and the landlord can no longer claim ownership over that which they do not use.

If you abolish the state, anyone can claim ownership over anything they want, they'll just have to muster their own force to enforce the claim since there is no state to impose force on behalf of any claimant.

This isn't borne out, though, by actual experience.

Plenty of economic goods are not secured by codified property rights, defined and enforced from above. Communities are able to self-organize to define a reasonable set of behavioral norms. Local knowledge can be leveraged to generate better outcomes, and locality allows different communities to experiment with what actually works best, making the system as a whole more fault tolerant.

See the work of Elinor Ostrom for several deeply investigated examples of this kind of organizing.

It actually is. While plenty of economic goods may not be secured by codified property rights and instead are secured through the application of community norms, when those norms are challenged community does have to apply force.

See: the majority of human history, particularly Pythagoras' attempt at community, every war for conquest, anarchic systems created in early Iceland/Scandinavia, normal people's experiences with bullies, etc.

> This isn't borne out, though, by actual experience.

Yes, actually, the fact that, in the absence of a state (and, in fact, even in the presence of a de jure state but the absence of an effective state), people are free to claim whatever, but their ability to enforce a claim is dependent on their ability to muster force to press it is well established by experience.

> Plenty of economic goods are not secured by codified property rights, defined and enforced from above.

I don't disagree with that, but its not relevant to anything I said.

> Communities are able to self-organize to define a reasonable set of behavioral norms.

Again, I don't disagree (in fact, that's what a democratic state is.)

> Local knowledge can be leveraged to generate better outcomes, and locality allows different communities to experiment with what actually works best, making the system as a whole more fault tolerant.

And, yet again, I don't necessarily disagree with that in general (though I do think it is an overgeneralization), and, again, it doesn't contradict anything I said.

> Abolition of property rights is usually down through coercive means by some agent of the state, hence it is top-down.

Creation of property rights is always done through coercive means by the State. In the absence of such action, there are no property rights.

This is not necessarily the case, and depends on your view of rights. If you believe in natural, self evident rights, (such as owning one's self,) then property rights can be derived in a number of ways. This is only one example, as there are a number of ways to establish property rights, some of which involve state coercion, and some of which do not.

> If you believe in natural, self evident rights, (such as owning one's self,) then property rights can be derived in a number of ways.

Whether or not you believe in such rights, they are different kind of thing than legal rights and (notably) cannot be abolished. Confusing natural (i.e., moral) rights and legal rights is the fallacy of equivocation (and is equivalent to conflating a fact proposition with a value proposition.)

Creation of legal property rights is always a top-down action by the State. It may be justified by a belief in certain inherent, unalterable moral rights (as, equally, can the abolition of legal property rights -- which is simply the State declining to continue to impose coercive means to uphold certain property rights), but that doesn't change that the mechanism by which they imposed is top-down, coercive action by the State.

I did not confuse anything, you left the type of right undefined. I assumed that the undefined right could be either moral or legal, whereas you interpret "right" to mean "legal right" unless explicitly stated otherwise. This has been an unfortunate misunderstanding.

> you left the type of right undefined

No, the post I responded to was about the abolition of rights, which restricts it to the class of rights (legal, not moral) for which that phrase is meaningful.

Context matters.

> whereas you interpret "right" to mean "legal right" unless explicitly stated otherwise.

No, I interpret it to mean "legal right" when it is used in a context in which what is being discussed is only meaningful for legal rights.

It's not really the fallacy of equivocation, since legal rights follow natural rights and he's not confusing the two.

Property rights are not necessarily externally applied. As you can apply use to the area around you, you can use your natural rights in order to claim property and protect it through force. In this way you are innately a sovereign. When you join in a community, you give up some of your natural rights to the state, particularly as regards the application of force.

> legal rights follow natural rights

Legal rights, as I said previously, may be motivated by beliefs about natural/moral rights, but they are, purely and simply, a decision by the State to use coercive measures to exclude some actions. And they may also not be motivated by any belief about "natural rights". Natural rights, except as a rhetorical device to claim the moral high ground in arguments about what decisions the State should make in terms of imposing coercive power on behalf of one or the other conflicting claimants in a class of actual or hypothetical disputes, don't actually have any direct bearing on, really, anything.

> As you can apply use to the area around you, you can use your natural rights in order to claim property and protect it through force.

You can use your physical capacity to exclude people from actions (whether or not they relate to an entity in which you claim a property right, and whether or not any "natural rights" exist or have any bearing on the situation). You belief about the existence and scope of natural rights might have an impact on where you choose to exercise that physical capacity, but, again, that's pretty much beside the point.

> When you join in a community, you give up some of your natural rights to the state

That's a rather controversial claim; many of those who believe in the existence of "natural rights" also believe that a fundamental distinguishing feature of "natural rights" is that they are inalienable -- that is, they cannot be transferred or surrendered.

>Natural rights, except as a rhetorical device to claim the moral high ground in arguments about what decisions the State should make in terms of imposing coercive power on behalf of one or the other conflicting claimants in a class of actual or hypothetical disputes, don't actually have any direct bearing on, really, anything

And where, precisely, does the State come from? From where does it come by its power? What is the State? If there was no community, would a state still exist? Sort of; each of us would retain individual sovereignty, and most likely, begin to group together again for security of both our persons and our property.

The idea of the state of nature and natural rights is not to create said rights, but instead to illuminate the rights each of us already possesses.

>whether or not they relate to an entity in which you claim a property right

I don't know what this means. My point was pretty simple; if I pick a bunch of apples and you try to take them from me, I can say 'those are mine' and hit you. In effect, I am thereby claiming property and enforcing my right to said property through force.

>many of those who believe in the existence of "natural rights" also believe that a fundamental distinguishing feature of "natural rights" is that they are inalienable -- that is, they cannot be transferred or surrendered.

It's not that controversial. Only some natural rights are inalienable, not all. The right to enter into the state of war, for example, is both a natural right and one which a person may give up to the state or community.

That's not accurate. Absent a state, I can still create property rights, and enforce them through the personal application of force.

If I hold something in my hand, it's practically my property. The state doesn't have to come in and say "that which you hold in your hand is yours", it's pretty much a given fact.

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