On a Saturday morning, when my brain should be occupied by strategy for my kid’s soccer game or by the prospect of college football, I find myself wrestling with the idea that our notions of property are so deeply embedded in our culture, we don’t have a good vocabulary for discussing the underlying assumptions of property; particularly in the context of a policy debate. That can’t be normal.
I don’t have any good answers at the moment, and I’ve almost certainly covered this ground before. But, advocates of the property status quo can just say, “I think people ought to be able to keep what’s theirs.” It’s simple and sounds utterly reasonable; almost unassailable.
To contest this, someone who thinks that more equity is necessary to preserve the health of our political and economic systems has to spend a great deal of time and a great number of words deconstructing the word “theirs”; making arguments about when property rights vest in a person such that the thing can be said to be “theirs,” that property rights do not exist in any enforceable sense absent the cooperation of the government, and suggesting that the point at which rights vest is, itself, a policy choice and mostly arbitrary.
If you have to spend that much effort and verbiage countering a simple sentence, chances are, you’re going to lose the debate unless the listener is uncommonly patient and open minded.
Anyway, that’s what I woke up thinking about. Maybe I need a hobby.
ironically many of the people who’d say they want to “keep what’s theirs” would be the same people complaining that taxation is “theft at the point of a gun.”
Ironically?
As the meme has it, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
As a card-carrying philosophunculist, I invite you to consider the following propositions (bonus points for anyone who can identify the source I cribbed them from):
Property is liberty.
Property is theft.
Property is impossible.
Trivial: Proudhon, “What is Property?”
No, but my source may well be taking it from your source…
if you can’t grasp the irony in simultaneously demanding the government (use force to) protect your “property rights” while denying government the funding and power it requires to do so, then you are the one who fails to understand irony.
How does this sound as irony? I would have no trouble paying taxes is they went for the things that I wanted them to go for.
You’re raising a couple of points never made in your first assertion – and apparently contradicting another.
So, your disparagement of me is somewhat ironic…
i didn’t raise any new points. i merely spelled them out for the irony-impaired.
Hmm…
Thought experiment:
Write your two comments on two separate cards.
Hand them to a third party. Ask the third party if the two comments are directly parallel.
I don’t think the answer would be yes, but YMMV.
[snark considered, but redacted]
that would be an absurd experiment, because my comments assume the reader has read doug’s post. perhaps that’s the problem here…
So, you’re not equipped to carry out a thought experiment?
It depends upon your assumptions/definitions for property much like Euclidean geometry.
If property is thought of mostly as ours and a thing to be stewarded and not exploited you would arrive at a different conclusion. That is until someone outside your culture arrives, gives you some blankets, and decides that what is ours is theirs.
But back to your argument, per your tweet some are ok with the government enforcing property rights but not ok with having to pay for that privilege.