From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Wed Jun 12 2002 - 18:45:13 MDT
Technotranscendence wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, June 12, 2002 1:49 PM Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com
> wrote:
> >> But material abundance doesn't translate to informational
> >> abundance. We know that human knowledge is doubling.
> >> So what? It is still quite finite, and as such it is subject to
> >> economies of scarcity, ergo it must be treated as property
> >> to be managed and utilized most effectively.
> >
> > "Scarcity" in that sense (i.e., finiteness of supply) is not
> > what gives rise to the efficacy of property as a solution
> > for efficient distribution. What gives rise to it is lack of
> > simultaneous use--I cannot use a piece of
> > land to serve my will and your will simulataneously
> > if I want to build a house and you want to plant corn.
> > This would be true even with infinite supply of land,
> > because any one piece of land still can't be used to
> > multiple conflicting purposes, and there might be a
> > reason to value a specific piece of land over abundant
> > equivalents--its proximity to others, for example.
>
> Actually, that's true, but that's part of the scarcity issue. Scarcity
> in use as well as in supply. I don't see how the two would conflict,
> though they are conceptually separable. (Granted, also people do work
> out timeshare contracts. Ultimately, property is about use and the
> service the thing can do for you -- not about the purely physical,
> intrinsic aspects of the object in question, but those in relation to
> you.)
>
> (It should also be pointed out that while the same piece of information
> can be stored in multiple locations, each location then loses its
> ability to store other information. This would also occur in quantum
> storage devices, though to a lesser extent.)
I think, though, that Lee's definition of property is the problem. What
gives an item value is entirely a matter of its marginal utility to its
user, while an item's status as property is matter of the fact that
labor produced it (or improved it from raw resources). Whether one or a
billion people can use it at the same time is immaterial to the
situation. If we own ourselves, then we own our own raw, barehanded
physical or mental labor. Anything which increases our productivity has
marginal utility to us. To use another's labor without recompense is
slavery, therefore any product of our labor is property. That the
product of our labor can be used by one or a billion customers in the
market is only a matter of assigning incremental value to each instance
of use, not to the fact that our labor is our property.
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