From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 10 2002 - 13:14:38 MST
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 09:20:24AM -0500, Dickey, Michael F wrote:
> My apologies, you are of course both correct. So I should have said massive
> socialist / communist states or states with corrupt despotic dictators that
> do not respect property rights of individuals. Of course this was a minor
Keeping in mind that "corrupt despotic dictators" aren't some historical
abberation, but a rather common mode of human self-organization.
> Damien, did these 'socialist' land reforms in Latin American countries grant
> ownership rights to the peasants?
As far as I know, yes. Or at least that was the goal. Whether it progressed
fully, I don't know. One complication would be the USA intervening to stop
the process.
> There seems to be some dispute what the topic is and this thread has
> frequently split between the validity of IP laws and the fact that one
> person can be allowed to a mass so much wealth. Damien's analogy
> specifically compared property ownership with IP laws, I have said all along
Yeah, I was focussing on rent, and the rentlike aspect of IP.
Consider that if Bill Gates's market was restricted to Iceland he wouldn't be
very rich, even with the exact same product. Given a piece of IP, you can be
much richer simply by selling it to a much larger market, without any extra
work. I can hear the voices saying "that's fair, it's reward proportional to
the social benefit!" But if we allow looking at social benefit, we can look
at possible social harms from vast concentrations of wealth. The fact that
libertarians tend to refuse to even look at such things is why I'm not a
libertarian anymore.
-xx- Damien X-)
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