From: hal@rain.org
Date: Thu May 20 1999 - 12:48:10 MDT
I agree with David Musick that it is worth examining the concept of
property rights. I would not approach this with the idea of stripping
anyone of their property (so jerk those knees back down). Rather,
consider a voluntary society (a space station, say), and consider in
what ways property rights are useful and beneficial, and in what ways
other ways of organizing resources may work better.
This is a utilitarian rather than natural-rights approach to property
rights (and other social institutions) and is IMO well within the
mainstream of extropian thought.
We are already aware of situations where other methods than property
rights are used to control access to resources. Within families there are
many resources which are commonly available to all. Within firms it is
also common to organize the companies efforts on a command basis rather
than by means of a market. Even in society as a whole, many resources
which difficult to manage with market mechanisms (like unpolluted air,
and whales) are handled in other ways.
There is a "theory of the firm" in economics which explores in detail
the question of when markets vs other organizational structures should
be used within corporations. This is not an immoral enterprise, but it
gives us useful information on the nature of reality which we can use
to guide our efforts.
I also agree with David that property rights are a social construct
and in that sense can be considered "fictional" (perhaps "cultural"
would be a better word). We had a discussion a few months ago about
abstract property rights, like intellectual property, ownership of the
EM spectrum, solar energy rights, unobstructed views, whaling rights,
and other entities which some people have tried to allocate with market
mechanisms. For some people it was obvious which things are "natural"
property and which are not, but in my view it comes down to social
agreements about what will be treated as ownable.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:46 MST