Quote from: myrkul on May 16, 2013, 02:08:45 AM

Quote from: Adrian-x on May 16, 2013, 02:04:51 AM

Quote from: Alpaca John on May 16, 2013, 12:05:45 AM

Quote from: Adrian-x on May 15, 2013, 12:10:20 AM

After Bitcoin I see only 1 hurdle to overcome in achieving the pure Free Market Economy. And that is redefining land as ~~properly~~ property, and solving Marx's dilemma.

As properTy? Land ís defined as property?

Did I misunderstand you?

Spelling who would have thought it could confuse people, yes "property"

One question, though: Isn't land already property?

Here is a 3:15 minute YouTube clip that does a fair job of introducing the problem.

http://youtu.be/QdbyUy-DN80?t=11m59s

(Stephanie Flanders at @14:30 incorrectly separates capitalist and entrepreneur, otherwise I think she does a good job, there is nothing wrong with entrepreneur using capital, but there is a problem when a monopoly is mistaken for entrepreneurship. )

Ultimately Property is a human meme, and what ownership is and isn't changes with consciousness.
Take slavery for example, people used to be property and then it changed over time and now most of us agree people aren't property.

And if you go back to the Khoisan or Bushman from Sothern Africa for example, just out of interest genetically when you trace the human mitochondrial DNA, they come closest to being direct descendents of the first humans.

Interestingly when the Duch settled in Southern Africa they could not make slaves of the San, as they would die in captivity, I would speculate it was because life is more than just a motive for food and warmth, but life is best understood when you are free to explore it. Bushman culture has no concept of property, they just live in the now. (If you have Netflix a movie that gives you some insight is "The Gods Must be Crazy." A comedy about the introduction of a coke bottle to a Bushman tribe.)

By contrast the Bantu people from Africa had evolved the meme of property rights they often used cows as money in large triads they also arrived in Sothern Africa around the time of the Europeans and fought each other. It is this population group that spared through Africa and were traded as slaves in Europe and North America.

While the Bushman living in a desert, where water is incredibly scares and not having adequate water is a life or death situation saw drinking water as communal property and a right. As nomads they would berry an ostrich egg shells filled with water and mark it with a stick so other nomads and tribes could use the resource. Whenever they encountered the marked stick in the ground, they would fill it up if they had water or drink from it if they didn't, never abusing the resource, in effect they had empathy for other humans traveling in the desert and used that collective empathy to maintain an inter-communal man made resource.

To get to the point, if one can create a monopoly on something, one destroys the free market, usually the free market finds an alternate and monopoly dies out. Today monopolies only exist because we create them with law, they cannot exist in a free system.

Getting to the problem of property rights which are considered individual's rights, and as a right that is not directly linked to "a mans right to his own life" to quote Ayn Rand, it shouldn't be considered to be and individual right. Property Rights only come into existence when one has the ability through force to prevent access to a land and make it exclusively yours thus denying mans right to use that land to benefit his own life. While I would agree the act of homesteading is creating value (even another form of property), it is denying man access to that land.

We are at a time today, where the central banks (owners of the means of exchange) manipulate peoples labour and savings, effectively enslaving them, ( a problem Bitcoin can solve with quite effectively), We still won't have a free labour market while labour and entrepreneurs are subject to the monopoly of land owners.

So in conclusion I would define property as that which is created, without infringing on individual rights and can be exchanged in a free market.