Quote from: Babylon on July 15, 2011, 05:38:53 PM

If the land is all owned by the ruling class then it is very similar to having landed on their island.

It is even better than that - the reason the ruling class IS the ruling class is because of their accumulation of capital and land. From feudalism to corporate capitalism, the rulers are those that can have wealth without work.

Quote from: myrkul on July 15, 2011, 05:50:23 PM

Never ceases to amuse me how the property is theft crowd ignore the fact that they could always just... I don't know... buy the damn land.

First off, you are ignoring the second part of Proudhon's statement which is that "Property is freedom".

Secondly, One is born into a poor family (through no fault of their own). They have no option to grow/gather food on unimproved land, because there is none left their only option is to sell their labor to those who own land (or other means of production). That is, they are wage slaves. There are many places in the world, where a semi-skilled laborer could work their whole lives and never be able to save enough capital to buy the means of production that they are using, or the land it sits on.

Anarchy does not simply mean "absence of the State" (however you define it) but "without rulers" or "contrary to authority". This was true in the 18th Century and is especially true now as the post-structuralists and others have given us a far more sophisticated understanding of how discipline/authoritarianism have pervaded nearly every aspect of our existence.

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I have already established the principle, namely, that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race; that in that state, every person would have been born to property; and that the system of landed property, by its inseparable connection with cultivation, and with what is called civilized life, has absorbed the property of all those whom it dispossessed, without providing, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss.

The fault, however, is not in the present possessors. No complaint is tended, or ought to be alleged against them, unless they adopt the crime by opposing justice. The fault is in the system, and it has stolen perceptibly upon the world, aided afterwards by the agrarian law of the sword. But the fault can be made to reform itself by successive generations; and without diminishing or deranging the property of any of present possessors, the operation of the fund can yet commence, and in full activity, the first year of its establishment, or soon after, as I shall show.

(Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice)

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At the end of the day, what all these arguments boil down to is a disagreement about the "stickiness" of property rights. You advocate for a highly-sticky perpetual property system, I am arguing for the least sticky property system whereby use alone gives one property rates that quickly degrade to common ownership(or non-ownership if you prefer) when not being used.

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To go back to the original assertion, there is plenty of opportunity for firms to pay under the minimum wage. Either through unpaid overtime, under the table cash payments, "uniform cleaning fees" and other such deductions, etc. Much of the agricultural labor in this country is done for near or less to minimum wage. Much of the small scale construction work as well.

In any case, cutting wages may make sense for an individual firm but in aggregate, it would just reduce aggregate demand for products, putting us back into the same situation as befoire.

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionC9