Re: Relative Appropriation of Economic Rents

On 5 Feb 2007 11:38:27 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitslayer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Feb 2, 6:15 pm, r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 2 Feb 2007 09:58:14 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitsla...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Feb 1, 4:20 pm, r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 1 Feb 2007 10:43:20 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitsla...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jan 28, 9:08 pm, r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 25 Jan 2007 16:50:09 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitsla...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

What do you think "public domain" means, genius?

It means not privately owned. As I said above, you are obviously
claiming that anything not privately owned is communally owned.

No, it means publically owned.

No, it does not. You are just lying again. Anything that is in the
public domain is not owned by anyone.

By your logic, anything that is communally owned is not owned at all.

OK, checking back through our discussion, I can see now where you
equivocated.

This was the exchange:

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Me: By your definition not only the oceans and atmosphere, but the
sun, moon and stars are communally owned, public domain art and
literature are communally owned,

You: What do you think "public domain" means, genius?

Me: It means not privately owned. As I said above, you are obviously
claiming that anything not privately owned is communally owned.

------------------------------------------------------------------

The term "public domain" has two distinct senses. The sense I used,
which was the first appearance of the term in our discussion, was in
reference to art and literature. Webster's New Universal Unabridged:

"Law. 1. the status of productions of authorship upon which the
copyrights have expired and of works published without copyright
protection."

You then equivocated, using the term in the second sense Webster
lists:

"2. land owned by the government."

Land owned by the government is owned by the government. Works of
authorship that are in the public domain are not owned by anyone.

Clear?

Yes, your nonsense makes plenty of sense if I let you determine what
definitions of words _I_ was using.

No. I used the words "public domain" first, liar, in reference to art
and literature, liar, and so when you substituted a different sense of
the term you were engaging in the dishonest logical fallacy known as
"equivocation."

Liar.

If, (gasp) someone happens to disagree on this point, then to
them, the Georgists are the thieves, not the land owners.

Right. Just as those who believed in slavery considered those who
freed slaves to be thieves.

Exactly. It is a matter of opinion...just as those who owned farms in
Russia considered Stalin to be a thief. See how that works?

People who _didn't_ own farms in Russia _also_ considered Stalin to be
a thief.

See how _that_ works?

Er, ok. Anyway, the point is that it all depends on whether you
believe in private ownership or public ownership of the asset in
question.

You again confirm that you consider everything either privately or
publicly owned.

For certain assets, yes. Not all.

All assets are owned, by definition. What is not owned is not an
asset, by definition. You are again trying to divert attention from
the fact that you have been comprehensively refuted.

National pride is a valuable asset to this country. Last I checked,
you cannot buy and sell shares of national pride on any stock
exchange.

More equivocation. Please reread the above exchange, starting about
20 lines up. You started talking about whether an asset should be
privately or publicly owned. That is "asset" in the second sense
Webster lists:

"2. a single item of ownership having exchange value."

Wrong. You misinterpreted. I wrote "asset" to mean something of
value, or as you wrote below "a useful thing or quality." Not only
that, but in context, that is obviously the only meaning that makes
sense.

No, stupid, despicable, lying filth. Look up about 30 lines. You
said, "it all depends on whether you believe in private ownership or
public ownership of the asset in question." That sentence clearly
cannot refer to any sense of asset other than owned items. You are
simply lying -- though not, as usual, about what I wrote, but about
what you yourself wrote!

That's got to be a new low, even for lying anti-LVT filth!

You are now equivocating, and trying to substitute for that sense the
first sense Webster lists:

"1. a useful thing or quality."

Clear? Equivocation is a very common fallacy, and those who are not
trained in logic, epistemology or philosophy will usually fall for it.

But I am not one of them.

You are definitely not one to allow imagined equivocation to slip past
you!

It was not imagined, as proved above.

Or would you care to specify exactly what you think the right to life
consists of?

Is there something about "the right not to be kill" that confused
you? How the hell else can I answer that question, ya big fat moron?

Perhaps by relying heavily on the more informative insights of your
moral and intellectual betters?

I am not so self-righteous that I believe such people are rare. I am
also not so stupid to believe that you are one of them.

See above for proof of the intellectual part, at least.

For some people, the right to life means outlawing abortions. For
environmentalists it might mean the right to ban industrial activity
that creates toxic pollution. For me, it means "the fucking right to
not be fucking killed."

OK, then did the release of poisonous gas by a chemical factory at
Bhopal violate anyone's right to life?

As much as it is possible to violate a person's rights by accident.
If I blow a tire on the road, veer on to the sidewalk and kill you, I
guess you could argue that I violated your right to live. But it was
an accident.

OK, so you believe that when corporations release toxic substances
that kill people, it is an "accident" and they can not be blamed for
it. Check.

You didn't ask if they could be blamed for it. You asked if it
violated their rights.

You have nothing.

I have the fact of your weaseling apology for mass poisonings. Look
up about 15 lines. Yep. There it is.

Suppose you have claimed ownership of a spring in the desert. A man
stumbles into "your" oasis dying of thirst. You do not let him drink
any of "your" water unless he agrees to be your servant for life in
return for it. Two scenarios might follow:

1. He tries to drink without agreeing to your terms, you assert your
omnipotent property rights, and in the ensuing struggle he quickly
overheats and dies of heat stroke.

2. He declines your offer of "voluntary" trade to mutual advantage and
waits for nightfall to go look for water elsewhere, but soon dies of
thirst.

Was his right to life violated in either case? Why or why not?

Though what "I" did here is cold-hearted, I did not kill the man. He
killed himself when he tried to walk across the Sahara.

Wrong. He knew the waterhole was there, and he correctly calculated
that he could reach it. What he didn't know was that it had been
appropriated by a thief -- and murderer.

You have changed the circumstances.

No, I have not. You are lying, as usual. I have simply added
additional detail. Your greed-besotted intention to murder him if he
does not serve you for life in return for you doing nothing is
unchanged.

When you wrote that he stumbled
in, you gave the impression that he was lucky to find it.

Nope. But in fact, it could not matter less if he was lucky to find
it. The only point of interest is that you sought to blame the victim
for the murder _you_ committed. You confessed that your beliefs are
evil, and that you yourself are evil, and you are now trying to weasel
out of it, exactly as expected.

If he was
expecting it to be there and he expected to be able to use it, which
you failed to mention, then perhaps in a US court of law, for example,
that might create some liability on my part.

That was not the issue. We know that US courts of law sometimes
demonstrate a modest concern for justice and rights. The issue was
your claim that your fabricated property right in the oasis justified
murder. US law has nothing whatever to do with the question, which
was about _your_ belief that you have a right to murder other people
if they do not give you whatever you want in return for your doing
nothing.

If it was a well-known
oasis, commonly used by the public for survival, and travelers had a
reasonable expectation that it would remain so, then I probably would
never have had the legal authority to seize it in the first place, and
for good reasons.

Indeed. But you have claimed a _moral_ right to seize it, and have
invoked that spurious right to justify murder.

Say there is no legal authority over the oasis. You are in the middle
of a desert that no country exercises sovereignty over. It's just you
and what you are no doubt pleased to call your moral sense.

We have lots and lots of laws, rules, regulations,
and social norms that both build on our natural rights and which have
little to do with those rights. Just because it may not violate his
right to live does not mean it is right, legal, or moral.

But of course, it most certainly _did_ violate his right to live.
Forcibly, and with malice aforethought.

But regardless, failing to help a man is not the same thing as killing
him.

He didn't ask for your help, thieving, lying murderer. He just wanted
to use what nature put there, the same as if you had never existed.
And you murdered him for trying to exercise his right to do so.

What "I" did was not necessarily right or even legal, but that
is not the same thing as violating his right to live.

Yes, of course it is. Murderer.

It is now evident that you consider forcible appropriation of natural
resources a higher right than the right not to be killed

Since I am defining the right to live, or right to not be killed, and
you are not, you can take your interpretation and stick it up your
ass. I did not kill him,

Yes, of course you did. You are now obviously in "lying anti-LVT
filth mode," a peculiar psychological state in which you will say and
believe _anything_whatever_ in order to avoid knowing the self-evident
and indisputable facts of objective reality that prove your beliefs
are false and evil.

particularly when he went wandering in to
the desert and stumbled in to my oasis,

?? "_YOUR_" oasis?? What on earth makes you think it was "your"
oasis? Other than your determination to murder anyone who declined
to be your servant for life in return for not blocking his access to
what nature put there, that is...

on which I have built a water
treatment plant and a system of canals, distributing the water to
farmers in the area to feed thousands of starving children. Forgive
the fences that are there to keep out dead camals, terrorists, etc..

ROTFL!!!

Oh, no, you don't, thieving, lying murderer. You didn't do any of
those things. You did absolutely nothing except claim the natural
resource as your private property, and then murder a man who tried to
use what nature put there, as was his RIGHT, and as he could have done
had you never existed. That is the defining characteristic of
violations of rights: the victim is deprived of what he would
otherwise have had, even had the perpetrator never been born.

and that
murdering people for your own personal unearned profit is morally
acceptable and even laudable if it can somehow be clothed in the Cloak
of Propertarian Self-Righteousness. You consequently do not believe
in any right to life that could potentially come into conflict with
the financial interests of those who have appropriated natural
resources.

Which is exactly what I thought you thought, from the very outset of
this discussion. Thank you for confirming that you are an apologist
for robbery, enslavement and murder.

What would that right mean, if it did not include a right to
access and use the natural resources needed to sustain one's life,
such as air to breathe, water to drink, and land from which to obtain
one's food?

So because good is a necessity of life, we have a right to own land so
that we can grow food on it?

You already know I do not claim there is any right to own land. Only
to use it.

Own, access, the sentiment is the same.

No, it is not. Ownership includes not only the right to use but the
right to deprive others of use

The act of using deprives others of use.

_GET_IT_?

No, it does not, as the example of the atmosphere proves so very
thoroughly: I use it all I want, yet others are also free to use it.

*****_____G - E - T ___ I - T - ?_____*****

We were talking about land specifically, not air. Remember?

No. we were talking about whether the act of using _anything_
inherently deprives others of its use.

And in fact, it doesn't even matter if you want to talk about land
rather than air. A member of a hunter-gatherer society can use the
land to obtain his food without depriving other society members of its
use. Indeed, they might cooperate in a hunt, all using the land
simultaneously.

"So because good is a necessity of life, we have a right to own land
so that we can grow food on it?"

See that? L A N D. Not A I R.

Using land means building things on it, storing *** on it or in it,
etc.. When I do that, I deprive others of the use of that land.

Some uses deprive others of use, others do not, as proved above. The
point is, before there was any such thing as private property in land,
people all used land without depriving others of its use, because
_THAT_WAS_THEIR_RIGHT_.

We have a right to access
land so that we can grow food on it, even though 98% of the population
doesn't grow a damned thing? That makes no sense.

It makes as much sense as having a right to breathe any part of the
atmosphere, even though one will only breathe far less than 1% of it
in a lifetime.

The need to grow food to live supposedly justifies your socialized
land dream.

No; the fact is, one needs land to make one's living no matter how one
does it: from hunting and gathering to trading currency options.

So why did you try to justify socialized land distribution by our
"right to eat?"

You are of course lying again. I did not mention any "right to eat,"
only a right to use land to obtain one'sfood. And snarling about
"socialized land distribution" is just more name calling.

And
one also has a _right_ to use land, because the rights to life and
liberty _cannot_ mean anything less, as I proved to you so very
irrefutably above.

The problem is that in your utopia, very few people would
actually grow food on the land they rented from the government.

Irrelevant. Using land to sustain one's life does not have to mean
growing food on it.

I disagree and in the end, it all comes down to a big, fat value
judgement.

Right. Do you value freedom, justice and truth, or slavery, privilege
and lies?

I value liberty above all else, which is why I am glad people like you
are relegated to kook status and probably always will be.

Yes, we have seen what you consider liberty: the liberty to murder
those who decline to give you something for nothing.

And we have seen how you define liberty: a socialized utopian wetdream
of communal land ownership.

Lie. Inevitably.

Reponse to a few things that google snipped:

--------------
<sigh> Allow me to remind you of the context:

You: Some things are just unownable. Land isn't one of them.

Me: Why not?

Get it? I asked you _WHY_ land is ownable, and you replied with the
fact that it is ownable because it is in fact owned. But while true
enough, that is not responsive to my question.

It's like you say, "You can't come in here," and I say, "Why not?"
and
your answer is, "Because I'm going to stop you." Maybe that's true,
but it does not answer the question, and is equivocation on the word,
"why."

You like equivocation a lot, I can tell. It's no doubt been very
useful to you when you have been dealing with the epistemologically
naive. U"nfortunately, you are not in that league now.
--------------

You, not I, failed to follow the conversation. When I originally
wrote that some things are not ownable, I meant that it is impossible
to own them. Land is ownable. The sun is not.

Says who? You think you can own an oasis in the desert just by
claiming it's yours. Why not the sun?

Some things are able to be owned.

Some things are not able to be owned.

And some things that are able to be owned can nevertheless be unowned.

Following yet, oh master of epistemology? You accused me of believing
that anything that is not privately owned is necessarily publically
owned.

That was the logical implication of your claim that if land were not
privately owned, it would have to be communally owned. Sorry for
giving you more credit for logic than you deserved.

Your question followed my statement than land is not unownable. Now
hold on, this is confusing to you, I understand, but try to
concentrate. Land is not unownable, obviously, because it is owned
right now. What other answer could I give, buddy?

How about an answer that answered my question: why not?

And finally I will drive the nail back in to your coffin:

ROTFL!!

?? Just as Webster told, you, above: "v.t.: 4. to take to or for
oneself; to take possession of. 5. to take without consent; seize;
expropriate."

Probably there is way to state that fact so clearly that you will
become willing to know it.

----------------

Let's run with your definitions above. Let's also do some algebra.

(I will ignore "expropriate" because it tends to imply the government
is doing it.

Private individuals can also expropriate things, but unlike
"appropriate," "expropriate" _does_ imply a previous owner.

"Appropriation" = "to take for oneself" = "to take possession of" =
"to take without consent" = "seize"

Now, here was the question I asked:
"Tell me again how something can be appropriated _from_ someone else
if that someone else didn't own it in the first place?"

And I already answered it: by depriving them of their right to use it.

Let's try substituting the definitions of appropriate in to this
sentence:

1) "Tell me again how something can be taken for oneself _from_
someone else if that someone else didn't own it in the first place?"

2) "Tell me again how something can be taken possession of, _from_
someone else if that someone else didn't own it in the first place?"

3) "Tell me again how something can be taken without consent _from_
someone else if that someone else didn't own it in the first place?"

4) "Tell me again how something can be seized _from_ someone else if
that someone else didn't own it in the first place?"

Please feel free to answer my question using any of these substitutes.

I'll answer them all, just as I did before: by depriving them of what
they would otherwise have been at liberty to use, even though they did
not own.

I don't blame you for wanting to forget the example of the oasis, but
do try to remember: you appropriated it from the guy you murdered and
from everyone else, even though neither he nor they owned it.

-- Roy L
.

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