Re: Relative Appropriation of Economic Rents

On 11 Feb 2007 14:21:25 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitslayer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Feb 6, 3:36 am, r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 5 Feb 2007 11:38:27 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitsla...@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:

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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.

Dear lying sack of Kook filth: do you or do you not believe that
anything which is communally owned is in fact not owned at all?

No. What is communally owned is owned by the community of those who
own it.

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.

That is true. But of course, this little tirade didn't start over
that comment. It started over this comment:

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

Me: For certain assets, yes. Not all.

And of course, this sentence clearly cannot refer to any sense of the
word "asset" other than "a useful thing or quality."

Which proves you equivocated again. As I said.

You are
simply lying -- though not, as usual, about what I wrote, but about
what you yourself wrote!

You can believe what you want, kook. I know you are an idiot.

Liar. You are fully aware that I have repeatedly demonstrated both a
grasp of this issue and a command of logic that are far superior to
yours.

So the
only reason for this charade is for the benefit of others. They can
draw their own conclusions.

Indeed they can. And they have. I warned you from the outset what
would happen in this discussion, and it certainly has. But you
wouldn't listen.

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.

This is very common problem with socialists.

?? ROTFL!!! That is a very common problem with lying apologists for
privilege and injustice: they cannot refute self-evident facts and
indisputable logic, so they just call the defenders of freedom,
justice and truth "socialists," even when it has been established
beyond any possible doubt that they are not.

They cannot
differentiate between our inalienable rights and any other protection
under the law. Simple minds think that any protection they receive is
an inalienable right. For example, the healthcare socialist cannot
difference between the right to life or liberty and the "right" to
make someone else pay your doctor's bills.

Let me know when you want to address an argument I have actually made.

The environmentalist sees
no difference between our inalienable rights and the "right" to clean
air.

So you are again saying that there is no such thing as a right not to
be poisoned? Check.

This stupidity represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the
Western Liberals' concept of rights but it plays well with the less
educated fools in the world.

It is your claim of "property rights, right or wrong" that
fundamentally misunderstands the Western liberal concept of rights.

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.

What is right and wrong is not the same thing as the definition of our
fundamental, inalienable rights. You don't understand that and
because you have the irrational mind of a socialist, trying to reason
with you is impossible.

<yawn> Thanks for admitting that you want to be free to kill others
if they do not serve you in return for you doing nothing.

Quote stuff skipped by google:
___________
ROTFL!!!

Oh, no, you don't, thieving, lying murderer.
-------------------

Oh yes I do, you worthless hypocrite. You think you can "add to" your
little story but I cannot.

No, I think -- in fact, I know -- that it was _you_ who first tried to
"add to" the story, by claiming, without evidence, that your murder
victim had wandered into the desert irresponsibly, and that you were
therefore at liberty to murder him if he declined to serve you for
life in return for you not stopping him from using what nature
provided.

My water treatment plant is a perfect
example of what is wrong with you adding to the story. In fact it
demonstrates perfectly why you cannot extend the "right to life" to
the right to any activity that will preserve your life.

I didn't try to, liar. I said it extended to everything you would
have been at liberty to do had no one else existed.

The
healthcare socialist tries to use the same bastardization of our
fundamental right to life to justify forcing others to pay for their
healthcare. You are no different.

Lie. I have said no such thing.

If I made a jacket with my own
hands and then refused to give it to a man who stumbled in to my camp
in the arctic, by your logic I violated his right to life.

Lie. The water was there all along; you appropriated it. If you had
never existed, he would have been able to use it. The jacket, by
contrast, was not there all along. If you had never existed, he would
NOT have been able to use it. That is the defining difference between
a violation of A's rights to life and liberty and security of B's
property rights: Is B depriving A of what A would have been free to
use if B had never existed?

The only
difference, in the end, is your belief that I have no right to own a
natural resource.

The jacket is a product of labor, though, and therefore NOT a natural
resource, liar.

That is your worthless, kook opinion and nothing else. It is not a
fundamental truth revealed by simple logic, as nutjobs like you seem
to think it is. In your worthless opinion, I cannot or should not be
able to own certain assets (that's things of value you blustering
nutjob.) That is the only difference between refusing to hand over
the jacket and refusing to hand over the water, in your wacked out
mind.

Lie, as proved above.

Opinion. Get it fruitcake? You have an opinion about whether we
should be able to privately own natural resources.

But it is an opinion based on self-evident facts, irrefutable logic,
and a moral standard you have still not ventured to dispute: the equal
human right to life, liberty, and property in the products of one's
labor.

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

Quote myself:
"So because [food] is a necessity of life, we have a right to own land
so that we can grow food on it?"

You grow a lot of food in the air, nutbag?

<yawn> Still claiming you have to own land in order to use it,
nutbag? Have you never heard of people _renting_ land, nutbag?

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.
----------

When hunter-gatherers use the land, that means extracting grubs,
vegetation, and wildlife from it. They literally clean an area of
these goods and then move on to another area.

No, it depends on the land. Often they stay in one place for
centuries, even millennia.

What, you think that
when they hunt down an animal and eat it, that the animal suddenly
reappears on the land again? Hunter-gatherers are quite territorial
because a competing tribe may well lead to starvation.

Yes, they are territorial, because in most cases their population will
push against the land's carrying capacity, leading to land scarcity.
If they were not territorial, others would deprive them of access to
the land they need to survive. But the members of any given
hunter-gatherer society still all use the land without excluding each
other from using it. Which proves you wrong.

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_.
----------

Bull***, tribes killed each other over land.

Right. Tribes, not individuals. Within tribes, people typically used
the land without excluding others from using it, contrary to your
false claims. The rights of all within the tribe to use the tribal
lands were recognized; they used without excluding. If there was no
other tribe around (as was often the case with, e.g., Pacific Island
peoples) _nobody_ was deprived of use of the land.

There are two important
differences between hunter-gatherer societies and modern societies
when it comes to land ownership. The first is that hunter-gatherers
lived in communal groups. _Within_the_group_ they often shared
everything. But outside the group, they staked claim to land much the
same as people do in any modern society. They fougth and killed over
the land. Though within the group they owned the land communally,

They did not own it at all, they only used it. You just can't seem to
wrap your head around the fact that land was once ALL unowned.

between different groups they most certainly did not share and share
alike. Their tenancy was always temporary, as is the nature of
nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, but while they were their, the land
was theirs as long as they could defend it.

They possessed but did not own it, like territorial animals. Right.

The second difference is
simply in the formality of "ownership." In the case of hunter-
gatherer societies, ownership was defined by a simple law of nature:
might made right.

Which proves it was not ownership at all, but mere possession.

Their "RIGHT" as you put it, had nothing to do with
inalienable human rights. It was not defined by God or some other
force and it was most certainly not fundamental. But I would not
expect you to understand what an inalienable right is. As you most
clearly demonstrate, you cannot differentiate between inalienable
rights and the protections of law, so why would you see any difference
between inalienable rights and the power of the spear?

I doubt that you can even provide a sensible definition of "rights."

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

Well gee ya worthless idiot. What could possibly be the difference
between trying to claim ownership of an oasis and trying to claim
ownership of the sun? Hmmmmmmmm. I'm sure that is a tough one but
I'll give you a hint, kook: I would need to do more than simply claim
the oasis is mine.

But you didn't, and you can't just extinguish others' rights that way
in any case.

I would have to exclude others from it and defend
my "ownership."

And with enough force, you could likewise exclude others from
benefiting by the sun and defend your "ownership" of it.

It is therefore YOU who are unable to distinguish between inalienable
rights and the power of the spear.

Exactly as I said.

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.
-----------

You and and the other Georgist mindshare morons did not only claim
that the rights to the land were appropriated from the rest of the
people. You claimed that the LAAAANNNNND was appropriated from the
rest of the people. Your own language proves you believe that the
people owned it until it was appropriated.

Lie. Appropriating unowned land MEANS forcibly depriving those who
would otherwise have been at liberty to use it of their access to it.


-- Roy L
.

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