"okay so if I hack my (non-expropriated) toothbrush into a rocket, go to space, bring back an asteroid and use my toothbrush to turn it into a 3d-printer which prints more 3d-printers, at which point do things get socialized and how?"
Because my laptop has so many hours of labor put into it, nobody should expropriate it or I will cry (Arch linux, disproving absolute abolition of property since 2002); and if we allow me to keep my laptop I can’t see any feasible way to absolutely prevent someone from hypothetically owning a factory.
Empirically, I think you just pass a law saying that you can’t own factories but laptops are okay, and leave judges to make Good Enough judgement calls to make the thing go- it’s less ambiguous than, e.g. anti-harassment laws. Communist countries have existed and have done this sort of thing.
Eventually a rich set of case law emerges defining what has/has not been considered to be a factory in the past, which provides guidance for judges making decisions and a level of dependability in judgements.
It’s only a problem if you insist on whatever the legal system does being rigorously defined- but I don’t think any real world legal system *is*, and I’m dubious one even could be, let alone must be. It’d probably also have to lack functional harassment restrictions, and I think you’d need to at least tolerate totally arbitrary cut offs to be even able to enforce assault and anti-noise disturbance law,
If you mean you think it has enforceability problems because a laptop will be too helpful for building a 3D printer, then that’s reasonable but akin to the enforceability problems of taxes; it is true, but the bigger you get the harder it is to not notice, so in practice the breaches are not a huge problem. Presuming the plan isn’t for the 3D printers to foom and destroy the state.(I’m not familiar with a lot of the details of communist thought, someone who actually is a communist could provide a more detailed idea of where they’d like the limits of private property to be.)
https://jbeshir.tumblr.com/post/143159441288/okay-so-if-i-hack-my-non-expropriated-toothbrush
The problem is that people are smart and will find ways around it. Enforceability problems with taxes are right now big enough to make pretty much every single welfare state be in deep trouble they wouldn’t be in if they could enforce the taxes they’ve set.
Like, legos are toys, right? We aren’t going to expropriate children’s toys because we aren’t terrible strawmen.
Consider a nerd: (laptop + legos) = 3d-printer.
Is it a “factory”? Reason (not the magazine) says it isn’t. Reason says using it to print another 3d-printer doesn’t turn it into a “factory”. Reason says 100 3d-printers is a “factory”. Induction breaks down somewhere.
We could argue that one may only own what they are possessing, so that the factory owner must personally operate all the machinery instead of having wage laborers, because any machinery they can’t operate personally 24/7 will be expropriated for everyone else’s use when they aren’t using it. This is the basis of many theories that try not to expropriate toothbrushes while still expropriating factories.
Consider a nerd: automation.
Even if people are only allowed to have “possessions”, not “property”, a nerd can “possess” an entire factory by running it off their laptop. And if land is the issue, the nerd will just make the factory mobile.
So even with the rule that property isn’t allowed, only possession, we still can have factory owners.
Or we could have a rule that whatever people build will revert to the public after 10 years or something. How unfortunate that my 3d-printer only lasts 9 years before breaking down. Or maybe I rebuild it in year 8 and argue that it’s new now and get to keep it for another 10 years.
The only way I can think is to have ultimately arbitrary expropriation based on the democratic decision-making process, and I don’t trust democracy not to find some way to expropriate even my laptop. So far democracy has managed to build two kinds of things: horrible bullshit that originated from evil intentions, and horrible bullshit that originated from good intentions. At best, we get a horrible bloated regulatory hell determining how many 3d-printers turn expropriable and what kind of automation is considered “possession” and what is “absentee ownership”.
(And this is with a few minutes of deliberately trying to break it; the people who run Mossack Fonseca have been thinking about such things a lot longer and more thoroughly.)
The alternative is really elegant: you can call it your own, but you must pay a tax for others to respect your property. Property can be bought and sold because that way there are markets that can be used to determine the value of any piece of property, and then people pay x% (always the same value of x, never changing for any reason because otherwise we get bullshit) of their “voluntary selling price” every year to be allowed to keep the property, otherwise it reverts to the public. If someone offers to buy it for the VSP they must sell, or raise the tax value of the property and pay more. No arbitrariness, no democracy, no loopholes, and my ingenuity in hacking things into 3d-printers printing more 3d-printers gets harnessed for the common good and I know that I can keep my laptop and thanks to the taxes everyone gets 3d-printers and a UBI to buy food and shelter etc.
Having a well-defined and principled legal system for things that involve the means of production is important in a way having a well-defined boundary for assault and noise isn’t, because people aren’t incentivized to bootstrap noise into a lot more noise and create auditory growth and musical prosperity.
And seriously, 3d-printers fooming and destroying the state is exactly what you can expect in this community. In rationalist tumblr, anything, absolutely anything, even legos and a laptop, ends in a foom and world domination.
2 months ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 11 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
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ilzolende liked this- thetransintransgenic said: That’s why we need to abolish capitalism, tho – you CAN’T hack your toothbrush into a rocket now – because DMCA prevents breaking DRM so you can’t touch anything. The only way we can get rid of the DMCA is by abolishing capitalism.
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