I did not set out to deliberately do it, but if one wants a libertarian case for a socialist-flavored free market (in the sense of it featuring a significant amount of shared capital), I kind of perhaps from a certain perspective might have basilisked propertarianism into suggesting that one could make a moral argument for needing to replace the welfare state with handing over some means of production to the people, because anything else would be theft:
If one looks at the state, taxes, benefits, regulations, etc. as strange property it provides a very interesting perspective to everything. (The perspective which, for example, informs my bostadsrett proposal for the abolition of rent control; people already have a certain kind of kind-of-property, and it would be naive to expect them to give it up right away without compensation. From an amoral so-propertarian-it-wraps-beyond-propertarianism perspective certain things make perfect sense and it can be argued that rolling back benefits would be, pragmatically speaking, as similar to theft as taxation is. We might have broken the system by creating all these property derivatives nobody fully understood, but simply expropriating one class of strange property that is mostly held by those in a bad position otherwise provokes the same kind of totally comprehensible resistance as expropriating less strange property.
And you know, if any state was to implement this kind of pareto-optimize-and-recognize-even-strange-property bargaining I’d be on board with the experiment.
And the reason for why we should do this instead of just abolishing the strange property? By the argument that we would be allowed to simply take away the property that has formed, we could just as well argue to abolish private property and institute communism, or give all land back to the descendants of the people who held it back in, say, 1200 CE. Or if we argue that property may not be strange, then we might have to say goodbye to the finance sector.
I’m not sure if I endorse this fully (because I try to avoid endorsing pretty much anything fully), but I do think it’s an interesting perspective to consider. And obviously this relies on moral libertarianism/propertarianism to begin with, so it isn’t convincing if one rejects the basic idea of that one (which I do, but playing around with constructs of logic and systems is just so fun)
1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #win-win is my superpower · 4 notes · .permalink
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