one of many more AC thought experiments to come

[latefordinner]

Somehow we start at some virginal pristine time when no one owns anything - so the race is on man, make some use of that land so you can "own" it.

Luckily in your quest for some land to call your own, you find a nice little lake in the middle of a scorching desert (the market must have forgotten to take care of climate change) and you spend a few weeks digging some nice pipes and making some water fountains and [censored]. So now you own this little oasis because you are using it right? and you can freely sell the water there and others can either buy or not buy it as they see fit. right?

But you're in the middle of a [censored] desert and you own the only water for miles, so you have what is in effect a natural monopoly on the water supply for the time being (now maybe someday in the future because your prices are so high some other entrepenueur helicopters in water or something, but let's say for the next month this won't happen)

so in AC you would have the right to charge whatever you wanted for access to "your" water right? so say I am trying to eek out a little living on some patch of desert near you but my daughter is literally dying of dehydration and I "voluntarily" sign a contract with you for a years worth of my labor that's just right? You got to the little oasis first and productively started pumping water out of it and putting it into bottles to sell so you own the water right? and if I don't like it I can just go buy water somewhere else?

and just for clarifications sake, does this apply to the water only while it is in the lake? or does water evaporating and then coming back to earth count as well so I can't build a rainwater catchment?

think I'm being facetious? oh if only! look at the rainwater privitization attempt by Bechtel in Bolivia after the WB decided that private firms would be more efficient in delivering water to poor Bolivians than the government.

just making sure I'm clear here.

(and yes I realize that I'm being somewhat extreme and you can rightly call strawman argument, but I'm working towards a moral and libertarian denunciation of private property here so stay tuned)

okay really to bed this time. wish I would have found this forum 5 years ago though, as it will be nice to debate with people that have actually deeply thought about what a free society looks like and come to some conclusions that it looks a lot like capitalism rather than the rah rah big State neocons that so many capitalists in the US are today.

[AlexM]

Yeah, I would just stay out of the desert and your oasis with your ridicilous costs and no money for you.

[Case Closed]

I would kill you with my buddies and take your water.

[SNOWBALL]

Anyone who has seen tank girl has a better idea of what AC would be than any of the true believers on this forum

[AlexM]

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone who has seen tank girl has a better idea of what AC would be than any of the true believers on this forum

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm confused. Weren't you pro-anarchy yesterday?

[Case Closed]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Anyone who has seen tank girl has a better idea of what AC would be than any of the true believers on this forum

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm confused. Weren't you pro-anarchy yesterday?

[/ QUOTE ]

I thought he was a stalinist or trotskyist(sorry I know it's the wrong term, I forgot the proper one) communist

[tolbiny]

[ QUOTE ]

Somehow we start at some virginal pristine time when no one owns anything - so the race is on man, make some use of that land so you can "own" it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Who are you, and who "owns" you?

[ QUOTE ]

so in AC you would have the right to charge whatever you wanted for access to "your" water right? so say I am trying to eek out a little living on some patch of desert near you but my daughter is literally dying of dehydration and I "voluntarily" sign a contract with you for a years worth of my labor that's just right?

[/ QUOTE ]

What kind of negligent father roams the desert with his daughter without enough water to drink? As a greedy capitalist why aren't i trading my water for a lifetime commitment of labor from the father AND the daughter? i mean i own the whole oasis and without my water they will die. If your going to start out with an absurd hypothetical, at least exploit the emotional gut wrenching part fully.


But really, what is your alternative here? Same hypothetical, limited supply of an extremely valuable resource, how do you distribute X units of water to Y # of people? Should we use one path toward the water, or many? should drinking water be separated from bathing water? Should we find the spring that feeds the oasis and exploit that resource so that we can have more water now, or carefully measure and control the levels in the lake? Does each individual get exactly enough to remain alive, enough to remain alive and physically healthy, enough to work under the desert sun, as much as they want? If the little girl also has a puppy, does the dog get more, less or the same amount of water as the people? How far away from the shore do we dig our [censored] pits, do we recycle our urine to reduce drinking water needs? What system do you propose to solve these questions that doesn't rely on someone being granted a level of authority over the water supply?

[ShakeZula06]

[ QUOTE ]
Somehow we start at some virginal pristine time when no one owns anything

[/ QUOTE ]
Good thing that isn't actually a problem because it couldn't happen.

[hmkpoker]

Imagine for a moment that you and handful of your friends discover a deserted island. The island is rich in fruits and vegetation. Ripe pineapples and bananas hang from the trees. There is way more than enough bounty to satisfy everyone's appetites. No one really cares whose tree is whose, or how much each person has had; there's simply more than enough to go around, and no reason whatsoever to regulate it. You and your friends pick fruits, take the freshest, juiciest bite, and discard it for the ants. Life is good.

Now let's throw a thousand people on that island. Now we have a bit of a problem. There is no longer enough fruit to satisfy everyone's appetites. If everyone ate the way they did when it was just a few people, the island will quickly become barren. To prevent this, you need some kind of social norms that regulate who gets how much. It could be collectivistic in nature (equal rations), or individualistic in nature (property right), but you have to have some method keeping boundless appetites in check. Hobbesian anarchy will result in starvation. That's no good.

This is the situation the Europeans and native americans were in. Native Americans had tons and tons of land, because their populations were so small. Homesteading land (just picking a spot and pitching a teepee) was very easy because there were many square miles for each person. For the Europeans, whose numbers were far greater, this was not so easy. There wasn't enough land to go around. Homesteading in a large population will result in some very unhappy people who are dissatisfied. Some form of boundary must exist.

1.5 million people live together on a 20 square mile island in New York. That's a mere ~371 square feet per person. Not exactly a lot of private space, is it? There's no way it could be done without some sort of boundaries.

[Borodog]

Ah, good old argument by impossibly pathological hypothetical.

"Assume that Bill Gates owns the world, and that the Moon is made of cotton candy . . . "

The only part of your OP that I found interesting was the bit about what a disaster privatizing previously state-monopolized industries can be. Well duh. That's because 1) the market has been extremely distorted for a long time, so there is a lot of crap that must be worked out, which always involves short term adjustments, often quite painful, and 2) governments cannot manage a transition to a free market any more than they can centrally plan a market in the first place.

Recently I attended a lecture by Chicago school economist Richard Epstein, where he made this same fallacy. He pointed to the "Oklahoma Sooners" and the debacle of the territorial land grabs as some kind of indictment of first acquisition, when really at all it is is an indictment of government preventing people from simply making claims in the normal fashion. If you tell people, "You can't claim land until this date" and advertise for months, then people will be lined up at the border in their thousands waiting for the starting pistol, and it will turn into a cluster[censored], of course. But the problem is not claiming land, the problem was government preventing the claiming of land until some arbitrary date.

He made the same fallacious argument about privatizing radio frequencies. He said that if government put the "public" radio spectrum up for first acquisition, every radio station in the nation would immediately begin broadcasting on every frequency at the highest possible wattage they could, and it would be a fiasco. Again, duh. The problem isn't the principle of first acquisition, the problem is that government has monopolized all acquisition, and artificially placing all of the property up for grabs at the same time is bound to generate a fiasco. Again, the problem rests solely at the feet of the state, not on the shoulders of the free market. Private property rights in the radio spectrum had already developed and were already being well handled in the courts by the time Uncle Sam nationalized (i.e. stole) the entire radio spectrum and doled it out to politically connected members of a newly formed government-backed radio cartel.